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

Others were straightway knocked down, stunned, and bound. Some died suddenly. And a few were saved to stretch the judicial ropes of the Bailiwick. For it was always thought a good thing by such as were in authority to have a good show on the "Thieves' Architrave," or general gallows of the vicinity, as a thing at once creditable to the zeal of the worthy dispensers of local justice, and pleasing to the Kaiser's officer if he chanced to come spying that way.


CHAPTER XXV
MINE HOST RUNS HIS LAST RACE
Hearty were the greetings when the soldiers found us all safe and sound. They shook us again and again by the hand. They clapped us on the back. They examined professionally the dead who lay strewn about.
"A good stroke! Well smitten!" they cried, as they turned them over, like spectators who applaud at a game they can all understand. Specially did they compliment me on my axe-work. Never had anything like it been seen in Plassenburg. The head of the yearling calf was duly exhibited, when the neatness of the blow and the exactness of the aim at the weakest jointing were prodigiously admired.
The good fellows, mellow with the Burgomeister's sinall-ale, were growing friendly beyond all telling, when, in the light of the offertory taper, now growing beguttered and burning low, there appeared the Lady Ysolinde.
You never saw so quick a change in any men. The heartiest reveller forthwith became silent and slunk behind his neighbor. Knees shook beneath stalwart frames, and there seemed a very general tendency to get down upon marrow-bones.
The Lady Ysolinde stood before them, strangely different from the slim, willowy maiden I had seen her. She looked almost imperial in her demeanor.
"You shall be rewarded for your ready obedience," she said; "the Prince will not forget your service. Take away that offal!"
She pointed to the dead rascals on the floor.
And the men, muttering something that sounded to me like "Yes, your Highness !" hastened to obey.
"Did you say 'Yes, your Highness' ?" I asked one of them, who seemed, by his air of command, to be the superior among the archers.
"Aye," answered he, dryly, "it is a term usually applied to the Lady Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg."
I was never more smitten dazed and dumb in my life. Ysolinde, the daughter of Master Gerard, the maid who had read my fate in the ink-pool, whom I had "made suffer," according to her own telling--she the Princess of Plassenburg '.
Ah, I had it now. Here at last was the explanation of the threadbare and inexplicable jest of Jorian and Boris, "The Prince hath a Princess, and she is oft upon her travels !"
But, after all, what a Wendish barking about so small an egg. I have heard an emperor proclaimed with less cackle.
Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg--yes, that made a difference. And I had taken her hand--I, the son of the Red Axe--I, the Hereditary Justicer of the Wolfmark. Well, after all, she had sought me, not I her. And then, the little Helene--what would she make of it? I longed greatly to find an opportunity to tell her. It might teach her in what manner to cut her cloth.
The archers of the Prince camped with us the rest of the night in the place of the outcast crew. They behaved well (though their forbearance was perhaps as much owing to the near presence of the Princess as to any inherent virtue in the good men of the bow) to the women and children who remained huddled in the corners.
Then came the dawn, swift-foot from the east. A fair dawn it was, the sun rising, not through barred clouds, with the lightest at the horizon (which is the foul-weather dawn), but through streamers and bannerets that fluttered upward and fired to ever fleecier crimson and gold as he rose.
We rode among a subdued people, and ere we went the Princess called for the Burgomeister and bade him send to Plassenburg the landlord, so soon as he should be found, and also the heads of the half-dozen houses on either side of the inn.
Then, indeed, there was a turmoil and a wailing to speak about. Women folk crowded out of the huts and kissed the white feet of the palfrey that bore the Lady Ysolinde.
"Have mercy!" they wailed; "show kindness, great Princess! Here are our men, unwounded and unhurt, that have lain by our sides all the night. They are innocent of all intent of evil--of every dark deed. Ah, lady, send them not to your prisons. We shall never see them more, and they are all we have or our children. 'Tis they bring in the bread to this drear spot!"
"Produce me your husbands, then!" said the Lady Ysolinde.
Whereat the women ran and brought a number of frowsy and bleared men, all unwounded, save one that had a broken head.
Then Ysolinde called to the Burgomeister. "Come hither, chief of a thievish municipality, tell me if these be indeed these women's husbands."
The Burgomeister, a pallid, pouch-mouthed man, tremulous, and brick-dusty, like everything else in the village of Erdberg, came forward and peeringly examined the men.
"Every man to his woman!" he ordered, brusquely, and the women went and stood each by her own property--the men shamefaced and hand-dog, the women anxious and pale. Some of the last threw a, protecting arm about their husbands, which they for the most part appeared to resent. In every case the woman looked the more capable and intelligent, the men being apparently mere boors.
"They are all their true husbands, at least so far as one can know!" answered the Burgomeister, cautiously.
"Then," said the lady, "bid them catch the innkeeper and send him to Plassenburg, and these others can abide where they are. But if they find him not, they must all come instead of him."
The men started at her words, their faces brightening wonderfully, and they were out of the door before one could count ten. We mounted our horses, and under the very humble guidance of the Burgomeister, who led the Princess's palfrey, we were soon again upon the high table-land. Here we enjoyed to the full the breezes which swept with morning freshness across the scrubby undergrowths of oak and broom, and above all the sight of misty wisps of cloud scudding and whisking about the distant peaks-behind which lay the city of Plassenburg.
We had not properly won clear of the ravines when we heard a great shouting and turmoil behind us--so that I hastened to look to my weapons. For I saw the archers instinctively draw their quarrels and bolt-pouches off their backs, to be in readiness upon their left hips.
But it was only the rabble of men and women who had been threatened, the dwellers in those twelve houses next the inn, who came dragging our brick-faced knave of a host, with that hard-polished countenance of his slack and clammy--slate-gray in color too, all the red tan clean gone out of it.
"Mercy--mercy, great lady!" he cried; "I pray you, do execution on me here and now. Carry me not to the extreme tortures. Death clears all. And I own that for my crimes I well deserve to die. But save me from the strappado, from the torment of the rack. I am an old man and could not endure."
The Lady Ysolinde looked at him, and her emerald eyes held a steely glitter in their depths.
"I am neither judge nor"--I think she was going to say "executioner," but she remembered in time and for my sake was silent, which I thought was both gracious and charming of her. She resumed in a softer tone: "What sentence, then, would you desire, thus confessing your guilt?"
"That I might end myself over the cliff there!" said the innkeeper, pointing to the wall of rock along the edge of which we were riding.
"See, then, that he is well ended!" said the Princess, briefly, to Jorian.
"Good!" said Jorian, saluting.
And very coolly betook himself to the edge of the cliff, where he primed his piece anew, and blew up his match.
"Loose the man and stand back!" cried the Princess.
A moment the innkeeper stood nerving himself. A moment he hung on the thin edge of his resolve. The slack gray face worked convulsively, the white lips moved, the hands were gripped close to his sides as though to run a race. His whole body seemed suddenly to shrink and fall in upon itself.
"The torture! The terrible torture!" he shrieked aloud, and ran swiftly from the clutches of the men who had held him. Between the path and the verge of the cliff from which he was suffered to cast himself there stretched some thirty or forty yards of fine green turf. The old man ran as though at a village fair for some wager of slippery pig's tail, but all the time the face of him was like Death and Hell following after.
At the cliff's edge he leaped high into the air, and went headlong down, to our watching eyes as slowly as if he had sunk through water. None of us who were on the path saw more of him. But Jorian craned over, regarding the man's end calmly and even critically. And when he had satisfied himself that that which was done was properly done, as coolly as before he stowed away his match in his cover-fire, mounted his horse, and rode towards us.
He nodded to the Princess. "Good, my Lady!" quoth he, for all comment.
"I saved a charge that time!" said he to his companion.
"Good!" quoth Boris, in his turn.
We had now a safe and noble escort, and the way to Plassenburg was easy. The face of the country gradually changed. No more was it the gray, wistful plain of the Wolfmark, upon which our Red Tower looked down. No more did we ride through the marly, dusty, parched lands, in which were the ravines with their uncanny cavern villages, of which this Erdberg was the chief. But green, well-watered valleys and mountains wooded to the top lay all about us--a pleasant land, a fertile province, and, as the Princess had said, a land in which the strong hand of Karl the Prince had long made "the broom-bush keep the cow."
I had all along been possessed with great desire to meet the Prince of so noble and well-cared-for a land, and perhaps also to see what manner of man could be the husband of so extraordinary a Princess.


CHAPTER XXVI
PRINCE JEHU MILLER'S SON
Yet now, when she was in her own country, and as good as any queen thereof, I found the Lady Ysolinde in no wise different from, what she had been in the city of Thorn and in her father's house. She called me often to ride beside her, Helene being on my other side, while the Lubber Fiend, who had saved all our lives, gambolled about and came to her to be petted like a lapdog of some monstrous sort. He licked his lips and twisted his eyes upward at her in ludicrous ecstasy till only the whites were visible whenever the Princess laid her hand on his head. So that it was as much as the archers of the guard could do to hide their laughter in their beards. But hide it they did, having a wholesome awe of the emerald eyes of their mistress, or perhaps of the steely light which sometimes came into them.
It was growing twilight upon the third day (for there were no adventures worth dwelling upon after that among the cavern dwellings of Erdberg) when for the first time we saw the towers of Plassenburg crowning a hill, with its clear brown river winding slow beneath.