Captain Goldstein, meanwhile, convinced that his entry into Windyhough was not to be bloodless, after all, had tried his strength once more against the gate of the courtyard, and, finding it solid, had cast about for some way of breaking through it. The moon was making greater headway now through the rifted snow-clouds, and he saw the pile of tree-trunks at which Simon Foster had been busy until Sir Jasper’s messenger had disturbed him at the wood-chopping.
Like his troopers, Goldstein was wet and hungry and impatient, and his one thought was to rive the gate down, whatever strength opposed him on the far side of it. He gave a sharp order, and six of his men lifted a trunk of sycamore, and poised it for a while, and rammed the gate. The first thrust strained the gate against the cross-bars, and broke back sharply on the men who held the ram, disordering them for a moment.
The master waited, his musket ready primed. “Simon,” he said, “and you, Ben Shackleton, we’re bidden to hold the house, but gad! we’ll do a little in the courtyard first.”
Goldstein’s men came at the gate again, struck savagely, found by chance a weak spot in the wood. And this time they splintered a wide opening. They drew back a little, to get their breath, and through the opening Rupert saw faintly in the moonlight the half of a man’s body. Simon Foster, watching him, saw a still, passionless light steal into his eyes as he lifted the musket to his shoulder and fired with brisk precision. There was a cry of anguish from without, a sudden, heavy fall, and afterwards the guttural voice of Captain Goldstein, bidding his troopers clear the dead away and ram the gate again.
Rupert, for his part, was reloading. And he was tasting that exquisite, tragic glee known only to those who kill their first man in righteous battle. He was drinking from a well old as man’s history; and its waters, while they swept compunction and all else away, gave him a strange zest for this world’s adventures.
The troopers were desperate now. They rammed the splintered gate with a fury that broke the cross-bars; and Lady Royd, watching it all from the porch, saw a troop of savages, dusky in the moonlight—let loose from hell, so it seemed to her disordered fancy—swarm through the opening. She glanced at Rupert, saw him take careful aim again; and this time there was no cry from the fallen, for he dropped dead in his paces, so suddenly that the man behind tripped over him.
Simon Foster, who had preached the gospel of steadiness so constantly to the young master, aimed wildly at Goldstein, and missed him by a foot; but Shackleton, slow and sure by temperament, picked out a hulking fellow for his mark and hit him through the thigh.
“Get to the house!” said Rupert, his new mastery sitting firm and lightly on him.
Like the Prince in retreat, he stood aside till his men had found safety, and then passed in himself. A few shots spattered on the house-front, and one grazed his shoulder; but the enemy were huddled too close together in the courtyard, and they jostled one another while talking hurried aim. Just in time he leaped across the threshold, clashed the main door in Goldstein’s face, and shot the bolts home.
Inside, the first note that greeted him was the yapping of his mother’s spaniel. And his eyes sought Nance’s with instinctive humour.