The Red Axe Part 8

"You are indeed no longer a child, but the fairest of sweet maids," I made answer. "I will do nothing you do not wish me to do. For, hearken to me, Helene, my heart is bound up in you, as indeed you know. But as to the second word of accusation--that I do not love you anymore--"

"You do not--you cannot!" she interrupted, "or you would not go out with Michael Texel all night to drinking-places, and worse, keeping your father and those that _do_ love awake, hurting their hearts here" (she put her hand on her side), "and all for what--that you may drink and revel and run into danger with your true friends?"

"Sweetheart," I began--penitently.

The Little Playmate made a gesture of infinite impatience.

"Do not call me that," she said; "you have no right. I am not your sweetheart. You have no heart at all to love any one with, or you would not behave as you have done lately. You are naught but a silly, selfish boy, that cares for nothing but his own applause and thinks that he has nothing to do but to come home when his high mightiness is ready and find us all on our knees before him, saying: 'Put your foot, great sir, on our necks--so shall we be happy and honored.'"

Now this was so perilously near the truth that I was mightily incensed, and I felt that I did well to be angry.

"Girl," I said, grandly, "you do not know what you say. I have been abroad all night on the service of the State, and I have discovered a most dangerous conspiracy at the peril of my life!"

For I thought it was as well to put the best face on the matter; and, besides, I have never been able, all the days of me, to hide my light under a bushel, as the clerks prate about.

But I was not yet done with my adventuring of this eventful day. And in spite of my father setting me, like a misbehaving bairn, to the drudgery of the water-carrying, there was more in life for me that day than merely hauling upon a handle. For that is a thing which galls an aspiring youth worse than any other labor, being so terribly monotonous.

As for me, I did not take kindly to it at all--not even though I could see mine own image deep in the pails of water as they came up br.i.m.m.i.n.g and cool out of the fern-grown dripping darkness of the well. Aye, and though the image given back to me was (I say it only of that time) a likely enough picture of a lad with short, crisped locks that curled whenever they were wet, cheeks like apples, and skin that hath always been a trouble to me. For I thought it unmanly and like a girl's. And that same skin of mine is, perhaps, the reason why all my days I never could abide your b.u.t.termilk-and-roses girls, having a supply about me enough to serve a dozen, and therefore thinking but little of their stock-in-trade.

Now in the Wolfmark this is the common kind of beauty--not that beauty of any kind is over-common. For our maids--especially those of the country--look too much as if they had been made out of wooden pillows such as laborers use to lay their heads on of nights--one large bolster set on the top of two other little ones, and all three well wadded with ticking and feathers. But I hope no one will go back to the Wolfmark and tell the maids that Hugo Gottfried said this of them, or of a surety my left ear will tingle with the running of their tongues if there be any truth in the old saw.

It was three of the clock and the sun was very fierce on the dusty, unslaked yard of the Wolfsberg, glaring down upon us like the mouth of a wide smelter's oven. Fat Fritz, the porter, in his arm-chair of a cell, had well-nigh dissolved into lard and running out at his own door. The Playmate's window was open, and I caught the waft of a fan to and fro. I judged therefore that my lady knew well that I was working out there in the heat, and was glad of it--being a spiteful pretty minx.

Then I began to wonder who had given her that fan, for it was not like my father to do it, and she knew no other. "Ah!" I said to myself, as a thought struck me, "could it possibly be Michael Texel? He is rich, and Helene may have known him before. The cunning, dark-eyed little vagabond--to take my introduction yester-even as if she had never set eyes on the fellow before, while here it is as clear as daylight that he had all the time been giving her presents--fans and such like."

So I raved within me, half because I believed it, and half because she seemed so comfortable up there, with her feet on a stool and a cool jug of curds at her elbow, while I sweated and labored in the sun.

Very decidedly it must be Texel; devil fly up with him and scratch him among the gargoyles of the minster!

The fan wagged on. It looked distractingly cool within. But then my father--filial obedience was very distinctly a duty, and, also, Gottfried Gottfried, though kind, was a man not to be disobeyed--even at nineteen, and after defying the White Wolf.

It was, as I have said, about three by the sundial on the wall, the arch of which cast a shadow like jet on the scale, that my father came out through the narrow door from the Judgment Hall, opening it with his own key. For he had the right of entrance and outgoing of every door in the palace, not even excepting the bedchamber of Duke Casimir.

"Hugo," he said, "come hither, lad. I did not mean to keep you so long at work in the sun. You must have filled all the cisterns in the place by this time!"

I thanked him sincerely, but did not pursue the subject. For, indeed, I had not worked quite so hard as in his haste my father had supposed from my appearance.

"Go within," he said; "don quickly your saint's-day dress, and betake yourself down to the house of Master Gerard von Sturm, the city chamberlain, and tell him all that he asks of you--readily and truly."

"But, father," said I, "suppose he asks of me that which might condemn one who has trusted me, what am I to say?"

"Tut, boy," said my father, impatiently, "you mean young Michael Texel.

Fear not for him. He was the first to inform. He was at Master von Sturm's by eight this morning, elbowing half a dozen others, all burning and s.h.i.+ning lights of the famous Society of the White Wolf. You are the hero of the day down there, it seems."

"And lo! here I am flouted by a stripling girl, and set to carry water by the hour in the broiling sun!" I said within myself. I possessed, however, though without doubt a manifest hero, far too much of the unheroic quality of discretion to say this aloud to my father.

"I thank you, sir," I said, respectfully. "I will go at once and put on my finest coat and my shoes of silk."

My father smiled.

"You need not be particular as to the silk shoes. 'Tis to see Master von Sturm, not to court pretty Mistress Ysolinde, that I asked you to visit the lawyer's house by the Weiss Thor."

But I was not sorry to be able to proclaim my destination as loud as I dared without causing suspicion.

"Hanne," I cried down the turret stairs, "I pray you bring me the silken shoes with the ribbon bows of silk. I am going down to Master von Sturm's house; also my gold chain and bonnet of blue velvet with the golden feather in it which I won at the last arrow-shooting."

I saw the fluttering of the fan falter and stop. A light foot went pattering up the stairway and a door slammed in the tower.

Then I laughed, like the vain, silly boy I was.

"Mistress Helene," I said to myself, "you will find that poor Hugo, whom you flouted and despised, can yet pay his debts!"

So I put on the fine clothes which I wore on festal days and sallied forth. Now, though the lower orders still hated my father and all that came out of the Red Tower, or indeed, for the matter of that, out of the Wolfsberg, with hardly concealed malice--yet there were many in the city, specially among those of the upper cla.s.ses, who began to think well of my determination to try another way of life than that to which I had been born. For I made no secret of the matter to Michael Texel and such of his comrades as joined us in our gatherings.

Indeed, now, when I come to think of it, it seems to me that my father was the only person of my acquaintance who did not suspect that I was resolved never to wear either the black robe of Inquisition or the crimson of Final Judgment.

Yet it wore round to within two years, and indeed rather less, of the time for my initiation into the mysteries of the Red Axe, and still I remained at home, an idle boy, playing at single-stick and fence with the men-at-arms, drinking beer in the evening with my bosom cronies, and in the well-grounded opinion of all honest people, likely enough to come to no good.

But I, Hugo Gottfried, had my eyes and my books open, and knew that I was but biding my time.

So it came about that I carried no taint of the dread a.s.sociations of the Wolfsberg about me as I went down the bustling street to the Weiss Thor to call on that learned and well-reputed lawyer, Master Gerard von Sturm.

So great was the fame of Master Gerard that he was often called in to settle the mercantile quarrels of the burghers among themselves, and was even chosen as arbiter between those of other towns. For, though accounted severe, he had universally the name of a just and wise man, who would not rob the litigants of all their valuables and then decide in favor of neither, as was too often the way with the "justice" of the great n.o.bles.

As for Duke Casimir of the Wolfmark, no man or woman went near him on any plea whatsoever, save that of asking mercy or favor. And unless my father chanced to be at hand, mostly they asked in vain. For, as I now knew, he had to keep up the common bruit of himself throughout the country as a cruel, fearless, and implacable tyrant. Besides, his fears were so constant and so great, perhaps also so well-founded, that often he dared not be merciful.

CHAPTER X

THE LUBBER FIEND

At five of the clock I lifted the great wolf's-head knocker of s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s which frowned above the door of Master Gerard von Sturm in the port of the Weiss Thor. Hardly had I let it fall again when a small wicket, apparently about two feet above my head, opened, and a huge round head with enormous ears at either side peeped out. So vast was the head and so small the aperture that one of the lateral wings of the chubby face caught on the sill, and the owner brought it away successfully with a jerk and a perfectly good-humored and audible "flip."

"Who are you, and what do you want?" said a wide-gashed mouth, which, with a squat, flattened-out nose and two merry little twinkling eyes, completed this wonderful apparition.

The words were in themselves somewhat rude. On paper I observe that they have an appearance almost truculent. But spoken as the thing framed in the window-sill said them, they were equal to a song of Brudershaft and an episcopal benediction rolled in one.

"I am Hugo Gottfried of the Red Tower, come to see Master Gerard," I replied. "Who may you be that asks so boldly?"

"I'll give you a stalk of rhubarb to suck if you can guess," was the unexpected answer.

As I had never in my life seen anything in the least like the prodigy, it was clearly impossible for me to earn the tart succulence of the summer vegetable on such easy terms.

"I should say," I replied, "if the guess savor not of insolence, that one might be forgiven for mistaking you for the Fool of the Family!"

The grin expanded till it wellnigh circ.u.mnavigated the vast head. It seemed first of all to make straight for the ears on either side. Then, quite suddenly, finding these obstacles insurmountable, it dodged underneath them, and the scared observer could almost imagine its two ends meeting with a click somewhere in the wilderness at the back of that unseen hemisphere of hairy thatch.