Chapter XXII Ralph to the Rescue
As William de Breauté was being marched to his fate, Ralph hurried up the winding turret stair, half choked by the blinding smoke which poured from the burning wood-work, and much impeded in his impetuous course by the chain of soldiers engaged in passing up water to extinguish the conflagration.
Even in the heat and din of the final assault his keen lover’s eye had found time to look for and to note the signal promised by Aliva. High up from one of the windows hung her scarf. But when Ralph and his men had toiled thither they found the room empty.
Ralph experienced a painful tightening of the heart. Whither had the bird flown?
But it was the smoke which had driven the ladies from their apartment, and Ralph, exploring higher still, up a rude stone stair, found them collected on the flat wooden roof covering the inner space between the lofty parapets and the four corner turrets.
Aliva, standing out tall and slim against the August twilight, was assisting Beatrice Mertoun to support the Lady Margaret, who was quite overcome with all that was taking place.
Ralph fell on his knee before Aliva, and kissed her hand with a rapture too deep for words. But Aliva bent over him, and throwing up his visor, kissed his face.
A voice sounded behind them. “Tut, children! this is neither time nor place to tarry to make love.—Ladies, haste you, and get you gone to a place of safety. We have conquered our enemies, but not yet subdued the fire.—Lady Margaret, permit that I assist thee down these stairs.—Nephew Ralph, bring the Lady Aliva.”
And the whole party, guided by De Beauchamp, hurried down into the hall, and thence into the débris and confusion which reigned in the bailey yards. The fast-falling darkness added to the weirdness of the scene—the ruins, the dead and dying, the shouts and cries of the victors, the crackling of the flames, and the crash of the charred beams as they fell.
Somehow or other in the tumult Ralph and Aliva got separated from the rest, and found themselves, when once clear of the fortifications, obliged for a few moments to stand aside on the river-bank to let a company of men-at-arms pass by with wounded and prisoners.
Suddenly, from behind some dark corner, a figure rushed at them in the gloom, and fell on his knees before Aliva. She started violently, and Ralph drew his sword.
“Misericorde, misericorde! for the love of Heaven and our Lady!” whined a familiar voice, that of Bertram de Concours. “Fair lady, as you hope for mercy, show some to me, and mind you how I succoured you in the chapel, when De Breauté and his men might have—ah!”
He never finished. A trampling of armed feet was heard behind, and he turned his head to see a guard advancing upon him.
“Better a watery grave than a living tomb!” he shrieked, and, before Ralph could stop him, plunged into the stream.
“Plague take the traitor priest! We have lost him,” growled the veteran man-at-arms in command.
“Old Ouse will have naught of such foul spawn, I trow,” corrected Ralph. “There are but two feet of water ’neath this bank at harvest-time. Fish him out; he sticketh in the mud, and is set fast.—But come, sweet Aliva,” he added, turning to the maiden at his side; “let us hasten. The Lady Margaret hath without doubt ere now gained the house of good Master Gilbert the Clothier, who bade me offer thee his hospitality.”
Aliva moved on, clinging to her lover’s arm. Behind them, into the darkness, the guard marched off the bedraggled priest. As regards the latter’s ultimate fate the chronicler is silent, beyond relating the fact that he was committed for trial in the court of the archbishop, and doubtless the ambitious Bertram de Concours fretted away the remainder of his days a prisoner in the cell of some austere order. But the little episode had awakened another memory in Aliva’s breast.
“My Ralph,” she exclaimed, “and what of the other, the Benedictine lay-brother, the Bletsoe youth, who did in all truth and fidelity succour me and strive to bring me aid?”
Sir Ralph looked down on the fair face resting on his arm, and then up to the purple sky of the summer night—
“The azure gloom,
When the deep skies assume
Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven.”
“God rest his soul!” he answered, in a low voice. “I owe it to his strong arm and ready wit, as he parried with his mace the blow De Breauté aimed at me, that I am here to-night with thee.”
Ralph only waited to see the ladies safely bestowed in the worthy burgess’s abode ere he hurried back again to the castle. There was no rest for him that night. Not the least onerous part of a commander’s duty in those rough times was to restore order and discipline among his men after the capture of a fortress which had held out against them. It was a melancholy sight to the young knight this sacking and firing of his ancestral castle, the home of his boyhood. It stood there with ruined walls and a huge rift in the side of the great keep like a lightning-stricken oak.
And morning light brought more work. Hubert de Burgh, the king’s justiciary, opened a court of justice in his sovereign’s name, and before it were brought William de Breauté and eighty of his men.
Late in the afternoon Beatrice Mertoun, devoured with curiosity as to what was happening, and chafing at her restraint in Master Gilbert’s house, persuaded one of Lady Margaret’s women to come with her towards the castle, intending, under cover of the twilight, to secure such of their possessions as the fire and the plunderers should have spared. But they returned quicker than they went, and empty-handed, driven back by horror; for in the bailey yard they came suddenly upon a rude gallows on which, grim and stark in the dim twilight, hung William de Breauté and seventy-three of his men.