There was a sudden faint click like the twist of a turned lock, a sound that made John Gore lift his chin heavenward and listen with both his ears. Then came a slow whine, as though an unoiled hinge were turning. The door of Barbara’s room had been opened; he had no doubt of that. Probably she was feigning sleep, thinking that one of my lord’s creatures had come to see that all was safe. A harsh gust of wind shook the ivy on the wall, making John Gore curse the leaves for setting up such a flutter.
But above the rustling of the ivy he heard an abrupt and half-smothered cry, and then the sound as of people struggling. The bed creaked; there was an inarticulate choking as of some one striving to call for help through the smothering folds of a cloak. The black room within seemed full of movement, of piteous effort, of hoarse, savage whisperings that made his mane bristle like a furious dog’s.
He gave one shout as a challenge and a warning, and then slid down the rope without heeding how it chafed his hands. Plucking out his sword and pistol from the ivy at the foot of the tower, he ran for the doorway that led from the terrace into the hall, his face meeting the moonlight that poured down through a broken window.
XXXVII
The door at the foot of the tower stood open, and John Gore plunged in with his sword forward and his pistol at the cock. The place was as dark as a pit, and he thrust out right and left with the sword, the point ringing against the walls till he found where the gap of the stairs opened. He went up silently, for he was in his stockings, but there was more grimness in that swift and silent climb than any clangor and clash that armed men might have made. His blood was up, the devil awake in him, and the spirit of murder howling in his ears. He seemed to see all the gross, smothering horror of the scene above, and he set his teeth as he wondered whether he would come too late.
A quick shuffling sound came down to him in the darkness. A hurrying human thing was close to him, and John Gore challenged and lunged without pity. There was a hard sob, and a dim shadow of a figure dragged down his sword’s point in its fall. He freed the blade and went on with hardly a thought, as a stormer pushes on over the bodies in the throat of a “breach.” A sudden gleam of light slanted down the stair, and he heard the tread of heavy feet and a harsh shout of “Nance! Nance!” Rounding the last twist of the stair, John Gore came upon a man with a white cloth over his face, standing on the landing outside Barbara’s room and holding a shaded lantern in his hand.
There was no parleying between those two, and Simon Pinniger, caught without arms, lifted up the lantern as though to dash it in John Gore’s face. The sea-captain flung up his left arm, and firing straight into the man’s body, saw him go lurching back, the lantern falling at his feet. John Gore sprang up with his sword ready, thinking for the moment that the bully had it in his heart. But Simon Pinniger’s ribs were tough enough to turn a pistol-bullet, and he recovered himself and came at the rescuer like a bull.
He tried to beat the sword aside with a sweep of the arm, but the lantern still burned upon the floor, and John Gore was too grim a gentleman to be tricked so easily. He avoided the blow with a backward step and a swift back swing of the right arm. The point was still to the fore, and lunging with the whole weight of arm and shoulder, he felt the blade grate between the fellow’s ribs. Then he was caught full face, like a bluff ship by an ocean roller, and knocked backward down the stairs by the mass and impact of the man’s charge.
The sword broke a foot from the guard, but John Gore held to the hilt, even while the brute bulk of the man was grinding over him down the steps. Twisting free, he slipped aside against the wall, only to feel a hand grasping at his throat, and the sound of hoarse, wet breathing mingling with savage curses. He struck out with the hilt of the sword, broke the man’s grip, and came up top dog despite Simon Pinniger’s brute, plunging fury. It was like the death-thrashing of a leviathan amid blood and spray. They struggled, clawed, and smote for a moment, till a chance stab went deep into the fellow’s eye. He crumpled down into the darkness; John Gore heard his head strike the wall, and the breath come out of him like the wind out of a stabbed “float.”
The man was mere carrion, and John Gore sprang up the stairs, finding the lantern still burning, though the grease from the candle had guttered through upon the stones. He picked it up, and was about to push forward into the room when a black square in the flooring caught his eye. A flagstone had been turned upon its side against the wall, uncovering the mouth of some oubliette or pit, and for a moment he bent over it, trying to probe its depths, as though dreading lest that dear body should be lying broken in the darkness beneath.