helves, mostly volumes
of plays, the Spanish Tragedy, the Laws of Candy, Love Lies a Bleeding,
etc., four plays to a volume in buckram covers. I was just getting
tired of All for Love, when I heard a footstep in the passage outside.
I thought that I would ask the passenger, whoever it might be, for
how much longer the squire would keep me waiting. I was anxious about
getting back to the army. It was dangerous to straggle too far from the
Duke's camps when unbeaten armies followed on both his wings. So I went
to the door to learn my fate at once. To my great surprise I found that
I could not open it. It was locked on the outside. The great heavy
iron lock had been turned upon me. I was a prisoner in the room there.
Thinking that it had been done carelessly, I beat upon the door to
attract the man who passed down the passage, calling to him to turn the
key for me so that I might get out. The footsteps did not pause. They
passed on, down the corridor, as though the man were deaf. After that
a fury came upon me. I beat upon the door for five minutes on end, till
the house must have rung with the clatter; but no one paid any attention
to me, only, far away, I heard a woman giggling, in an interval when I
had paused for breath. The door was a heavy, thick oak door, bound with
iron. The lock was a bar of steel at least two inches thick; there was
no chance of getting it open. Even firing into the lock with my little
pistol would not have helped me; it would only have jammed the tongue of
steel in its bed. I soon saw the folly of trying to get out by the door;
so I turned to the window, which was more difficult still, or, if not
more difficult, more tantalizing, since it showed me the free garden
into which one little jump would suffice to carry me. But the closely
placed piers of stone made it impossible for me to get through the
window. It was no use trying to do so. I should only have stuck fast,
midway. I began at once to pick out the mortar of the pier stones with
my knife point. It was hopeless work, though, for the old monks had used
some cement a good deal harder than the stones which it bound together.
I could only dig away a little dust from its surface. That way also was
barred to me. Then I went down to the bathing-chamber, hoping that there
would be some way of escape for me there. I hoped that the escape pipe
of the bath might be a great stone conduit leading to a fish-pond in
the garden. It was nothing of the sort.