“They’re weak in numbers,” he said by and by.
“I’m not so sure. They’re quick enough to fire from all four sides of the house.”
“Yes, but the Stuart whelp would have led a sortie before this if they’d been strong.”
“True,” growled the sergeant, old at campaigning. “How long shall we give them, Captain?”
“A day or two. See to the sentries, keep out of fire, and we’ll see what the waiting-time will do for them. It’s a devil’s game, waiting for action that never comes—we learned that, Randolph, in the old Flanders days.”
“Aye, we learned fear,” said the sergeant, harking back to some lonely enterprises that he had shared with Goldstein.
Within doors Rupert kept his post. The brief excitement of his skirmish with the sergeant was gone. His fancy, always active, was racing now. He pictured, with a minuteness painful in its vividness, the shrift his women-folk would meet at the hands of the enemy without. Men who could not honour a truce of their own asking differed little from the brutes. And he was almost single-handed here, the master of a garrison so small that it was laughable.
The snow, after an hour or so, began to fall again. And round about the house there was a silence that could be felt. Those who have played sentry, hoping constantly for the relief of action, know the stealthy, evil fears that creep into a man’s mind, know the crude, imminent temptation that sleep offers them, know the persuasive devil at their elbow who asks them why they take this trouble for a cause lost already.
All that day there was silence and the falling snow. And all night there was silence, broken only by a little wind that sobbed about the house; and Goldstein and the sergeant, nursing their wounds in the stable, could have told Rupert every symptom of the malady from which he suffered. They had gone through it years ago.
Lady Royd, for her part, showed bright against the dull canvas of the siege. She discovered, in her own haphazard way, that years of communion with Sir Jasper had taught her courage when the pinch of danger came. She still kept her pampered spaniel under her arm; but, in between the sleep she snatched fitfully, she moved about the house as the mistress and great lady. She kept up the flagging spirits of the women-servants, saw that the men had food and wine to keep their strength alive. And, now and then, she stole into the room overlooking the main door, and stood watching her son—bone of her bone—keep steady at his post. And afterwards she would withdraw, a happiness like starshine going with her because the heir, despite her weak handling of his destiny, was after all a man.