Chapter XX Love Laughs at Locksmiths
When the interview with his uncle had ended and Ralph’s endeavours to cheer the latter’s gloom had in a measure succeeded, the young knight went off to make his report upon John de Standen’s operations to his superiors. Evening was falling fast ere he found himself free, and then it suddenly came into his mind to pay a kind of unofficial visit to the sentries on the south side of the river, and see if they were on the alert. Perhaps, also, he was impelled by an uncontrollable desire to gaze from as close a point as was possible on that stern keep, where he had that noontide learned from Beatrice Mertoun that his lady-love lingered in much doubt and distress.
He crossed the bridge and walked along the river-bank, giving the required password to each post, and adding a few syllables of caution. In so doing, he told himself he was but fulfilling the object of his nocturnal ramble. Ere long he found himself facing the huge keep, rising on the opposite shore of the river black against the northern sky.
Ralph knew every window of the southern face of the keep, and well-nigh every stone. He perceived a light in one of the large openings of the upper story. He knew that window well. It was that of the lady’s bower, which had been his cousin’s apartment in the old days, and was probably now occupied by the Lady Margaret.
Dark though the night was, the young man’s eyesight was keen, and as he gazed at that window, a crowd of tender thoughts flooding his heart, he saw in the opening two figures in dark profile against the light behind them.
Seized by an uncontrollable impulse, Ralph hastily doffed his armour, and, clad only in the soft leathern dress which knights wore beneath their harness, dropped into the stream so quietly as to be unperceived by the nearest sentry on the river-bank.
Starting from a well-known old pollard willow, Ralph breasted the stream manfully, making, as nearly as the sweep of the current and the darkness of the night would allow him, for certain iron stanchions which he remembered he had fixed, when a boy, into the castle wall.
To his great joy he found they had not been removed. He caught hold of the lowest, which was near the water’s edge, and quickly scaled the wall. When he reached the top he looked eagerly down and around.
No one was near. William de Breauté, whose garrison was but scanty, had judged that no attack would be made upon the river side of the castle, except by boat, and accordingly had contented himself with posting sentries at each end of the long river-wall, concentrating his principal strength on the landward side of the castle.
Ralph slid down the other side of the wall, and cautiously crossed the open space which separated him from the huge mound on which stood the keep. He was still unperceived; so, climbing the steep side of the mound, he crouched down against the lofty wall, immediately beneath the lighted window.
Were those two figures still there?
Twice he softly called Aliva by name, and then, to his intense rapture, sweet as an angel’s voice from heaven to him, came the words from above,—
“Ralph! Ralph! can it be thou?”
“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.”
Love laughs at locksmiths. In this case it made light, too, of some forty perpendicular feet of massive stone wall. After five weary months of uncertainty, all doubts, mistrusts, and tortures of anxiety were swept away in a breath, as these two heard, each one once more, the loved voice neither had expected ever to hear again; and old Father Ouse, rippling sluggishly on between the willows through the dark summer night, had never listened to warmer raptures, to more passionate protestations of love.
But some one else was listening too.
In the thickness of the wall, at the south-east corner of the keep, on the same floor as the great hall, was the small chapel of the castle. It was a tiny apartment, affording room for but few worshipping besides those attending on the ministrations of the priest. Behind a round arched arcading in a stone gallery were accommodated the ladies and the household of the lord’s family; but the bulk of the congregation would have to stand in a sort of antechapel opening out of the great hall, and join in the mass from that position.
Up and down the narrow space in front of the altar—freshly repaired and cleaned for the bridal of Aliva and De Breauté—paced restlessly at midnight Bertram de Concours. His thoughts were not pleasant ones. The freshly-appointed chaplain of Bedford Castle had conceived that his new position would be one which would lead him to power and authority, and probably give him an opportunity to triumph over those whom he considered his enemies, the ecclesiastical superiors who had dishonoured and disowned him. But now, instead of rising to power with the De Breauté family, he found his new patrons in sore distress. He was well aware that the two assaults which had already been made on the castle had been completely successful, and that all the outer defences had been taken. He gleaned, from the talk of De Breauté and his under-officers, that if the walls were really undermined, and a fresh attack should be made with the same vigour, nothing could avert the fall of the castle.
For the fate of De Breauté and his men Bertram de Concours cared nothing, but in the event of his own capture he clearly foresaw for himself condemnation in the ecclesiastical court. The sentence would be perpetual imprisonment in the cell of some stringent order, where offending priests were subjected to even more severe discipline than that voluntarily assumed by the most austere monks themselves.
“Fool that I was,” he muttered to himself, “to have thrown in my lot with these French upstarts! Why did I not see this maiden safe to her father’s house, and so have won me the eternal gratitude of this love-sick knight, and what is more, the favour of his family?”
As he moved restlessly to and fro, he paused, and opening the rude shutter which closed the narrow window on the south, looked out into the silent summer night. The calm freshness seemed to mock the consuming uneasiness in his mind.
But as he gazed he heard voices. He leaned out and listened intently.
Yes, he was not mistaken: a voice there was above him—a woman’s—answering to a man’s below in the darkness.
“Escape, my Ralph, ere dawn break! There are watchers at each end of the long wall, and they will certes espy thee if thou lingerest till it grows light. How it came that thou crossedst the glacis, and scaledst the keep mound unseen, I cannot tell. May the saints bear thee safe across the river!”
And then another female voice went on,—
“And take my message to thy revered uncle, bold young Sir Knight. Tell him that Margaret de Ripariis has but lived these long years in sorrow and mourning for the false step into which she was both forced and betrayed, and that she hath ever held his memory dear.”
Then a man’s voice answered from below,—
“Fare thee well, my heart’s darling, Aliva!—My Lady Margaret, I salute thee. Forget not the signal. When the last assault comes—as come full soon it must—and we attack this mighty keep, hang your scarves from the windows of the chamber to which ye retreat, and I will come and convey ye both away in safety.”
Then Bertram heard the speaker cautiously feeling his way among the loose stones which lay at the foot of the keep.
He drew a short, sharp breath, and clinched his teeth.
“By the mass,” he exclaimed, “though naught can undo my folly in the past, yet I will have vengeance now! Ho, warder, ho!” he cried, hurrying from the chapel into the hall, and shouting to the sentry on duty at the entrance; “ho! quick to the window, and take thy aim at yon figure hastening down to the river wall. ’Tis the young knight De Beauchamp. It grows light enow for thee to see thy mark.”
At that moment William de Breauté entered the hall from the turret staircase in the corner. He had been taking a few hours’ sleep in one of the upper chambers, and was now about to sally out on his early morning rounds, fearing an attack when his guards were weary and drowsy.
“How sayest thou, Sir Chaplain?” he exclaimed; “Ralph de Beauchamp here—beneath the castle wall! ’Tis not possible!”
“Nay, Sir William, not so impossible,” replied the priest. “I trow he hath been drawn across the Ouse by a lodestar within these walls. From the chapel window I heard him e’en now hold converse with the Lady Aliva at a window above.”
With a furious volley of French oaths William de Breauté rushed wildly out of the hall, calling upon all the sentries near to stop or kill Sir Ralph.
It was a maddening race. From the upper window the girl watched it in agony. The cross-bow bolts flew thick and fast around Ralph as he hurried to the wall. Some shattered themselves against the stones as he scaled it.
For a brief moment he stood out clearly upon the summit against the gray dawn, an easy mark for the archers. Then, without waiting to descend by the iron stanchions, he took a desperate plunge into the stream.
Aliva saw him rise to the surface, and watched him swimming with all his might to the opposite bank.
But as he leaped from the top of the wall she saw another figure reach it, and she recognized the pursuer to be William de Breauté.
He held in his hand a ready-strung cross-bow which he had snatched from one of the warders.
Aliva saw him take aim and loose the shaft.
The figure of the swimmer half rose in the water, and then disappeared from view beneath its surface.
With a faint cry Aliva fell back swooning into the arms of Lady Margaret.