Goldstein, when he awoke the next morning to find himself laid on the stable straw with a dull ache in his left thigh, remembered the business that had brought him here, and tried to rise. He found himself sick and useless, and, getting to his feet by sheer hardihood, fell back again with a black mist about his eyes. Little by little he began to accept the situation as it stood, and he waited till his head was fairly clear again. He did not propose, so long as he had breath, to abandon his project of securing the blood-money that would secure him a life of ease in the Fatherland; and his troopers, when he gave his commands for the day with brisk precision, liked him better, seeing his pluck, than they had done since the beginning of this ill-starred errand. He reminded them, moreover, of their slain, lying here and there about the courtyard; and revenge is a fire that kindles men’s courage and hard obstinacy.

A little while later, as Rupert peered through the dawn-red snow of the courtyard, he heard a gruff voice from below. It was the sergeant’s who was Goldstein’s deputy.

“I want to come within gunshot of your window,” he said.

“Every man to his taste,” laughed Rupert, glad of any respite from his vigil. “If you need lead, I can entertain you.”

“Under truce.”

“There can be no truce. I hold my house for the King, and mean to keep it.”

“But listen. Give us the Pretender—we know as well as you do that he’s hiding here—and the rest of you can pass out in safety.”“The Prince is here you think? Why, then, we guard him, sir—what else is possible?”

“You’ll not give five minutes’ truce? Captain Goldstein is wounded——”

“I’m devilish glad to hear it,” said Rupert, with the gaiety that would not be denied.

“He sends me to talk over this little matter of the siege.”

“Then step out into the open—under truce—and let me see your face.”

Some quality of honour in Rupert’s voice reached the sergeant. As he put it to himself, he knew the man for a fool who kept his word. The snow had all but ceased for a while, and in the keen dawnlight Goldstein’s man looked up and saw Rupert’s grave, clean-cut face at the window overhead.

“Your garrison is weak. We know it,” said the sergeant.

“You lie. Our garrison is strong,” Rupert answered bluntly.

“How strong?” put in the other, trying clumsily to catch him unawares.

“Force your way in and learn.”

“But surely we can drive a bargain? There’s a price on the Pretender’s head—a trifle of thirty thousand pounds—and you can share it with us, if you will.”

A sudden loathing came to Rupert as he listened to the man’s thick, guttural persuasiveness. These hired soldiery of the enemy seemed to have only two views of a man—that he could be bullied or be bought.

“Go back to Captain Goldstein,” he said. “Tell him that we’re strong to stand a siege, and that—we are gentlemen of Lancashire who hold the house.”

The sergeant glanced narrowly at the face above, and a suspicion took sudden hold of him. This man with the disdainful, easy air might be the Prince himself. He remembered the condition “dead or alive” attached to the blood-money, lifted his carbine, and fired point blank. The ball went wide a little; but for a moment Rupert thought that he was hit, as the splintered masonry cut across his forehead. Then he stooped, picked up a musket, and took flying aim at the man below—without avail, as he thought. It would have cheered him to see the sergeant limp round the corner of the house toward the stables.

“Well?” asked Goldstein, cursing the pain that touched him as he moved quickly round. “Did the young rebel come to terms?”

“He came to the butt-end of a musket against his shoulder, and the bullet grazed my knee. I shall limp for days to come.”

“Then limp, you fool! What is a grazed knee with the Pretender indoors yonder——”

“I’ve seen the Pretender,” said the other, getting out his pipe and filling it. “The young rebel, as you call him—the man who pretends to be Sir Jasper’s son—is Charlie Stuart. Face, and big, careless air, and belief that truce means truce in wartime—he’s Charlie to the life, the Charlie who got as far as Derby and then, with all before him, went back again.”

Goldstein, with nothing to do except nurse his wound, had been thinking much the same, had been reckoning up, too, the chances of this enterprise.

“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.

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.

The snow, about three of the afternoon, ceased falling, and across the moors that guarded Windyhough a wild splendour lit the hills. The clouds were scattered, till the last of them trailed over Lone Man’s Hill in smoky mist. The sun lay red and fiery on the western spurs, and from the east the young moon rose, her face clean-washed and radiant. Frost settled keen and hard about the land, and all the white emptiness of snow grew full of sparkling life, as if some fairy had gone sowing diamonds broadcast.

At Will Underwood’s house, five miles away across the heath, the feckless men who had shirked the Rising, took heart again. The duck-shooting that Will had promised them had miscarried yesterday, because the snow declined to humour them; but there would be sport to-night. Civil war, arising suddenly, brings always strange medleys, and it seemed unbelievable that these gentry could be here, quietly discussing the prospects of their moonlight shooting, while the house that was nearest neighbour to Underwood was standing, unknown to them, a siege against long odds. For Windyhough lay isolated, high up the moors that were untravelled by chance wayfarers during this rough weather; it was circled by rolling hills that caught the crack of muskets, and played with the uproar, passing it on from spur to spur, until it reached the outer world as a dull, muffled sound that had no meaning to the sharpest ears.

Rupert did not ask aid, would have resented any. And, as the day wore on to seven o’clock—ticked out solemnly by the great clock in the hall—he was fighting, with surprising gaiety and patience, the battle against silence and the foe without. His eyes were not misty now with sleep. His mind was clear, unhurried, fixed on a single purpose; and, when now and then he made his round of the house, his body seemed light and supple in the going, as if he trod on air. He was possessed, indeed, by that dangerous, keen strength known to runners and night-riders as second wind.

One of Goldstein’s sentries, patrolling the front of the house, chose this moment for a fool’s display of confidence. The house was so silent, the strain on the endurance of the garrison so heavy, that he thought them all asleep within doors, and came out into the open to reconnoitre.

Rupert saw him creep, a dark splash against the frosty snow, and levelled his musket sharply. In this mood of clear vision and clear purpose, he could not have missed his aim; and the sentry dropped, as a bullock does when the pole-axe strikes his forehead.

And then there was a sound of hurried feet across the yard, and another sentry came to see what was in the doing. And a second musket-shot ran out

“What is it, Rupert?” came a low, troubled voice from the doorway.

He turned and saw Nance standing there, roused by the shots, but still only half awake. Not again, perhaps, would he taste the exquisite, unheeding joy, the sense of self-command, that held him now.

“There are two less, my dear,” he said.

She had been dreaming of old days and new, during the vigil at the north window that had proved too long for her; and she spoke as a child does, half between sleep and waking.

“I thought you came to me, Rupert, and you held me close, because there was danger, and you told me you were proved at long last. I always trusted you to show them—how big a Stuart heart you had.”

The master glanced at her. She was good to see, with the brown, disordered hair that clouded a face soft with sleep and tenderness. And yet he was impatient, as he touched her hand, led her back to her seat under the north window, watched her yield again to the sleep that would not be denied. Then he went to his post; and all the new-found passion in him, all his zest in life, were centred on the strip of snowy courtyard that lay about the great main door. He was captain of this enterprise, and till the siege was raised he asked no easier road of blandishment.

For the next hour there was quiet, except that Martha, the dairymaid, came upstairs with heavy tread; and, when the master went out to learn what was in the doing, he found her setting down a steaming dish on Simon Foster’s knees.

“You were always one for your victuals,” she was saying tenderly.

“Aye,” assented Simon cheerily. “An empty sack never stands up, they say; and who am I to deny it? You’ve a knowledgable way of handling a man, Martha.”

“Well, you’re all I have, Simon.”

“And that willun’t be much to boast of, if this plaguy quiet goes on much longer. I’m fair moiled wi’ weariness, my lass.”

Rupert saw the man, who should have learned riper wisdom by this time, bring down Martha’s head to the level of his own; and he went back to his window, filled with a deep, friendly merriment. And still he trod on air, not knowing how near he lay to the sleep that would not be denied.

And by and by, as he looked out in constant hope that another figure would come stealing into the moonlit open, he heard his mother’s spaniel barking from the far side of the house. The dog had heard, though the master’s duller ears could not, the voices raised in sharp discussion in the stable-yard. News had been brought to Goldstein that the house was resolute and wide-awake, if two dead men from among his lessening band were proof enough; and the pain of his wound roughened his impatience; and he gave certain orders that were to the liking of his troopers, chilled by harsh weather and inaction.

A little later Rupert heard a woman’s step again along the corridor and the pampered crying of a dog. Lady Royd, all in her night gear, with a wrap thrown loosely over it, came into the moonlight of the room, carrying the spaniel underarm.

“Rupert, my little dog is restless.”

“Yes, mother? It’s an old habit with him. You feed him in season and out. No wonder he has nightmares.”

“You never liked him, I know,” she complained.

He was gentle with her petulance. Her face was stained with weariness and fear; she needed him. On all hands he was needed these last days; and the strength of him went out, buoyantly, to each new call made on him.

“I must like him for your sake, mother,” he answered lightly.

The spaniel slipped suddenly from Lady Royd’s grasp, ran barking to the window, and jumped on to the sill. All seemed quiet without, but the dog barked furiously, and would not be quieted.

Then from the courtyard a musket cracked. The bullet missed the spaniel, went droning through the room, and touched Lady Royd’s cheek in passing. She did not heed, but ran and clutched her dog.

“My little man!” she murmured, with tender foolery. “You’re not hurt? The wicked men, to shoot at a wee doggie——”

“He’s not hurt,” said Rupert sharply; “but you are, mother.”

She touched her cheek, looked at the crimson on her finger. And she was the great lady once again. “Rupert, a wasp has stung me,” she said, in her dainty, well-bred voice—“a rebel wasp. You will destroy the hive.”

And the master laughed, seeing she was little hurt. This mother of his was a Royd among them, after all. She had not thought of danger as she snatched her spaniel from the window, had not winced when the bullet seared her cheek. In the quiet, royal way, she gave her quarrel into his hands and trusted him to take it up.

“What’s agate, master?” asked Simon Foster, coming in to learn the meaning of the musket-shot.

“I can’t tell you, Simon. All was quiet outside——”

“Not if the dog heard something,” said the other shrewdly. “He’s sharper ears than you or me.”

He lifted his head cautiously above the sill and listened. There was silence absolute in the courtyard, and within doors only the tick-tack of the eight-day clock in the hall, the whimpering of the spaniel. Whatever Goldstein’s project had been, it was delayed by the dog’s unexpected challenge.

Simon scented danger on this side of the house, however, and would not get back to his post. And a half-hour later his patience was rewarded.

“I guess what they’re at,” he said, turning with a slow grin. “My lady—meaning no disrespect—you’d best keep your lile dog’s tongue still, or he’ll spoil our sport.”

Lady Royd was learning obedience these days. “Are they your orders, Rupert?” she said submissively.“Yes, mother, yes. Get back to your warm room. You’ll take a chill out here.”

She turned at the door, glanced at him with a whimsical, queer air of raillery. “You men are built after the one pattern. You need us women till there’s something worth while in the doing, and then—why, then, my dear, you send us straight to bed, like naughty children.”

“We keep you out of harm’s way, mother. Good-night,” said Rupert gravely. “What do you hear, Simon?” he asked the moment she was gone.

“Men creeping through the snow; I can hear their feet scrunching over the frozen crust; and they’re dragging branches after them. I was a fool not to listen to the women-folk when they asked me to get in yond cartload of fuel I left just outside the gate.”

The master understood at last. “They’ll be firing the main door?”

“Just that. And there’s straw in plenty, and the stack o’ bracken we got in last autumn, and a barrel of tar left over from the spring. They’ve got it all ready to their hands, master.”

“I’m glad of it,” said Rupert, with the keen, unerring foresight bred of the vigil he had kept.

“Oh? And for why, if a plain body might ask?”

“Because another night of this would find us fast asleep, Simon. I have had to wake you once or twice already, and I’ve not slept since Tuesday.”

“I can’t rightly follow you,” said Foster, whose wits jogged slowly.

“Let them fire the door. It’s our one chance. We can keep awake, say, for two hours longer, and the fight will help us.”

So then Simon, who thought himself old to warfare, yielded to a grudging admiration of this youngster who was fighting his first battle. “Who taught ye this?” he asked, with simple curiosity.“The years behind,” snapped Rupert.

They listened to the stealthy goings and comings out of doors. Between the house-wall and the line of fire from Rupert’s window there was a clear five yards of sanctuary; and along this track of safety they could hear Goldstein’s men scrunch to and fro, carrying fuel of all kinds to the sturdy main door that had barred their progress until now. And once they heard a gruff command from the sergeant who led this enterprise.

“Stir yourselves, fools!” The rough German tongue sounded muffled from below. “We’ll catch ’em asleep; and there’s thirty thousand pounds indoors, and wine, and comfort; stir yourselves, my lads!”

Rupert did not understand the language of these hired soldiers, but the rough edge of a man’s voice carries meaning, whatever tongue he speaks.

“There’s no time to waste, Simon. We must get all our muskets down into the hall.”

He crossed the landing, told Ben Shackleton what was in the doing, and the three of them made speed with carrying the muskets down. The two older men borrowed something of the master’s eagerness and fire, forgetting that they were half dead for lack of sleep—sleep, which is more vital to a man than food, or drink, or happiness.

“They’ll fire the door, and come through the gap,” said Rupert, as if he spoke of trifles. “I take this wall; you stand close against the other.”

“I catch your drift, master,” said Simon, with a slow grip of understanding. “We shall be i’ the dark, and they’ll be red-litten by a bonfire o’ their own making. And they’ll have one shot apiece to fire, but we’ll have six. You frame not so varry ill, seeing how young you are.”

The master, by the light of a solitary candle that stood in a sconce overhead, saw to the priming of his muskets, laid them in an orderly row along the floor, and watched his men while they did the like. And then he bent an ear toward the main door. Its thickness, and the settle up-ended against it, let no sound come through, save now and then a dulled oath or quick command. And again there was a waiting-time, one of many that had come to Windyhough.

Rupert, sure that he would not be needed for a while, ran up the stairs and found Nance still sleeping like a child at her post, and roused her gently.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, scarce awake from a dream of onset and of fury that had pictured Rupert in the forefront of the battle.

And then he told her—quickly, because this was time stolen from his work downstairs—that she must get Lady Royd into the kitchen, must wait there with the women-servants till they knew how the night’s battle went. If the house were taken, they were to escape by the kitchen door, find their way to the disused farmstead in the hollow, and hide there till Goldstein’s men had ridden off.

“But there are only three of you,” said Nance, alert once more. “You let me keep a window for you, Rupert—are you afraid I shall go to sleep again if I join your company downstairs?”

“I command here,” he said briefly, “and you obey.”

In the thickest tumult women have odd methods of their own. “Obey? I never liked the word. I come with you—where the gunshots are.”

“No,” said Rupert.

And, “Yes,” she said, an open quarrel in her glance.

So then the master, by sheer, blundering honesty, found the right way with her. “Nance, you’ll weaken me if you come down. Nothing that can happen to me—nothing—can hurt me as—as what would chance if Goldstein’s brutes got through us.”

In the hurry and suspense, Nance found leisure—long almost as eternity—to see Rupert as he was. This was his courage, this was his love for her—a love asking nothing, except to stand between herself and danger.“My dear,” she said, “I think I shall obey.”

And the master, greatly daring, lifted her hand, and touched it with his lips. “God bless you, Nance!” he said, as if he toasted royalty.

He went down the stair, took his place at the wall, and stood nursing a musket in his hands.

“They’re long in getting their durned fire alight,” said Ben Shackleton, with a nonchalance bred of great excitement.

Simon Foster’s unrest took another form of outlet. He crossed to the master’s side of the hall, reached up and blew the candle out. “Best take no risks,” he grumbled. “You were always a bit unpractical, master, though I say it to your face.”

Two hours or so before, Will Underwood had led his company of good livers and poor loyalists across the frozen snow to the roomy stretch of water that was known as Priest’s Tarn. It was a white and austere land they crossed—league after league of shrouded, rolling heath that stretched to the still, frozen skies. The moon, hard and clear-cut, seemed only to increase the savage desolation by interpreting its nakedness.

The company were not burdened by the awe and stillness of the night. They had dined well; there was prospect of good sport; the going underfoot was crisp and pleasant. It was only when they reached the Tarn, and Will Underwood looked down at the gables of Windyhough, snowy in the moonlight a quarter of a mile below, that some keenness of regret took hold of him. Nance was under the roof yonder; and he loved her with a passion that had been strengthened, cleansed of much dross, since she put shame on him; and yet he was forbidden to go down and ask how she was faring. Even his hardihood could not face a second time the contempt that had given him a kerchief, because he might need a flag of truce.

“Here’s Will all in a dream, with his eyes on Windyhough,” laughed the jolly, red-faced squire. “Well, well! We all know Nance Demaine is a bonnie lass.”

Underwood turned sharply, too sick at heart to care how openly he showed his feelings. “We’ll not discuss Miss Demaine, sir; our record is not clean enough.”

The squire was ruffled by the taunt, because he, too, was uneasy touching this stay-at-home policy that once had seemed so prudent. “The man’s in love,” he said, with boisterous raillery. “Here’s Lancashire packed thick with pretty women, and he thinks there’s only one swan in the county. Will, you must let me laugh. To be young—and sick with love—it’s a fine, silly business. And little Nance has frowned, has she, when we thought you the prime favourite?”

“If you want a duel,” said Underwood suddenly, “you can have it. The moon’s light is good enough.”

“We have no swords.”

“No, but we have our fowling-pieces—say, at twenty paces. The light is good enough, I tell you.”

There were seven in the party, and five of them at least were not disposed to miss their duck-shooting because two of their number chose to pick a quarrel. And, somehow, by ridicule, persuasion, threats of interference, they staved off the duel. And Will Underwood turned his back on Windyhough, regained a little of his old, easy self, and settled to the night’s business.

They put on the linen coats they had brought with them, each laughing as he watched his neighbour struggle with sleeves too narrow to go easily over their thick wearing-gear, and took their stations round the Tarn. They stood there silently, and waited; and they were white against white snow, so that even the keen-eyed duck could see nothing in this waste of silence except the glinting gun-barrels.

They waited for it might be half an hour, till the cold began to nip them. The black waters of the Tarn showed in eerie contrast to the never-ending white that hemmed its borders. And then the wild-duck began to come, some flying low, some swinging high against the moon and starry sky. And one and all of the seven ghostly sportsmen forgot they were due with Prince Charles Edward on the road of honour; for there is a wild, absorbing glee about this moortop sport that cancels men’s regrets and shame.

Will Underwood shot well to-night. He picked the highest birds, from sheer zest in his marksmanship; and he saw the feathers, time after time, fluff up against the moonlight, watched his bird come down with that quick, slanting drop which is the curve of beauty.

Then there was another waiting-time. It was easy to gather their birds, for they showed plain against the snow, and the green feathers of the drakes glanced in the moonlight with a strange, other-worldly sheen.

“A night worth living for, Will,” said the red-faced squire, as he went again to his station.

The duck were long in coming, and while they waited two musket-shots rang out from the dingle that sheltered Windyhough below. The uproar was so loud on the still air, so unexpected, that the men forgot the need of silence, and drew together, and asked each other sharply what it meant.

“Rupert the cavalier aiming at the moon,” snapped Underwood. “He always did. He will wake his lady mother’s spaniel.”

No other shot sounded from below, and they returned at last to their waiting for the duck to come over. But Will Underwood kept his eyes steadily on the house below, and wondered, with an unrest that gained strength every moment, if all were well with Nance. He was roused by a sharp call from the squire.

“Your bird, Will!”

Will glanced up by instinct, saw a drake winging big and high overhead, and brought him down. Then he looked across at Windyhough again, and saw a flicker of crimson shoot up against the leafless tree that guarded it. The flicker grew to a ruddy, pulsing shaft of flame till the roof-snow took on a rose-colour.

Underwood, ruffler, stay-at-home, and man of prudence, felt thanksgiving stir about his heart. There was danger threatening Windyhough; and Nance was there, and his single thought was for her safety.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with a quiet gravity, “the duck must wait. We’re needed there at Windyhough.”