Inside the room Plummer was now saying how much the marriage would
please his mother.
"Psst!"
George looked about him. It seemed to him that he had heard a
voice. He listened. No. Except for the barking of a distant dog,
the faint wailing of a waltz, the rustle of a roosting bird, and
the sound of Plummer saying that if her refusal was due to anything
she might have heard about that breach-of-promise case of his a
couple of years ago he would like to state that he was more sinned
against than sinning and that the girl had absolutely misunderstood
him, all was still.
"Psst! Hey, mister!"
It was a voice. It came from above. Was it an angel's voice? Not
altogether. It was Albert's. The boy was leaning out of a window
some six feet higher up the castle wall. George, his eyes by now
grown used to the darkness, perceived that the stripling
gesticulated as one having some message to impart. Then, glancing
to one side, he saw what looked like some kind of a rope swayed
against the wall. He reached for it. The thing was not a rope: it
was a knotted sheet.
From above came Albert's hoarse whisper.
"Look alive!"
This was precisely what George wanted to do for at least another
fifty years or so; and it seemed to him as he stood there in the
starlight, gingerly fingering this flimsy linen thing, that if he
were to suspend his hundred and eighty pounds of bone and sinew at
the end of it over the black gulf outside the balcony he would look
alive for about five seconds, and after that goodness only knew how
he would look. He knew all about knotted sheets. He had read a
hundred stories in which heroes, heroines, low comedy friends and
even villains did all sorts of reckless things with their
assistance. There was not much comfort to be derived from that. It
was one thing to read about people doing silly things like that,
quite another to do them yourself. He gave Albert's sheet a
tentative shake. In all his experience he thought he had never come
across anything so supremely unstable. (One calls it Albert's sheet
for the sake of convenience. It was really Reggie Byng's sheet.
And when Reggie got to his room in the small hours of the morning
and found the thing a mass of knots he jumped to the conclusion--
being a simple-hearted young man--that his bosom friend Jack Ferris,
who had come up from London to see Lord Belpher through the trying
experience of a coming-of-age party, had done it as a practical
joke, and went and poured a jug of water over Jack's bed. That is
Life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts
and what not. Absolutely!) Albert was becoming impatient. He was in the position of a great
general who thinks out some wonderful piece of strategy and can't
get his army to carry it out. Many boys, seeing Plummer enter the
room below and listening at the keyhole and realizing that George
must have hidden somewhere and deducing that he must be out on the
balcony, would have been baffled as to how to proceed. Not so
Albert. To dash up to Reggie Byng's room and strip his sheet off
the bed and tie it to the bed-post and fashion a series of knots in
it and lower it out of the window took Albert about three minutes.
His part in the business had been performed without a hitch. And
now George, who had nothing in the world to do but the childish
task of climbing up the sheet, was jeopardizing the success of the
whole scheme by delay. Albert gave the sheet an irritable jerk.