The next day broke with keen frost and a red sun that forced its way through the last cloudbanks of the snow. And the sergeant asked Goldstein for his orders.
“Let ’em wait,” grinned Goldstein. “We know the game, Randolph, eh? Let ’em wait till nightfall. Change sentries every two hours. It’s devilish cold, and we must humour our ill-licked cubs. And, Randolph——”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Remember, thirty thousand pounds are worth the waiting for.”
The master of Windyhough still kept his post; but, as the day wore on, he knew that he was facing disastrous odds. Across his eyes sleep began to weave slim and filmy cobwebs. He brushed them savagely away; but a moment later the hidden enemy was once again at work. It was a warfare as stealthy as this fight between the garrison, sheltered by stout walls, and the besiegers, who could not gauge the strength of those within.
For his health’s sake, the master went the round of the house, found Ben Shackleton frankly asleep at the west window, and Simon Foster nodding, half-befogged with weariness. He roused them—not gently—and the struggle to stir them into watchfulness cleared all the cobwebs from his eyes.
He went back to his post by way of the north window; and here again he found his sentry fast asleep. Nance was sitting on the chair that Lady Royd had brought her, earlier in the day. Her brown hair was loosened in a cloud, and her face was hidden in her two capable, small hands. She had been a sentry to him—no more, no less, since the fiercest of this siege commanded all his ruggedness and strength; but he had no wish to rouse her now.
The waning light showed him the bowed figure, the tiredness that had conquered her persistent courage. He drew nearer, touched her bowed head with some stifling war of passion against reverence. All the muddled way of his love for her—the love that had not dared, because he doubted his own strength to claim her—was swept aside. At the heart of him—the big, eager heart that had found no room till now—he knew himself a man. With the strength of his manhood he needed her, here in the midst of the siege perilous, needed to tell her of his love.
He moved forward, checked himself, watched the figure that was bent by a vigil too burdensome and long-protracted. And the wildness left him. The faith that had grown with his growing—the faith that had shown signs, a little while ago, of wear and tear—laid a cool, persuasive hand on him. Through the storm and trouble of this love for Nance he saw that she was weak, and wearied-out, and needing sleep. And at such times to the stalwart men a little light, reflected, may be, from the Madonna’s face, shows like a shrouded star about all suffering women.
Rupert was finding the big love, and the lasting, here in the silence that tested faith and courage more than any fury of attack and open peril. He went back to his window. And again sleep tried to spin her cobwebs round his eyes; but her blandishments were idle.