He faced the fact as he paced his castle walls. The relish had gone out of his life. He was gathering what he had sown, and the harvest was barren indeed.
Time passed; he walked unheeding. If he spent the whole night on the ramparts, there was no one to know or care. It was better than tossing sleepless under a roof. He felt as if a roof would suffocate him. But sheer physical weariness began to oppress even his elastic frame at last. He awoke to the fact that he was dead tired.
He sat down in an embrasure between the battlements, and drifted into the numb state between waking and sleeping in which visions are born. For a space nothing happened, then quite suddenly, rising as it were out of a void, a presence entered his consciousness, reached and touched his spirit. Intangibly, but quite unmistakably, he was aware of the summons, of a voice that spoke within his soul.
He lifted his head and looked about him. Emptiness, stark emptiness, was all he saw. Yet, in a moment, as though a hand had beckoned, he arose. Without a backward glance he traversed the distance that lay between him and the turret-door. He went through it into utter darkness, and in utter darkness began the descent.
A shaft of moonlight smote through a slit in the stone wall as he rounded the corner of the stair. It lay like a shining sword across his path, and for a second he paused. Then he passed over it, sure-footed and confident, and plunged again into darkness. When he reached the end of the descent, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were alight with a strange fire. He pulled upon the door and put aside the thick curtain with the swift movements of a man who can brook no delay. He passed into the long, dim room beyond with its single red lamp burning at the far end. He prepared to pass on to the door that led out upon the gallery and so to the grand staircase. But before he had gone half-a-dozen paces he stopped. It was no sound that arrested, no visible circumstance of any sort. Yet, as if at a word of command, he halted. His quick look swept around the room like the gleam of a rapier, and suddenly he swung upon his heel, facing that still, red light.
Seconds passed before he moved again. Then swiftly and silently he walked up the room. Close to the lamp was a deep settee on which the spots of a leopard skin showed in weird relief. At one end of the settee, against the leopard skin, something gold was shining. Saltash's look was fixed upon it as he drew near.
He reached the settee treading noiselessly. He stood beside it, looking down. And over his dark face with its weary lines and cynical mouth, its melancholy and its bitterness, there came a light such as neither man nor woman had ever seen upon it before. For there before him, curled up like a tired puppy, her tumbled, golden hair lying in ringlets over the leopard skin, was Toby, asleep in the dim, red lamplight.
For minutes he stood and gazed upon her before she awoke. For minutes that strange glory came and went over his watching face. He did not stir, did not seem even to breathe. But the fact of his presence must have pierced her consciousness at last, for in the end quite quietly, supremely naturally, the blue eyes opened and fixed upon him.
"Hullo!" said Toby sleepily. "Time to get up?"
And then, in a moment, she had sprung upright on the couch, swift dismay on her face.