Again she interrupted me.

"See," she said, speaking quickly and eagerly, "they tell me this your Helene is an angel of mercy to the sick. If she is spared she will be content to give her life to works of good intent among the poor. This cannot be life and death to her as it is to me. Her love is not as the love of a woman like Ysolinde. It is not for any one man to possess in monopoly. Though you may deceive yourself and think that it will be fixed and centred on you. But she will never love you as I love you. See, I would knee to you, pray to you on my knees, make myself a suppliant--I, Ysolinde that am a princess! With you, Hugo, I have no pride, no shame. I would take your love by violence, as a strong man surpriseth and taketh the heart of a maid."

She was now all trembling and distract, her lips red, her eyes bright, her hands clasped and trembling as they were strained palm to palm.

"Lady Ysolinde, I would that this were not so," I began.

A new quick spasm pa.s.sed over her face. I think it came across her that my heart was wavering. "G.o.d knows that I, Hugo Gottfried, am not worth all this!"

"Nay," she said, with a kind of joy in her voice and in her eyes, "that matters not. Ysolinde of Pla.s.senburg is as a child that must have its toy or die. Worthiness has no more to do with love than creeds and dogmas.

Love me--Hugo--love me even a little. Put me not away. I will be so true, so willing. I will run your errands, wait on you, stand behind you in battle, in council lead you to fame and great glory. For you, Hugo, I will watch the faces of others, detect your enemies, unite your well-wishers, mark the failing favor of your friends. What heart so strong, what eye so keen as mine--for the greater the love the sharper the eye to mark, prevent, countermine. And this maid, so cold and icy, so full of good works and the abounding fame of saintliness, let her live for the healing of the people, for the love of G.o.d and man both, and it liketh her. She shall be abbess of our greatest convent. She shall indeed be the Saint Helena of the North. Even now I will save her from death and give her refuge. I promise it. I have the power in my hands. Only do you, Hugo Gottfried, give me your love, your life, yourself!"

She was standing before me now, and had her arms about my neck. I felt them quiver upon my shoulders. Her eyes looked directly up into mine, and whether they were the eyes of an angel or of a tempting fiend I could not tell. Very lovely, at any rate, they were, and might have tempted even Saint Anthony to sin.

"Ysolinde," I said, at last, "it is small wonder that I am strongly moved; you have offered me great things to-night. I feel my heart very humble and unworthy. I deserve not your love. I am but a man, a soldier, dull and slow. Were it not for one man and one woman it should be as you say. But Karl of Pla.s.senburg is my good master, my loyal friend. Helene is my true love. I beseech you put this thought from you, dear lady, and be once more my true Princess, I your liege subject--faithful, full of reverence and devotion till life shall end!"

As I spoke she drew herself away from me. My hand had unconsciously rested on her hair, for at first she had leaned her head towards me. When I had finished she took my hand by the wrist and gripped it as if she would choke a snake ere she dropped it at arm's-length. I knew that our interview was at an end.

"Go!" she commanded, pointing to the door. "One day you shall know how precious is the love you have so lightly cast aside. In a dark, dread hour, you, Hugo Gottfried, shall sue as a suppliant. And I shall deny you. There shall come a day when you shall abase yourself--even as you have seen Ysolinde the Princess abase herself to Hugo, the son of the Red Axe of the Wolf mark. Go, I tell you! Go--ere I slay you with my knife!"

And she flashed a keen double-edged blade from some recess of her silken serpentine dress.

"My lady, hear me," I pleaded. "Out of the depths of my heart I protest to you--"

"Bah!" she cried, with a sudden uprising of tigerish fierceness in her eyes, quick and chill as the glitter of her steel. "Go, I tell you, ere I be tempted to strike! _Your heart!_ Why, man, there is nothing in your heart but empty words out of monks' copy-books and proverbs dry and rotten as last year's leaves. Ye have seen me abased. By the lords of h.e.l.l, I will abase you, Executioner's son! Aye, and you yourself, Hugo Gottfried, shall work out in flowing blood and bitter tears the doom of the pale trembling girl for whom you have rejected and despised Ysolinde, Princess of Pla.s.senburg!"

CHAPTER XLVII

THE RED AXE DIES STANDING UP

How I stumbled down the stairs and found myself outside the house in the Weiss Thor I do not know. Whether the servitor, Sir Respectable, showed me out or not has quite pa.s.sed from me. I only remember that I came upon myself waiting outside the gate of Bishop Peter's palace ringing at a bell which sounded ghostly enough, tinkling like a cracked kettle behind the door.

The lattice clicked and a face peeped out.

"Get hence, night-raker!" cried a voice. "Wherefore do you come here so untimeously, profaning the holy quiet of our minster-close?"

"There was no very holy calm in the kitchen t'other night, Peter Swinehead!" said I, my wits coming mechanically back to me at the familiar sound.

"Ha, Sir Blackamoor, 'tis you; surely your chafts have grown strangely white, or else are my eyes serving me foully in the torchlight."

Instinctively I covered as much of my face as I could with my cloak's cape, for indeed I had washed it ere I went forth to see the Lady Ysolinde.

"'Tis that you have slipped too much of the Rhenish down thy gullet, old comrade," said I, slapping Peter on the back and getting before him so that he might remark nothing more.

At that, being well pleased with my calling him comrade, he lighted me cordially to my chamber, and there left me to the sleepless meditation of the night.

The next day was one of great quietness in the city of Thorn. An uneasy, sultry pause of silence brooded over the lower town. Men's heads showed a moment at door and window, looked furtively up and down the street, and then vanished again within. Plots were being hatched and plans laid in Thorn; yet, while there was the lowering silence in the city, up aloft the Wolfsberg hummed gayly like a hive. Once I went up that way to see if I could win any news of my father. But this day the door into the Red Tower stood closed, nor would any within open for all my knocking. So perforce I had to return unsatisfied. Several times I went to the Weiss Thor to spy the horizon round for the troops of Pla.s.senburg. But only the gray plain of the Mark stretched itself out so far as the eye could penetrate--hardly a reeking chimney to be seen, or any token of the pleasant rustic life of man, such as in my youth I remembered to have looked down upon from the Red Tower. Beneath me the city of Thorn lay grimly quiescent, like a beast of prey which has eaten all its neighbors, and must now die of starvation because there are no more to devour.

The day pa.s.sed on feet that crept like those of a tortoise, as the sullen minutes dragged by, leaden-clogged and tardy. But the evening came at last. And with it, knocking at the door of the Bishop's quadrangle and interrupting my long talk with Dessauer, lo! a messenger, hot-foot from the castle.

"To the learned Doctor and his servant, Gottfried Gottfried, being in death's utmost extremities, sends greeting, and desires greatly to have speech with them."

Thus ran my father's message in that testing hour where he had seen so many! Yet I was but little surprised. There was no wonder in the fact save the wonder that it should all seem so natural. Dessauer rose quickly.

"I will go with you," he said; "it will be safer. For at least I can keep the door while you speak with your father."

So, without further word, we followed the messenger up the long, narrow, wooden-gabled street, and heard the folk muttering gloomily in the darkness within, or talking softly in the dull russet glow of their hearth-fires. For there were but few lighted candles in Thorn that night. And I wondered how near or how far from us tho men of Pla.s.senburg might be encamping, and thrilled to think that at any moment a spy might ride in to warn Duke Otho of the spy within his city, or the near approach of his foe.

But so far all was quiet at the Red Tower. The wicket-gate in the angle of the wall was open, and we pa.s.sed in without difficulty. As I mounted the stairs I heard the key turn behind us. Obviously, therefore, we were expected. The gate of the Red Tower had been left open for our entrance; and so soon as the birds were in the snare, it was shut, and the silly goslings trapped.

Nevertheless we climbed up and up the dark stairs till we came to the door of my father's garret. I pushed it open without knocking, and entered.

"The most learned the Doctor Schmidt," I announced, lest there should be some stranger in the room. And indeed my precaution was necessary enough.

For, from my father's bed-head, disengaging himself reluctantly, like a disturbed vulture napping up from the side of a dying steer, Friar Laurence rose out of the darkness, and, folding his robe about him, stalked to the door without a word or nod to either of us. I stood holding the edge of it till I had watched him well down the stairs. Then Dessauer relieved me at the stair-head as I went to approach my father.

I saw a change in him, very startling, indeed, to see. "In the uttermost extremity" he was, indeed, as he had written. A ghastly pallor overspread his face; his eyes were wild, his breathing came both quick and hard.

The fire cast nickering lights over his face and on the outlines of his lank figure under the scarlet mantle which had been cast over him. One corner of it was cast aside, as if for air or coolness, and I could see a thing which gave me a cold chill in the marrow of my spine.

My father still wore the dress which he only donned when some poor soul was about to die and pay the forfeit.

At first Gottfried took no notice of me whatever, but lay looking at the ceiling, his lips muttering something steadily, though what the words were I could not hear.

"Father," I said at last, bending over him gently, "I have come to see you."

He turned to me, as if suddenly and regretfully summoned back from very far away. It was a movement I had seen in many dying men. He looked at me, a strange, luminous comprehension growing up gradually in his eyes.

"Hugo," he said, "you have come home at last! The Little Playmate has come home, too. We three will make a merry party in the old Red Tower. We have not been all together for so long. Lord Christ, but I have been a man much alone! Hugo, why did you leave me so long? Ah, well, I do not blame you, my son. You have been pushing your fortunes, doubtless, and you have--so they tell me--become a great man in Pla.s.senburg. And the little maid is a lady of honor, and very fair to see. But now you two have come to the old garret, like birds homing to the nest."

"Yes, father," I said to him, "we have both come home to you, the Little Playmate and I. And now you will give us your blessing!"

"The Little Playmate--say rather the Little Princess," he cried, cheerfully, as, with the air of one who brings good tidings, he sat up in bed. Then he pointed to a chair on which a pillow had carelessly been flung. "Little Maid," he said, looking at the cushion as if it had been Helene, "I am glad you have come back to be wedded to my boy. That was like you. I ever wished it, indeed. But I never expected to see my children thus happy. Yet I always knew you and Hugo were made for each other. You are at your sewing, little maid. Well, 'tis natural. I mind me when my own love sat making dainties of just such delicate and wreathed whiteness."

He paused, and then, his countenance suddenly changing, he looked fearfully and fixedly at the chair.

"But, little maid, my own Helene," he cried, in a loud, gasping, alarmed tone, "what is this, best beloved? Why, you are sewing at a shroud?

Surely such funeral-trappings become not bridals. A shroud--and there is blood upon it! Put it down--_put it down,_ I pray you!"

The red flames on the fire crackled suddenly up about the back log and cast dancing shadows on his face.

"Lie down and rest, dear father," I said softly to him, "the Little Playmate is not here--I, Hugo, your son, am alone beside you."

"Hugo," he said, instantly appeased, and pa.s.sing a lean arm about me, "my good son, my brave boy! You will be kind to the little Princess. She loves you. There is no man so beloved as you in all the city of Thorn.

Many would have loved her besides Otho. Ah, but I threw him out of the window there. I threw a Grand Duke out of a window! Ha! ha! it was the bravest jest!"