As for Oliver Icingla, he almost felt that he was content with his condition. It would be too much to say that if his prison doors had been opened he would have said with the heroine of the ballad of “The Spanish Lady’s Love”--
“Full woe is me: Oh, let me still sustain this kind captivity!”--
but certainly he did find his prison infinitely less intolerable than it had been when he first entered it, cursing the fate that had sent him thither. At times, however, the old spirit seized him, and he stamped about like a caged lion, and startled the sullen gaoler by his explosions of rage.
“On my faith,” said he to himself one day in April, after having worn himself out by the intensity of his ravings, “never did the hart pant for the water-brook more than I pant for freedom and air and exercise, and yet the chance seems as far away from me as ever. I marvel how long I have been here. Ha! I have lost count. By St. Edward, I fear me that ere long I shall lose my senses!”
As Oliver thus soliloquised he went to the window, and, seating himself on the broad sill of stone, looked out on meadows and woodlands which spring, “that great painter of the earth,” had once more robed in green, and on the ploughed fields to which, in spite of war and rumours of war, the husbandmen were committing the seeds, with every hope of reaping in due season. Almost as he did so, his ear caught the sound of a musical instrument and of a voice singing a Castilian ballad in very indifferent Spanish, but in accents which were so familiar that his heart leaped within him. Oliver listened, and as he listened the singer sang--
“They have carried afar into Navarre the great Count of Castile, And they have bound him sorely, they have bound him hand and heel; The tidings up the mountains go, and down among the valleys-- To the rescue! to the rescue, ho! they have ta’en Fernan Gonsalez!”
Interrupting without ceremony, and taking the ballad out of the singer’s mouth, Oliver repeated the verse at the top of his voice, so emphasising several of the words as to leave little room for mistake as to his meaning. As he did so he observed a figure climb slowly but without difficulty up a parapet, at such a distance from him that there was no possibility of communicating by words; but the figure, on reaching the top of the parapet, reared itself and stood in the form of a boy dressed in crimson, holding some musical instrument in his hand, and looking scrutinously from window to window, and from casement to casement, apparently with the object of discovering from which had come the voice of the person who had caught up his song. Oliver, to aid him, took his cap, put his hand between the bars of the window, and dexterously tossed the cap in the air. The signal was observed and had the desired effect. The singer returned it, and having dropped nimbly to the ground disappeared, while Oliver, withdrawing into the interior of his chamber, began to marvel what consequences would flow from this unexpected incident.