The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (autobiographies to read .txt) 📖

“Nay,” returned Matcham, “I saw her not.”

“Nor heard tell of her?” he pursued.

The steps drew nearer. Sir Daniel was still roaring the name of Joanna from the courtyard.

“Did ye hear of her?” repeated Dick.

“I heard of her,” said Matcham.

“How your voice twitters! What aileth you?” said Dick. “’Tis a most excellent good fortune, this Joanna; it will take their minds from us.”

“Dick,” cried Matcham, “I am lost; we are both lost. Let us flee if there be yet time. They will not rest till they have found me. Or, see! let me go forth; when they have found me, ye may flee. Let me forth, Dick—good Dick, let me away!”

She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended.

“By the mass!” he cried, “y’are no Jack; y’are Joanna Sedley; y’are the maid that would not marry me!”

The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again.

“Joanna,” he said, “y’ ’ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies—ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time’s out, and before I die I must say this: Y’are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you.”

She answered nothing.

“Come,” he said, “speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!”

“Why, Dick,” she cried, “would I be here?”

“Well, see ye here,” continued Dick, “an we but escape whole we’ll marry; and an we’re to die, we die, and there’s an end on’t. But now that I think, how found ye my chamber?”

“I asked it of Dame Hatch,” she answered.

“Well, the dame’s staunch,” he answered; “she’ll not tell upon you. We have time before us.”

And just then, as if to contradict his words, feet came down the corridor, and a fist beat roughly on the door.

“Here!” cried a voice. “Open, Master Dick; open!”

Dick neither moved nor answered.

“It is all over,” said the girl; and she put her arms about Dick’s neck.

One after another, men came trooping to the door. Then Sir Daniel arrived himself, and there was a sudden cessation of the noise.

“Dick,” cried the knight, “be not an ass. The Seven Sleepers had been awake ere now. We know she is within there. Open, then, the door, man.”

Dick was again silent.

“Down with it,” said Sir Daniel. And immediately his followers fell savagely upon the door with foot and fist. Solid as it was, and strongly bolted, it would soon have given way; but once more fortune interfered. Over the thunder-storm of blows the cry of a sentinel was heard; it was followed by another; shouts ran along the battlements, shouts answered out of the wood. In the first moment of alarm it sounded as if the foresters were carrying the Moat House by assault. And Sir Daniel and his men, desisting instantly from their attack upon Dick’s chamber, hurried to defend the walls.

“Now,” cried Dick, “we are saved.”

He seized the great old bedstead with both hands, and bent himself in vain to move it.

“Help me, Jack. For your life’s sake, help me stoutly!” he cried.

Between them, with a huge effort, they dragged the big frame of oak across the room, and thrust it endwise to the chamber door.

“Ye do but make things worse,” said Joanna, sadly. “He will then enter by the trap.”

“Not so,” replied Dick. “He durst not tell his secret to so many. It is by the trap that we shall flee. Hark! The attack is over. Nay, it was none!”

It had, indeed, been no attack; it was the arrival of another party of stragglers from the defeat of Risingham that had disturbed Sir Daniel. They had run the gauntlet under cover of the darkness; they had been admitted by the great gate; and now, with a great stamping of hoofs and jingle of accoutrements and arms, they were dismounting in the court.

“He will return anon,” said Dick. “To the trap!”

He lighted a lamp, and they went together into the corner of the room. The open chink through which some light still glittered was easily discovered, and, taking a stout sword from his small armoury, Dick thrust it deep into the seam, and weighed strenuously on the hilt. The trap moved, gaped a little, and at length came widely open. Seizing it with their hands, the two young folk threw it back. It disclosed a few steps descending, and at the foot of them, where the would-be murderer had left it, a burning lamp.

“Now,” said Dick, “go first and take the lamp. I will follow to close the trap.”

So they descended one after the other, and as Dick lowered the trap, the blows began once again to thunder on the panels of the door.

The passage in which Dick and Joanna now found themselves was narrow, dirty, and short. At the other end of it, a door stood partly open; the same door, without doubt, that they had heard the man unlocking. Heavy cobwebs hung from the roof; and the paved flooring echoed hollow under the lightest tread.

Beyond the door there were two branches, at right angles. Dick chose one of them at random, and the pair hurried, with echoing footsteps, along the hollow of the chapel roof. The top of the arched ceiling rose like a whale’s back in the dim glimmer of the lamp. Here and there were spy-holes, concealed, on the other side, by the carving of the cornice; and looking down through one of these, Dick saw the paved floor of the chapel—the altar, with its burning tapers—and stretched before it on the steps, the figure of Sir Oliver praying with uplifted hands.

At the other end, they descended a few steps. The passage grew narrower; the wall upon one hand was now of wood; the noise of people talking, and a faint flickering of lights, came through the interstices; and presently they came to a round hole about the size of a man’s eye, and Dick, looking down through it, beheld the interior of the hall, and some half-a-dozen men sitting, in their jacks, about the table, drinking deep and demolishing a venison pie. These were certainly some of the late arrivals.

“Here is no help,” said Dick. “Let us try back.”

“Nay,” said Joanna; “maybe the passage goeth farther.”

And she pushed on. But a few yards farther the passage ended at the top of a short flight of steps; and it became plain that, as long as the soldiers occupied the hall, escape was impossible upon that side.

They retraced their steps with all imaginable speed, and set forward to explore the other branch. It was exceedingly narrow, scarce wide enough for a large man; and it led them continually up and down by little breakneck stairs, until even Dick had lost all notion of his whereabouts.

At length it grew both narrower and lower; the stairs continued to descend; the walls on either hand became damp and slimy to the touch; and far in front of them they heard the squeaking and scuttling of the rats.

“We must be in the dungeons,” Dick remarked.

“And still there is no outlet,” added Joanna.

“Nay, but an outlet there must be!” Dick answered.

Presently, sure enough, they came to a sharp angle, and then the passage ended in a flight of steps. On the top of that there was a solid flag of stone by way of trap, and to this they both set their backs. It was immovable.

“Some one holdeth it,” suggested Joanna.