"The young fellow is right," said the stranger, slowly. "I will answer all he may demand."
"Forgive me," said Ebbo, abashed, "forgive me;" and, as his mother broke from him, he fell upon his knee; but he only heard his father's cry, "Ah! Stine, Stine, thou alone art the same," and, looking up, saw her, with her face hidden in the white beard, quivering with a rapture such as he had never seen in her before. It seemed long to him ere she looked up again in her husband's face to sob on: "My son! Oh! my beautiful twins! Our son! Oh, see him, dear lord!" And the pilgrim turned to hear Ebbo's "Pardon, honoured father, and your blessing."
Almost bashfully the pilgrim laid his hand on the dark head, and murmured something; then said, "Up, then! The slayer of Schlangenwald kneeling! Ah! Stine, I knew thy little head was wondrous wise, but I little thought thou wouldst breed him up to avenge us on old Wolfgang! So slender a lad too! Ha! Schneiderlein, old rogue, I knew thee," holding out his hand. "So thou didst get home safe?"
"Ay, my lord; though, if I left you alive, never more will I call a man dead," said Heinz.
"Worse luck for me--till now," said Sir Eberhard, whose tones, rather than his looks, carried perfect conviction of his identity. It was the old homely accent, and gruff good-humoured voice, but with something subdued and broken in the tone. His features had grown like his father's, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife's tendance, she found that he had not merely the ordinary hurts of travelling, but that there were old festering scars on his ankles. "The gyves," he said, as she looked up at him, with startled, pitying eyes. "Little deemed I that they would ever come under thy tender hands." As he almost timidly smoothed the braid of dark hair on her brow--"So they never burnt thee for a witch after all, little one? I thought my mother would never keep her hands off thee, and used to fancy I heard the crackling of the flame."
"She spared me for my children's sake," said Christina; "and truly Heaven has been very good to us, but never so much as now. My dear lord, will it weary thee too much to come to the castle chapel and give thanks?" she said, timidly.
"With all my heart," he answered, earnestly. "I would go even on my knees. We were not without masses even in Tunis; but, when Italian and Spaniard would be ransomed, and there was no mind of the German, I little thought I should ever sing Brother Lambert's psalm about turning our captivity as rivers in the south."
Ebbo was hovering round, supplying all that was needed for his father's comfort; but his parents were so completely absorbed in one another that he was scarcely noticed, and, what perhaps pained him more, there was no word about Friedel. He felt this almost an injustice to the brother who had been foremost in embracing the idea of the unknown father, and scarcely understood how his parents shrank from any sorrowful thought that might break in on their new-found joy, nor that he himself was so strange and new a being in his father's eyes, that to imagine him doubled was hardly possible to the tardy, dulled capacity, which as yet seemed unable to feel anything but that here was home, and Christina.
When the chapel bell rang, and the pair rose to offer their thanksgiving, Ebbo dutifully offered his support, but was absolutely unseen, so fondly was Sir Eberhard leaning on his wife; and her bright exulting smile and shake of the head gave an absolute pang to the son who had hitherto been all in all to her.
He followed, and, as they passed Friedmund's coffin, he thought his mother pointed to it, but even of this he was uncertain. The pair knelt side by side with hands locked together, while notes of praise rose from all voices; and meantime Ebbo, close to that coffin, strove to share the joy, and to lift up a heart that WOULD sink in the midst of self-reproach for undutifulness, and would dislike the thought of the rude untaught man, holding aloof from him, likely to view him with distrust and jealousy, and to undo all he had achieved, and further absorbing the mother, the mother who was to him all the world, and for whose sake he had given his best years to the child- wife, as yet nothing to him.
It was reversing the natural order of things that, after reigning from infancy, he should have to give up at eighteen to one of the last generation; and some such thought rankled in his mind when the whole household trooped joyfully out of the chapel to prepare a banquet for their old new lord, and their young old lord was left alone.
Alone with the coffin where the armour lay upon the white cross, Ebbo threw himself on his knees, and laid his head upon it, murmuring, "Ah, Friedel! Friedel! Would that we had changed places! Thou wouldst brook it better. At least thou didst never know what it is to be lonely."
"Herr Baron!" said a little voice.
His first movement was impatient. Thekla was apt to pursue him wherever he did not want her; but here he had least expected her, for she had a great fear of that coffin, and could hardly be brought to the chapel at prayer times, when she generally occupied herself with fancies that the empty helmet glared at her. But now Ebbo saw her standing as near as she durst, with a sweet wistfulness in her eyes, such as he had never seen there before.
"What is it, Thekla?" he said. "Art sent to call me?"
"No; only I saw that you stayed here all alone," she said, clasping her hands.
"Must I not be alone, child?" he said, bitterly. "Here lies my brother. My mother has her husband again!"
"But you have me!" cried Thekla; and, as he looked up between amusement and melancholy, he met such a loving eager little face, that he could not help holding out his arms, and letting her cling to him. "Indeed," she said, "I'll never be afraid of the helmet again, if only you will not lay down your head there, and say you are alone."
"Never, Thekla! while you are my little wife," said he; and, child as she was, there was strange solace to his heart in the eyes that, once vacant and wondering, had now gained a look of love and intelligence.
"What are you going to do?" she said, shuddering a little, as he rose and laid his hand on Friedel's sword.
"To make thee gird on thine own knight's sword," said Ebbo, unbuckling that which he had so long worn. "Friedel," he added, "thou wouldst give me thine. Let me take up thy temper with it, thine open-hearted love and humility."
He guided Thekla's happy little fingers to the fastening of the belt, and then, laying his hand on hers, said gravely, "Thekla, never speak of what I said just now--not even to the mother. Remember, it is thy husband's first secret."
And feeling no longer solitary when his hand was in the clasp of hers, he returned to the hall, where his father was installed in the baronial chair, in which Ebbo had been at home from babyhood. His mother's exclamation showed that her son had been wanting to her; and she looked fuller than ever of bliss when Ebbo gravely stood before his father, and presented him with the good old sword that he had sent to his unborn son.
"You are like to use it more than I,--nay, you have used it to some purpose," said he. "Yet must I keep mine old comrade at least a little while. Wife, son, sword, should make one feel the same man again, but it is all too wonderful!"
All that evening, and long after, his hand from time to time sought the hilt of his sword, as if that touch above all proved to him that he was again a free noble in his own castle.
The story he told was thus. The swoon in which Heinz had left him had probably saved his life by checking the gush of blood, and he had known no more till he found himself in a rough cart among the corpses. At Schlangenwald's castle he had been found still breathing, and had been flung into a dungeon, where he lay unattended, for how long he never knew, since all the early part of the time was lost in the clouds of fever. On coarse fare and scanty drink, in that dark vault, he had struggled by sheer obstinacy of vitality into recovery. In the very height of midsummer alone did the sun peep through th
e grating of his cell, and he had newly hailed this cheerful visitor when he was roughly summoned, placed on horseback with eyes and hands bound, and only allowed sight again to find himself among a herd of his fellow Germans in the Turkish camp. They were the prisoners of the terrible Turkish raid of 1475, when Georg von Schenk and fourteen other noblemen of Austria and Styria were all taken in one unhappy fight, and dragged away into captivity, with hundreds of lower rank.
To Sir Eberhard the change had been greatly for the better. The Turk had treated him much better than the Christian; and walking in the open air, chained to a German comrade, was far pleasanter than pining in his lonely dungeon. At Adrianople, an offer had been made to each of the captives, if they would become Moslems, of entering the Ottoman service as Spahis; but with one voice they had refused, and had then been draughted into different divisions. The fifteen nobles, who had been offered for ransom, were taken to Constantinople, to await its arrival, and they had promised Sir Eberhard to publish his fate on their return to their homes; and, though he knew the family resources too well to have many hopes, he was rather hurt to find that their promise had been unfulfilled.
"Alas! they had no opportunity," said Ebbo. "Gulden were scarce, or were all in Kaisar Friedrich's great chest; the ransoms could not be raised, and all died in captivity. I heard about it when I was at Wurms last month."
"The boy at Wurms?" almost gasped Sir Eberhard in amaze.
"I had to be there about matters concerning the Wildschloss lands and the bridge," said Ebbo; "and both Dankwart von Schlangenwald and I made special inquiries about that company in case you should have shared their fate. I hoped to have set forth at that time, but the Kaisar said I was still too lame, and refused me license, or letters to the Sultan."
"You would not have found me," said his father, narrating how he with a large troop of captives had been driven down to the coast; where they were transferred to a Moorish slave-dealer, who shipped them off for Tunis. Here, after their first taste of the miseries of a sea life, the alternative of Islam or slavery was again put before them. "And, by the holy stone of Nicaea," said Sir Eberhard, "I thought by that time that the infidels had the advantage of us in good-will and friendliness; but, when they told me women had no souls at all, no more than a horse or dog, I knew it was but an empty dream of a religion; for did I not know that my little Ermentrude, and thou, Stine, had finer, clearer, wiser souls than ever a man I had known? 'Nay, nay,' quoth I, 'I'll cast in my lot where I may meet my wife hereafter, should I never see her here.'" He had then been allotted to a corsair, and had thenceforth been chained to the bench of rowers, between the two decks, where, in stifling heat and stench, in storm or calm, healthy or diseased, the wretched oarsmen were compelled to play the part of machinery in propelling the vessel, in order to capture Christian ships--making exertions to which only the perpetual lash of the galley-master could have urged their exhausted frames; often not desisting for twenty or thirty hours, and rowing still while sustenance was put into their mouths by their drivers. Many a man drew has last breath with his last stroke, and was at the first leisure moment hurled into the waves. It was the description that had so deeply moved Friedel long ago, and Christina wept over it, as she looked at the bowed form once so proud and free, and thought of the unhealed scars. But there, her husband added, he had been chained next to a holy friar of German blood, like himself a captive of the great Styrian raid; and, while some blasphemed in their misery, or wildly chid their patron saints, this good man strove to show that all was to work out good; he had a pious saying for all that befell, and adored the will of God in thus purifying him; "And, if it were thus with a saint like him, I thought, what must it be with a rough freebooting godless sinner such as I had been? See"--and he took out a rosary of strung bladders of seaweed; "that is what he left me when he died, and what I meant to have been telling for ever up in the hermitage."
"He died, then?"
"Ay--he died on the shore of Corsica, while most of the dogs were off harrying a village inland, and we had a sort of respite, or I trow he would have rowed till his last gasp. How he prayed for the poor wretches they were gone to attack!--ay, and for all of us--for me also--There's enough of it. Such talk skills not now."
It was plain that Sir Eberhard had learnt more Christianity in the hold of his Moorish pirate ship than ever in the Holy Roman Empire, and a weight was lifted off his son's mind by finding that he had vowed never to return to a life of violence, even though fancying a life of penance in a hermitage the only alternative.
Ebbo asked if the Genoese merchant, Ser Gian Battista dei Battiste, had indeed been one of his fellow-captives.
"Ha!--what?" and on the repetition, "Truly I knew him, Merchant Gian as we used to call him; but you twang off his name as they speak it in his own stately city."
Christina smiled. "Ebbo learnt the Italian tongue this winter from our chaplain, who had studied at Bologna. He was told it would aid in his quest of you."
"Tell me not!" said the traveller, holding up his hands in deprecation; "the Junker is worse than a priest! And yet he killed old Wolfgang! But what of Gian? Hold,--did not he, when I was with him at Genoa, tell me a story of being put into a dungeon in a mountain fortress in Germany, and released by a pair of young lads with eyes beaming in the sunrise, who vanished just as they brought him to a cloister? Nay, he deemed it a miracle of the saints, and hung up a votive picture thereof at the shrine of the holy Cosmo and Damian."
"He was not so far wrong in deeming ONE of the lads near of kin to the holy ones," said Christina, softly.
And Ebbo briefly narrated the adventure, when it evidently appeared that his having led at least one foray gave his father for the first time a fellow-feeling for him, and a sense that he was one of the true old stock; but, when he heard of the release, he growled, "So! How would a lad have fared who so acted in my time? My poor old mother! She must have been changed indeed not to have scourged him till he had no strength to cry out."
"He was my prisoner!" said Ebbo, in his old defiant tone; "I had the right."
"Ah, well! the Junker has always been master here, and I never!" said the elder knight, looking round rather piteously; and Ebbo, with a sudden movement, exclaimed, "Nay, sir, you are the only lord and master, and I stand ready to be the first to obey you."
"You! A fine young book-learned scholar, already knighted, and with all these Wildschloss lands too!" said Sir Eberhard, gazing with a strange puzzled look at the delicate but spirited features of this strange perplexing son. "Reach hither your hand, boy."
And as he compared the slender, shapely hand of such finely-textured skin with the breadth of his own horny giant's paw, he tossed it from him, shaking his head with a gesture as if he had no commands for such feminine-looking fingers to execute, and mortifying Ebbo not a little. "Ah!" said Christina, apologetically, "it always grieved your mother that the boys would resemble me and mine. But, when daylight comes, Ebbo will show you that he has not lost the old German strength."
"No doubt--no doubt," said Sir Eberhard, hastily, "since he has slain Schlangenwald; and, if the former state of things be at an end, the less he takes after the ancient stock the better. But I am an old man now, Stine, though thou look'st fair and fresh as ever, and I do not know what to make of these things. White napery on the table; glass drinking things;--nay, were it not for thee and the Schneiderlein, I should not know I was at home."
He was led back to his narration, and it appeared that, after some years spent at the oar, certain bleedings from the lungs, the remains of his wound, had become so much more severe as to render him useless for naval purposes; and, as he escaped actually dying during a voyage, he was allowed to lie by on coming into port till he had in some degree recovered, and then had been set to labour at the fortifications, chained to another prisoner, and toiling between the burning sand and burning sun, but treated with less horrible severity than the necessities of the sea had occasioned on board ship, and experiencing the benefit of in
tercourse with the better class of captives, whom their miserable fate had thrown into the hands of the Moors.
It was a favourite almsdeed among the Provencals, Spaniards, and Italians to send money for the redemption of prisoners to the Moors, and there was a regular agency for ransoms through the Jews; but German captives were such an exception that no one thought of them, and many a time had the summons come for such and such a slave by name, or for five poor Sicilians, twenty Genoese, a dozen Marseillais, or the like, but still no word for the Swabian; till he had made up his mind that he should either leave his bones in the hot mud of the harbour, or be only set free by some gallant descent either of the brave King of Portugal, or of the Knights of Rhodes, of whom the captives were ever dreaming and whispering.
At length his own slave name was shouted; he was called up by the captain of his gang, and, while expecting some fresh punishment, or, maybe, to find himself sold into some domestic form of slavery, he was set before a Jewish agent, who, after examining him on his name, country, and station, and comparing his answers with a paper of instructions, informed him that he was ransomed, caused his fetters to be struck off, and shipped him off at once for Genoa, with orders to the captain to consign him to the merchant Signor del Battiste. By him Sir Eberhard had been received with the warmest hospitality, and treated as befitted his original station, but Battista disclaimed the merit of having ransomed him. He had but acted, he said, as the agent of an Austrian gentleman, from whom he had received orders to inquire after the Swabian baron who had been his fellow-captive, and, if he were still living, to pay his ransom, and bring him home.
"The name--the name!" eagerly asked Ebbo and his mother at once.
"The name? Gian was wont to make bad work of our honest German names, but I tried to learn this--being so beholden to him. I even caused it to be spelt over to me, but my letters long ago went from me. It seems to me that the man is a knight-errant, like those of thy ballads, Stine--one Ritter Theur--Theur--"
The Dove in the Eagle's Nest Page 30