Red Axe, Samuel Rutherford Crockett [top novels TXT] 📗

slings, drooping haggard faces upon their chests. But all passed rapidly enough up the steep street, and tumbled with noise and shouting, helter-skelter into the great court-yard beneath me as I watched, secure as God in heaven, from my perch on the Red Tower.
Then came the captives, some riding horses bare-backed, or held in place before black-bearded riders--women mostly these last, with faces white-set and strange of eye, or all beblubbered with weeping. Then came a man or two also on horseback, old and reverend. After them a draggled rabble of lads and half-grown girls, bound together with ropes and kept at a dog's trot by the pricking spears of the men-at-arms behind, who thought it a jest to sink a spear point-deep in the flesh of a man's back--"drawing the claret wine" they called it. For these riders of Duke Casimir were every one jolly companions, and must have their merry jest.
After the captives had gone past--and sorry I was for them--the body-guard of Duke Casimir came riding steadily and gallantly, all gentlemen of the Mark, with their sons and squires, landed men, towered men, free Junkers, serving the Duke for loyalty and not servitude, though ever "living by the saddle"--as, indeed, most of the Ritterdom and gentry of the Mark had done for generations.
Then behind them came Duke Casimir himself. The Eastland blood he had acquired from his Polish mother showed as he rode gloomily apart, thoughtful, solitary, behind the squared shoulders of his knights. After him another squadron of riders in ghastly armor of black-and-white, with torches in their hand and grinning skulls upon their shields, closed in the array. The great gate of the Wolfsberg was open now, and, leaving behind him the hushed and darkened town, the master rode into his castle. The Wolf was in his lair. But in the streets many a burgher's wife trembled on her bed, while her goodman peered cautiously over the leads by the side of a gargoyle, and fancied that already he heard the clamor of the partisans thundering at his door with the Duke's invitation to meet him in the Hall of Judgment.


CHAPTER II
THE LITTLE PLAYMATE COMES HOME
But there was to be no Session in the Hall of Judgment that night. The great court-yard, roofed with the vault of stars and lit by the moon, was to see all done that remained to be done. The torches were planted in the iron hold-fasts round about. The plunder of the captured towns and castles was piled for distribution on the morrow, and no man dared keep back so much as a Brandenburg broad-piece or a handful of Bohemian gulden. For the fear of the Duke and the Duke's dog-kennels was upon every stout fighting-kerl. They minded the fate of Hans Pulitz, who had kept back a belt of gold, and had gotten himself flung by the heels with no more than the stolen belt upon him, into the kennels where the Duke's blood-hounds howled and clambered with their fore-feet on the black-spattered barriers. And they say that the belt of gold was all that was ever seen again of the poor rascal. Hans Pulitz--who had hoped for so many riotous evenings among the Fat Pigs of Thorn and so many draughts of the slippery wine of the Rheingan careering down the poor thirsty throat of him. But, alas for Hans Pulitz! the end of all imagining was no more than five minutes of snapping, snarling, horrible Pandemonium in the kennels of the Wolfsberg, and the scored gold chain on the ground was all that remained to tell his tale. Verily, there were few Achans in Duke Casimir's camp.
And it is small wonder after this, that scant and sparse were the jests played on the grim master of the Wolfsberg, or that the bay of a blood-hound tracking on the downs frightened the most stout-hearted rider in all that retinue of dare-devils.
Going to the side of the Red Tower, which looked towards the court-yard, I saw the whole array come in. I watched the prisoners unceremoniously dismounted and huddled together against the coming of the Duke. There was but one man among them who stood erect. The torch-light played on his face, which was sometimes bent down to a little child in his arms, so that I saw him well. He looked not at all upon the rude men-at-arms who pushed and bullied about him, but continued tenderly to hush his charge, as if he had been a nurse in a babe-chamber under the leads, with silence in all the house below.
It pleased me to see the man, for all my life I had loved children. And yet at ten years of age I had never so much as touched one--no, nor spoken even, only looked down on those that hated me and spat on the very tower wherein I dwelt. But nevertheless I loved them and yearned to tell them so, even when they mocked me. So I watched this little one in the man's arms.
Then came the Duke along the line, and behind him, like the Shadow of Death, paced my father Gottfried Gottfried, habited all in red from neck to heel, and carrying for his badge of office as Hereditary Justicer to the Dukes of the Wolfmark that famous red-handled, red-bladed axe, the gleaming white of whose deadly edge had never been wet save with the blood of men and women.
The guard pushed the captives rudely into line as the Duke Casimir strode along the front. The women he passed without a sign or so much as a look. They were kept for another day. But the men were judged sharp and sudden, as the Duke in his black armor passed along, and that scarlet Shadow of Death with the broad axe over his shoulder paced noiselessly behind him.
For as each man looked into the eyes of Casimir of the Wolfsberg he read his doom. The Duke turned his wrist sharply down, whereupon the attendant sprites of the Red Shadow seized the man and rent his garment down from his neck--or the hand pointed up, and then the man set his hand to his heart and threw his head back in a long sigh of relief.
It came the turn of the man who carried the babe.
Duke Casimir paused before him, scowling gloomily at him.
"Ha, Lord Prince of so great a province, you will not set yourself up any more haughtily. You will quibble no longer concerning tithes and tolls with Casimir of the Wolfmark."
And the Duke lifted his hand and smote the man on the cheek with his open hand.
Yet the captive only hushed the child that wailed aloud to see her guardian smitten.
He looked Duke Casimir steadfastly in the eyes and spoke no word.
"Great God, man, have you nothing to say to me ere you die?" cried Duke Casimir, choked with hot, sudden anger to be so crossed.
The elder man gazed steadily at his captor.
"God will judge betwixt me, a man about to die, and you, Casimir of the Wolfmark," he said at last, very slowly--"by the eyes of this little maid He will judge!"
"Like enough," cried Casimir, sneeringly. "Bishop Peter hath told me as much. But then God's payments are long deferred, and, so far as I can see, I can take Him into my own hand. And your little maid--pah! since one day you took from me the mother, I, in my turn, will take the daughter and make her a titbit for the teeth of my blood-hounds."
The man answered not again, but only hushed and fondled the little one.
Duke Casimir turned quickly to my father, showing his long teeth like a snarling dog:
"Take the child," he said, "and cast her into the kennels before the man's eyes, that he may learn before he dies to dread more than God's Judgment Seat the vengeance of Duke Casimir!"
Then all the men-at-arms turned away, heart-sick at the horror. But the man with the child never blanched.
High perched on the top tower, I also heard the words and loved the maid. And they tell me (though I do not remember it) that I cried down from the leads of the Red Tower: "My father, save the little maid and give her to me--or else I, Hugo Gottfried, will cast myself down on the stones at your feet!"
At which all the men looked up and saw me in white, a small, lonely figure, with my legs hanging over the top of the wall.
"Go back!" my father shouted. "Go back, Hugo! 'Tis my only son--my successor--the fifteenth of our line, my lord!" he said to the Duke in excuse.
But I cried all the more: "Save the maid's life, or I will fling myself headlong. By Jesu-Mary, I swear it!"
For I thought that was the name of one great saint.
Then my father, who ever doted on me, bent his knee before his master: "A boon!" he cried, "my first and last, Duke Casimir--this maid's life for my son!"
But the Duke hung on the request a long, doubtful moment.
"Gottfried Gottfried," he said, even reproachfully, "this is not well done of you, to make me go back on my word."
"Take the man's life," said my father--"take the man's life for the child's and the fulfilling of your word, and by the sword of St. Peter I will smite my best!"
"Aye," said the man with the babe, "even so do, as the Red Axe says. Save the young child, but bid him smite hard at this abased neck. Ye have taken all, Duke Casimir, take my life. But save the young child alive!"
So, without further word or question, they did so, and the man who had carried the child kissed her once and separated gently the baby hands that clung about his neck. Then he handed her to my father.
"Be gracious to Helene," he said; "she was ever a sweet babe."
Now by this time I was down hammering on the door of the Red Tower, which had been locked on the outside.
Presently some one turned the key, and so soon as I got among the men I darted between their legs.
"Give me the babe!" I cried; "the babe is mine; the Duke himself hath said it." And my father gave her to me, crying as if her heart would break.
Nevertheless she clung to me, perhaps because I was nearer her own age.
Then the dismal procession of the condemned passed us, followed by my father, who strode in front with his axe over his shoulder, and the laughing and jesting men-at-arms bringing up the rear.
As I stood a little aside for them to pass, the hand of the man fell on my head and rested there a moment.
"God's blessing on you, little lad!" he said. "Cherish the babe you have saved, and, as sure as that I am now about to die, one day you shall be repaid." And he stooped and kissed the little maid before he went on with the others to the place of slaughter.
Then I hurried within, so that I might not hear the dull thud of the Red Axe, on the block nor the inhuman howlings of the dogs in the kennels afterwards.
When my father came home an hour later, before even he took off his costume of red, he came up to our chamber and looked long at the little maid as she lay asleep. Then he gazed at me, who watched him from under my lids and from behind the shadows of the bedclothes.
But his quick eye caught the gleam of light in mine.
"You are awake, boy!" he said, somewhat sternly.
I nodded up to him without speaking.
"What would you with the little maid?"