The count looked at the superb figure which advanced toward him, and for an instant he stood struck dumb with astonishment.

"G.o.d's blood!" he cried out so loudly that Albrecht heard him half-way across the wide hall. "That is not a man; it is a G.o.d!"

"It is the lord of our poor castle!" returned Lady Adelaide, sweeping him a sarcastic courtesy. "Accept our thanks that thou hast promised to defend it and him from the Huns when they come."

XVI

HOW THE COUNT TALKED AND SANG.

The uncanny wood-folk who hovered about Rittenberg in these days might well have had their fill of minstrelsy and mirth. If life had been jocund before the return of Count Stephen, it may well be understood that it was gayer yet now that he had come. Von Rittenberg had vowed his life to pleasure; and life to him was much what it was to the soulless creatures of the forest, in that it meant to him nothing higher than the delights of the senses. He prolonged his stay at the castle upon the slightest urging, suggesting one amus.e.m.e.nt after another, and joining with hearty zest in whatever sports were forward.

"It is well that my steed brought me hither," the count said to his cousin one day. "Indeed the beast was wiser than I, for I was minded not to come this way at all, so little did I dream that thou wouldst have been so changed."

"And is it only thy steed, then, that we have to thank for thy visit?"

she asked with a smile.

"Only the steed," he returned; "for when I was come to the place where the ways part, I was minded to turn southward, and to ride on homeward without let or stay; and then it was that my horse would not, and resolutely set his head toward your castle. My squire will have it that an old man with a white beard and eyes like fire did catch at the bridle-rein, but I saw naught, and do not regard his foolish fancy."

Erna laughed and made some jest at the knight's unwillingness to come to Rittenberg; but Albrecht, who had been by, turned pale, and when he was next alone with the priest, he said to him:

"Dost thou think, Father, that the folk of the forest can work harm to one who has won an immortal soul?"

"That thou shouldst know better than I, having lived among them," the other answered; "only of this be sure: however much they might harm the body, it is not given them to reach the immortal part. What dost thou fear?"

"I fear naught," Albrecht answered; "but he who is ruler of the kobolds in the forest round about Rittenberg, as was my father in the Neiderwa.s.ser valley, is sore incensed by my marriage. He hath had certain speech with Herr Frederich concerning it, and it is he who turned the Count von Rittenberg in this direction when he was minded to ride past. I like it not."

Neither did it make the priest more easy in his mind to learn that the king of the kobolds was become concerned in the affairs of his mistress; but there seemed naught that he might do concerning the matter save to watch for what should come and to pray fervently to the saints for their gracious protection. He could not divine what it could boot to the kobold that Count Stephen should come again to Rittenberg, but none the less he wished the guest gone.

There was little token, however, that the guest was minded to take his departure. He lingered from day to day, and always he became more and more the leader in the life of the castle and in all its gayety. It was a constant source of amazement to Count Stephen that Erna should have so changed, or, as he phrased it to himself, should so have improved during his absence. She was no longer a cold pa.s.sionless maiden, moving in a world of ideals and pious dreams remote from his ken; she was a beautiful, pa.s.sionate woman, who stirred his pulses, and who responded with eager readiness to any suggestion of pleasure or sport which he made. He began to feel that he had made a grievous error in refusing the alliance which had been tacitly offered him, and to nourish a sense of injustice toward the man who had robbed him of the possession of this beautiful woman whom now he found so suited to his taste. He did not reason that to Albrecht must be due in no small measure this transformation, and if such a thought had crossed his mind he would not have doubted his own ability to produce the same result had Erna been his wife instead of the baron's.

It was hardly a proof of the vanity of the count that he believed that his cousin, as he continually called her, making of the relationship a pretext for many little familiarities which, albeit they were harmless enough, caused the eyes of Albrecht to glow with jealous rage, felt the attraction which their natures had for each other. She showed her liking by tokens which though they were slight were unmistakable; and Count Stephen, who had had not a little experience in love affairs, smiled to himself as he reflected upon the faint pressure of the hand, the half averted-glance, the almost unheard sigh which he had from time to time won from Erna.

It was quite in keeping with the count's cleverness that he had not failed to perceive that the sympathy between Erna and her husband was becoming fainter. It was evident that every day they found themselves less wholly one. More and more did the baron give himself up to pious studies, while Erna was thus more and more thrown into the company of Von Rittenberg. Count Stephen had secretly a profound contempt for his host, the idea of piety and that of study being alike ridiculous in his mind. He admired Albrecht's skill in hunting, his strength, and his superb figure, but he was never able to look upon the studies which had become the chief interest of Albrecht's daily life as other than a subject for jest and ridicule. It is true that he had learned that Erna resented his jests upon this theme, but he was acute enough to observe that her anger was turned quite as much toward her husband for giving occasion for them as at her guest for daring to make them. He found in the Lady Adelaide an ally, since that worldly old dame liked the ways of Albrecht no more than did Erna; and the fact that the great-aunt was really very fond of Albrecht only made her the more irritated at his course. She joined with Count Stephen, and often the quip which he left half spoken was taken up and put into words by Lady Adelaide, while Erna frowned and bit her lips with vexation.

"Good sooth," he said one morning, as he sat with Erna, who was working a tapestry in which with cunning skill she was depicting those wars of Charlemagne in which her father had led the Swabian guard of which the emperor had been so proud, "thy husband should to court. The king is marvellously well disposed toward learning. Thou knowest he hath forgiven the offence of Eginhard, the clerk, and wed him to the fair Emma, his own daughter."

"And what," asked Lady Adelaide, whose bright old eyes were also watching her needle over the tapestry, "was the offence of Eginhard?"

"It is a fair tale," responded he, laughing. "It made much scandal. This Eginhard is a man that hath hot blood though he be clerkly, and too hath he good trim limbs and a winning eye. That he should dare to raise his glance so high as the daughter of the king might move one to wonder, but it was not so strange that she should smile upon him when he had done so, for he might well stir a maiden's fancy. They were secret in their loves, but not for the fear of the displeasure of even the king, her father, could they restrain the fury of their pa.s.sion, and one night did Eginhard steal to the chamber of the princess, there to enjoy the fruits of his wooing without more delay, or the form of a priest's blessing."

"Body of Saint Fridolin!" exclaimed Lady Adelaide; "and she a king's daughter!"

"The night wasted," continued the count, "without that they found it over-long, I trow; and before they were aware, the dawn began to appear.

Then Eginhard would fain have gone the way he came, across the court, but the heavens had betrayed them. The snow had fallen and covered the ground so that he could not step without leaving the trace."

"Body of Saint Fridolin!" cried Lady Adelaide, again; "that was the judgment of Heaven upon her for betraying the honor of the king."

"Even if it were," Count Stephen rejoined, "the Princess Emma is not one to be lightly daunted, even by the judgments of Heaven. She was well aware what would befall her lover if the track of his footsteps were found leading from her window, but she trusted that her royal father, who has not been able to rein in his own blood over well, might be moved to forgive her, if it appeared that the transgression had been hers, and that she had sought her lover's chamber."

"It is ever the woman who sacrifices herself to the man," muttered Lady Adelaide. Erna still listened to the tale in silence, while her cousin watched her with penetrating gaze.

"So the princess took the scribe on her shoulders," the knight went on, making no reply to the dame's interjection, "and carried him across the court to his own window, so that only her tracks would appear in the snow."

"Body of Saint Fridolin!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Lady Adelaide, for the third time.

"Is it thus that they do at court? And what said her father when he was told that she had been with the scribe Eginhard?"

"As fate would have it," the count answered, pulling at the long silky ears of the hound which lay at his side, "the king himself had been that morn troubled in his sleep, and had risen to stand by the window looking out at the newly fallen snow before that the court was astir to besmirch it with their footsteps; and with his own eyes he saw his daughter carry her lover across the place."

"What did he?" asked Erna, raising her eyes from her embroidery for the first time since the tale began.

"Oh, he doubtless cursed for a little, and then he remembered himself, like the wise man that he is, that it were well not to make a bad matter worse, and that love is free and not to be constrained even by the bidding of a king."

He looked into her eyes as he answered thus, and so significant a glance accompanied his last words that hers fell before it. She flushed and once more fixed her attention upon her embroidery, while Count Stephen went on to relate how Charlemagne had told the tale before the whole court to the shaming of the offenders, and had then forgiven them and had them married out of hand.

Then, when he had replied to the questions of Lady Adelaide, who found this gossip a most savory morsel under her tongue, he suddenly caught up a lute that lay near him upon the cushioned window-ledge, and running his fingers across the strings with a swift rattling of tinkling notes, sang not unmusically this song:

"The bird flies jocund through the sky, And sports in upper air, Only too soon fluttering to lie, Caught in the fowler's snare, The wind constrains the forest tall, The tempest rules the sea; The mighty hold the weak in thrall; And only love is free.

"Nor bonds, nor bars, nor word of hate, Can love's sweet will control; Or quench the flame resistless fate Hath kindled in the soul.

The mind may bow to slavish law, As kings in chains may be; Reason to wisdom bend in awe; Yet still will love be free.

"What's plighted troth or formal vow, When hearts are turned to fire?

As chaff on tempests blown, I trow, Such bonds before desire!

Let whosoever come between, To part my dear and me, I'd beat down all to reach my queen, And make our loving free!"

His voice rang out with a strain of pa.s.sion as he sang these last words.

His eyes shone, and he bent forward toward Erna as if he would constrain her to understand the message of his song. And when Erna, rising hastily, dropped her embroidery and hastened out of the hall, there came into his face a look of triumph which it was ill to see. He bent over the hound at his feet to conceal it from Lady Adelaide, who looked after her niece with astonishment.

"Body of Saint Fridolin," quoth the old dame for the hundredth time that morning, "but she is becoming flighty instead of settling down, now that she is married."

Meantime Albrecht sat in the chamber of the priest, learning the wonders of that soul which had been so lately bestowed upon him by Heaven.

XVII

HOW THEY HUNTED THE STAG.

It was on a glorious autumn afternoon, when all the air was fragrant with the odor of pine trees steeping in the warm sunlight, and dim with the hazes which were smoke-like without being smoke, that the folk of Castle Rittenberg set forth to hunt the stag.

While the hounds were baying in the courtyard eager to be off, and the sound of trampling horse's hoof and jingling bridle-rein, with cry of groom and laugh of page, came through the open window, Erna and Count Stephen stood in the hall waiting for Albrecht. At a little distance stood Fastrade and Elsa, both of whom were to ride with Erna to follow the hunt; and Elsa said to her companion, pointing to the boar-spear which still stuck in the head of the deer that hung above the chimney-place:

"If the baron can but make such another shot as that he made when he thrust that spear into the bone from the other end of the hall, may I be there to see!"