Joan of the Sword Hand
Page 43
CHAPTER XLII
THE WORDLESS MAN TAKES A PRISONER
It was the hour of the evening meal at Isle Rugen. The September daypiped on to its melancholy close, and the wild geese overhead calleddown unseen from the upper air a warning that the storm followed hardupon their backs. At the table-head sat Theresa von Lynar, her largelymoulded and beautiful face showing no sign of emotion. Only great quietdwelt upon it, with knowledge and the sympathy of the proven for theuntried. On either side of her were Joan and Prince Conrad--not sad,neither avoiding nor seeking the contingence of eye and eye, but yet, inspite of all, so strange a thing is love once declared, consciouslyhappy within their heart of hearts.
Then, after a space dutifully left unoccupied, came Captains Boris andJorian; while at the table-foot, opposite to their hostess, toweredWerner von Orseln, whose grey beard had wagged at the more riotous boardof Henry the Lion of Hohenstein.
Werner was telling an interminable story of the old wars, with many a"Thus said I" and "So did he," ending thus: "There lay I on my back,with thirty pagan Wends ready to slit my hals as soon as they could gettheir knives between my gorget and headpiece. Gott! but I said everyprayer that I knew--they were not many in those days--all in twominutes' space, as I lay looking at the sky through my visor bars andwaiting for the first prick of the Wendish knife-points.
"But even as I looked up, lo! some one bestrode me, and the voice Iloved best in all the world--no, not a woman's, God send him rest"("Amen!" interjected the Lady Joan)--"cried, 'To me, Hohenstein! To me,Kernsberg!' And though my head was ringing with the shock of falling,and my body weak from many wounds, I strove to answer that call, as Isaw my master's sword flicker this way and that over my head. I rosehalf from the ground, my hilt still in my hand--I had no more left afterthe fight I had fought. But Henry the Lion gave me a stamp down with hisfoot. 'Lie still, man,' he said; 'do not interfere in a little businessof this kind!' And with his one point he kept a score at bay, crying allthe time, 'To me, Hohenstein! To me, Kernsbergers all!'
"And when the enemy fled, did he wait till the bearers came? Well I wot,hardly! Instead, he caught me over his shoulder like an empty sack whenone goes a-foraging--me, Werner von Orseln, that am built like a donjontower. And with his sword still red in his right hand he bore me in,only turning aside a little to threaten a Wendish archer who would havesent an arrow through me on the way. By the knights who sit round Karl'stable, he was a man!"
And then to their feet sprang Boris and Jorian, who were judges of men.
"To Prince Henry the Lion--_hoch!_" they cried. "Drink it deep to hismemory!"
And with tankard and wreathed wine-cup they quaffed to the great dead.Standing up, they drank--his daughter also--all save Theresa von Lynar.She sat unmoved, as if the toast had been her own and in a moment moreshe must rise to give them thanks. For the look on her face said, "Afterall, what is there so strange in that? Was he not Henry the Lion--andmine?"
For there is no joy like that which you may see on a woman's face when agreat deed is told of the man she loves.
The Kernsberg soldiers who had been trained to serve at table, hadstopped and stood fixed, their duties in complete oblivion during thetale, but now they resumed them and the simple feast continued.Meanwhile it had been growing wilder and wilder without, and the shrilllament of the wind was distinctly heard in the wide chimney-top. Now andthen in a lull, broad splashes of rain fell solidly into the red emberswith a sound like musket balls "spatting" on a wall.
Then Theresa von Lynar looked up.
"Where is Max Ulrich?" she said; "why does he delay?"
"My lady," one of the men of Kernsberg answered, saluting; "he is goneacross the Haff in the boat, and has not yet returned."
"I will go and look for him--nay, do not rise, my lord. I would go forthalone!"
So, snatching a cloak from the prong of an antler in the hall, Theresawent out into the irregular hooting of the storm. It was not yet thedeepest gloaming, but dull grey clouds like hunted cattle scoured acrossthe sky, and the rising thunder of the waves on the shingle prophesied anight of storm. Theresa stood a long time bare-headed, enjoying thethresh of the broad drops as they struck against her face and cooled herthrobbing eyes. Then she pulled the hood of the cloak over her head.
The dead was conquering the quick within her.
"I have known a _man_!" she said; "what need I more with life now? Theman I loved is dead. I thank God that I served him--aye, as his dogserved him. And shall I grow disobedient now? No, not that my son mightsit on the throne of the Kaiser!"
Theresa stood upon the inner curve of the Haff at the place where MaxUlrich was wont to pull his boat ashore. The wind was behind her, andthough the waves increased as the distance widened from the pebbly bankon which she stood, the water at her feet was only ruffled and pittedwith little dimples under the shocks of the wind. Theresa looked longsouthward under her hand, but for the moment could see nothing.
Then she settled herself to keep watch, with the storm riding slack-reinoverhead. Towards the mainland the whoop and roar with which itassaulted the pine forests deafened her ears. But her face was youngerthan we have ever seen it, for Werner's story had moved her strongly.Once more she was by a great man's side. She moved her hand swiftly,first out of the shelter of the cloak as if seeking furtively to nestleit in another's, and then, as the raindrops plashed cold upon it, shedrew it slowly back to her again.
And though Theresa von Lynar was yet in the prime of her gloriousbeauty, one could see what she must have been in the days of hergirlhood. And as memory caused her eyes to grow misty, and the smile oflove and trust eternal came upon her lips, twenty years were shorn away;and the woman's face which had looked anxiously across the darkeningHaff changed to that of the girl who from the gate of Castle Lynar hadwatched for the coming of Duke Henry.
She was gazing steadfastly southward, but it was not for Max theWordless that she waited. Towards Kernsberg, where he whose sleep shehad so often watched, rested all alone, she looked and kissed a hand.
"Dear," she murmured, "you have not forgotten Theresa! You know shekeeps troth! Aye, and will keep it till God grows kind, and your truewife can follow--to tell you how well she hath kept her charge!"
Awhile she was silent, and then she went on in the low even voice ofself-communing.
"What to me is it to become a princess? Did not he, for whose wordsalone I cared, call me his queen? And I was his queen. In the blackblank day of my uttermost need he made me his wife. And I am his wife.What want I more with dignities?"
Theresa von Lynar was silent awhile and then she added--
"Yet the young Duchess, his daughter, means well. She has her father'sspirit. And my son--why should my vow bind him? Let him be Duke, if sothe Fates direct and Providence allow. But for me, I will not stirfinger or utter word to help him. There shall be neither anger norsadness in my husband's eyes when I tell him how I have observed thebond!"
Again she kissed a hand towards the dead man who lay so deep under theponderous marble at Kernsberg. Then with a gracious gesture, lingeringlyand with the misty eyes of loving womanhood, she said her lonelyfarewells.
"To you, beloved," she murmured, and her voice was low and very rich,"to you, beloved, where far off you lie! Sleep sound, nor think the timelong till Theresa comes to you!"
She turned and walked back facing the storm. Her hood had long ago beenblown from her head by the furious gusts of wind. But she heeded not.She had forgotten poor Max Ulrich and Joan, and even herself. She hadforgotten her son. Her hand was out in the storm now. She did not drawit back, though the water ran from her fingertips. For it was clasped inan unseen grasp and in an ear that surely heard she was whispering herheart's troth. "God give it to me to do one deed--one only before Idie--that, worthy and unashamed, I may meet my King."
When Theresa re-entered the hall of the grange the company still sat asshe had left them. Only at the lower end of the board the three captainsconferred together in low voices, while
at the upper Joan and PrinceConrad sat gazing full at each other as if souls could be drunk inthrough the eyes.
With a certain reluctance which yet had no shame in it, they pluckedglance from glance as she entered, as it were with difficulty detachingspirits which had been joined. At which Theresa, recalled to herself,smiled.
"In all that touches not my vow I will help you two!" she thought, asshe looked at them. For true love came closer to her than anything elsein the world.
"There is no sign of Max," she said aloud, to break the first silence ofconstraint; "perhaps he has waited at the landing-place on the mainlandtill the storm should abate--though that were scarce like him, either."
She sat down, with one large movement of her arm casting her wet cloakover the back of a wooden settle, which fronted a fireplace where greenpine knots crackled and explosive jets of steam rushed spitefullyoutwards into the hall with a hissing sound.
"You have been down at the landing-place--on such a night?" said Joan,with some remains of that curious awkwardness which marks theinterruption of a more interesting conversation.
"Yes," said Theresa, smiling indulgently (for she had been in likecase--such a great while ago, when her brothers used to intrude). "Yes,I have been at the landing-place. But as yet the storm is nothing,though the waves will be fierce enough if Max Ulrich is coming home witha laden boat to pull in the wind's eye."
It mattered little what she said. She had helped them to pass the bar,and the conversation could now proceed over smooth waters.
Yet there is no need to report it. Joan and Conrad remained and spokethey scarce knew what, all for the pleasure of eye answering eye, andthe subtle flattery of voices that altered by the millionth of a toneeach time they answered each other. Theresa spoke vaguely butsufficiently, and allowed herself to dream, till to her yearning gazehonest, sturdy Werner grew misty and his bluff figure resolved itselfinto that one nobler and more kingly which for years had fronted her atthe table's end where now the chief captain sat.
Meanwhile Jorian and Boris exchanged meaning and covert glances, askingeach other when this dull dinner parade would be over, so that theymight loosen leathern points, undo buttons, and stretch legs on bencheswith a tankard of ale at each right elbow, according to the wont ofstout war-captains not quite so young as they once were.
Thus they were sitting when there came a clamour at the outer door, thenoise of voices, then a soldier's challenge, and, on the back of that,Max Ulrich's weird answer--a sound almost like the howl of a wolf cutoff short in his throat by the hand that strangles him.
"There he is at last!" cried all in the dining-hall of the grange.
"Thank God!" murmured Theresa. For the man wanting words had known Henrythe Lion.
They waited a long moment of suspense till the door behind Werner wasthrust open and the dumb man came in, drenched and dripping. He washolding one by the arm, a man as tall as himself, grey and gaunt, whofronted the company with eyes bandaged and hands tied behind his back.Max Ulrich had a sharp knife in his hand with a thin and slightly curvedblade, and as he thrust the pinioned man before him into the full lightof the candles, he made signs that, if his lady wished it, he wasprepared to despatch his prisoner on the spot. His lips moved rapidlyand he seemed to be forming words and sentences. His mistress followedthese movements with the closest attention.
"He says," she began to translate, "that he met this man on the furtherside. He said that he had a message for Isle Rugen, and refused to turnback on any condition. So Max blindfolded, bound, and gagged him, hebeing willing to be bound. And now he waits our pleasure."
"Let him be unloosed," said Joan, gazing eagerly at the prisoner, andTheresa made the sign.
Stolidly Ulrich unbound the broad bandage from the man's eyes, and agrey badger's brush of upright stubble rose slowly erect above a highnarrow brow, like laid corn that dries in the sun.
"Alt Pikker!" said Joan of the Sword Hand, starting to her feet.
"Alt Pikker!" cried in varied tones of wonderment Werner von Orseln andthe two captains of Plassenburg, Jorian and Boris.
And Alt Pikker it surely was.