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Updated: June 11, 2025
At last Teligny made a sortie at the head of a considerable force. A warm action succeeded, at the conclusion of which, without a decided advantage on either side, the sluice-gate in the fortress was opened, and the torrent of the Scheldt, swollen by a high tide, was suddenly poured upon the Spaniards.
He was not even sure that Maud felt it, or rather he suspected that the experience of wedded love was to her the heightening and emphasizing of something which she had always known. The essence of it was that it was like the inrush of some moving tide through an open sluice-gate.
"If you go out and look at the highest water mark, you can easily imagine what I had to face last night when I had to cross the bridge to open the sluice-gate, or the bridge would have gone, too. If the children had not wakened with the storm, and hunted me, I'd have had to stay over there until morning, if I could have clung to the tree that long.
Thus, beginning with a trickle, the flow of her good humor presently broadened to the width of the sluice-gate, as she entered upon an absorbing scrutiny of the quaint old house which by tradition had served one of the earlier governors. It was a rambling structure of unexpected turns and endless alcoves stored with curios, art treasures, and trophies of travel.
The big livid cloud, urged on by a terrible wind, was galloping across the sky, filling it with the clamor of a tempest. And almost immediately afterwards the rain-drops increased in volume and in number, lashed by so violent a squall that the water poured down as if by the bucketful, or as if some huge sluice-gate had suddenly burst asunder overhead.
After a few moments the clank of the bars and ratchet was heard as two of the men raised the heavy sluice-gate on the dam. A roar of water, momently increasing, marked the slow rise of the barrier. A very imaginative man might then have made out a tendency forward on the part of those timbers floating nearest the centre of the pond.
"Tom, we've got to get flood-water unless we want to run into an awful job there," said Orde to the foreman. "I wonder if we can't drop that gate 'way down to get something for a head." The two men examined the chute and the sluice-gate attentively for some time.
But when at last they reached the sea end, it was to find Mr Marston very busy with his men closing the great gates to keep out the tide, which had risen high and threatened to flood a good deal of low-lying ground. For probably by carelessness the sluice-gate down by the sea had been left open, and the tide had come up and drowned the works.
They went through a little gate from the high-road, to the head of the water, where was a great stone basin which received the overflow, and a flight of stone steps descended into the depths of the water itself. At the head of the steps was the lock of the sluice-gate. The night was silver-grey and perfect, save for the scattered restless sound of voices.
If he had but one hour longer there would be enough water for men and horses for days, twenty jars of water pouring all the time! Now and again a figure came towards the wheel, but not close enough to see that the one sluice-gate had been shut and the other opened. A half- hour passed, an hour, and then the end came.
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