Wild with helpless misery, the Lord of Ivarsdale would have charged the Berserkers with his handful of armed servants if the old cniht had not restrained him almost by force; when he spent his breath in railing at everything between earth and sky.
“It is the folly of it that maddens me,” he cried over and over, “the needless folly! Had I but used my mind to think with, instead of to plan feasts—I am moved to dash my brains out when I remember it!”
“Nay, it is my judgment that was lacking,” Morcard said bitterly. “I was an old dog that could not learn a new trick. I should have seen that the old ways no longer avail. The fault was mine.” His wrinkled old face was so haggard with self-reproach that the Etheling hastily recanted.
“Now I bethink me, I am wrong, and it is no one’s fault. It comes of the curse that lies over the Island. Was there not something rotten in all English palisades, it would never have happened that the pirates got their first foothold. But we have shaken off the spell, and they have not mastered us yet. To-night we will try to get a messenger out to my kinsman in Yorkshire, and another to my father’s friend in Essex.”
The next day, and for many days thereafter, the Tower windows stared out like expectant eyes. But no delivering bands ever came over the hills to reward their watching. From the moment that he was swallowed by the outer darkness, the messenger for Yorkshire was as lost to their sight and their knowledge as though he had plunged into the ocean. And a week later, the man who had been sent into Essex crept back with a dejection that foretold his ill success. The ealdorman was taxed, might and main, to protect his own lands. He regretted it, to his innermost vitals, but these were days when each must stand or fall for himself. He could only send his sympathy and the counsel to hold out unflinchingly in the hope that some fortune of war would call the besiegers away.
When he heard that, Father Ingulph forgot his robes to indulge in a curse. “Does he think we have possession of the widow’s blessed oil-cruse? If the larder had not been stocked for a week’s feasting, we must needs have been starved under ere this. How much longer can we endure, even at one meal a day?” He sighed as he drew his belt in another notch.
When the beginning of the Wine Month came, the bitterest sight that the Tower windows gave out upon was the band of foragers that every morning went forth from the Danish camp-fires. Every noon they returned, amid a taunting racket, with armfuls of ale-skins, back-loads of salted meats, and bags bulging with the bread which they had forced the terrorized farm-women into baking for them. “They have the ingenuity of fiends!” Father Ingulph was wont to groan after each of these spectacles.
At last the time arrived when it looked as though these visions were to be the only glimpses of food vouchsafed to them.
“Bread for one more meal; and the last ale-cask has been broached,” the steward answered in a very faint voice when Morcard put the nightly question.
Because it was not possible for the old man’s face to record more misery, the light of the guard-room fire over which he crouched showed no change whatever in his expression.