Red Axe - Samuel Rutherford Crockett (books to read fiction .TXT) 📗

to her my father might not have heard, yet hitherto she had always been first and sole in my heart whenever I thought on the things which were to be.
The Lady Ysolinde having brought me to her chamber, bade me sit upon an oaken folding-stool beside a table on which lay weapons of curious design--crooked knives and poisoned arrows. Then she went to an ivory cupboard of the Orient (or, as they are called in Holy Writ, "an ivory palace"), and opening the beautifully fitting door, she took from it a small square bottle of red glass which she held between her and the light.
"It is well," she said, looking long and carefully at it; "it will flow."
And coming to the table and pouring some of a shining black liquid into the palm of her left hand, she sat down beside me on the stool and gazed steadily into the little pool of ink.
It was strange to me to sit thus motionless beside a beautiful woman (for such I then thought her)--so near that I could feel the warmth of her body strike like sunshine through the silken fineness of her sea-green gown. I glanced up at her eyes. They were fixed, and, as it seemed, glazed also. But the emerald in them, usually dark as the sea-depths, had opal lights in it, and her lips moved like those of a devotee kneeling in church.
Presently she began to speak.
"Hugo--Hugo Gottfried, son of the Red Axe," she said, in the same hushed voice as before, most like running water heard murmuring in a deep runnel underground, "you will live to be a man fortunate, well-beloved. You will know love--yes, more than one shall love you. But you will love one only. I see the woman on whom your fate depends, yet not clearly--it may be, because my desire is so great to see her face. But she is tall and moves like a queen. She goes clad in white like a bride and her arms are held out to you.
"But another shall love you, and between them two there is darkness and hate, from which come bursting clouds of fire, bringing forth lightnings and angers and deadly jealousies!
"Again I see you, great, honored, and sitting on a high seat. The woman whose face I cannot distinguish is beside you, clothed in a robe of purple. And, yes, she wears a crown on her head like the coronet of a queen."
Ysolinde withdrew her eyes gradually from the ink-pool, as if it were a pain to look yet a greater to look away. Then with a quick jerk she threw up her head, and tears were standing in her eyes ready to overflow. But the wetness made them beautiful, like a pebble of bright colors with the dew upon it and shone on by the sunshine of the morning.
"You hurt me," she murmured reproachfully, looking at me more like a child than ever I had seen her. She was very near to me.
"_I_ make you suffer!" cried I, greatly astonished. "How can Hugo Gottfried have done this thing?"
For it seemed impossible that a poor lad, and one alien by his birth from the hearts of ordinary folk, should yet have the power to make a great lady suffer. For a great lady I knew Ysolinde to be even then, when her father seemed to be no more in the city of Thorn than Master Gerard, the fount and treasure-house of law and composer-general of quarrels.
But I might have known that he was no true lawyer to be so eager about that last. For upon the continuance and fostering of differences the law-men of all nations thrive and eat their bread with honey thereto.
As my father often said, "Better the stroke of the Red Axe than that of the scrivener's goose-quill. My solution is kindlier, sooner over, hurts less, and is all the same in the end!"
Ysolinde thought a little before she answered me.
"No man ever made me suffer thus before," she said, "though I have seen and known many men. I am older than you, Hugo, and have travelled in many countries, the lands from which these things came. But true love, the pain and the pleasure of it, have I never known."
She leaned her head on her hand and her elbow on the table, turning thus to look long and intently at me. I felt oafish and awkward, as Jan Lubber Fiend might have done before the King. Many things I might have wished to say and do with that slender figure and lissome waist so near me. But I knew not how to begin. Yet I think the desire came not so much from love or passion, but rather from a natural longing to explore those mysteries concerning which I had read so much after Friar Laurence had done me the service of teaching me French. But it was well that stupidity was my friend. For rebounding like a vain, upstart young monkey from my mood of self-depreciation, I must needs hold it for certain that all was within my grasp, and that the Lady Ysolinde expected as much of me, which thing would have wrought my downfall.
"Yon ride soon to Plassenburg, I hear," she said, after she had looked at me a long time steadily with the emerald eyes shining upon me. Then it was that I saw clearly that they were not the right emerald in hue so much as of the shade of the stone aqua-marine, which is one not so rare, but a better color when it comes to the matter of maiden's eyes.
"It is indeed true, my lady," I replied, disappointed at her words, and yet somehow infinitely relieved, "that I ride soon to Plassenburg by the favoring of your father, who has been gracious enough to promise me his interest with the Prince."
I saw her lip curl a little with scorn--the least tilt of a rose leaf to which the sun has been unkind.
She seemed about to speak, but presently thinking better of it, smiled instead.
"It is like my father," she said, after a little; "but since I also go thither, you shall be of my escort. A sufficient guard accompanies me all the way to the city, and I dare say the arrangement may serve your convenience as well as add to the pleasure and safety of my journeying."
"But how will your father do without your company, Lady Ysolinde?" I asked. For it seemed strange that father and daughter should thus part without reason in these disturbed times.
She laughed more heartily than I had heard her.
"My father has been used to missing me for months at a time, and, moreover, is well resigned also. But you do not say that you are rejoiced to be of a lady's escort in so long a travel."
"Indeed, I am much honored and glad to have so great a favor done to me. I am but a mannerless, landward youth, to have been bred in the outer courts of a palace. But that which I do not know you will teach me, and my faults I shall be eager to amend."
"Pshaw!--psutt!" said Ysolinde, making a little face, "be not so mock-modest. You do very well. But tell me if you have any sweetheart in the city to leave behind you."
Now this bold question at once reddened my face and heightened my confusion.
"Nay, lady," I stammered, conscious that I was blushing furiously, "I am over-young to have thought much of the things of love. I know no woman in the city save our old house-keeper Hanne, and the Little Playmate."
The Lady Ysolinde looked up quickly.
"Ah, the Little Playmate!" she said, in a low voice, curiously distinct from that which she used when she had interpreted her visions to me. "The Little Playmate! That sounds as though it might be interesting. Who is the Little Playmate?"
"She is a maid whose folks were slain long ago by the Duke in a foray, and the little one being left, my father begged her life. And she has been brought up with me in the Red Tower."
"How old is she now?" The Lady Ysolinde's next question leaped out like the flash of a dagger from its sheath.
"That," answered I, meditatively, "I know not exactly, because none could tell how old she was when she came to us."
"Tut," she said, impatiently tossing her head, "do not twist your answers to me--only wise men and courtiers have the skill to do that and hide it. As yet you are neither. Is she ten, or is she twenty, or is she mid-way betwixt the two?"
"I think she may be a matter of seventeen years of age."
"Is she pretty?" was the next question.
"No," said I, not knowing well what to say.
Her face cleared as she heard that, and then, in a little, her eyes being still bent steadily on me, reading my very heart, it clouded over again.
"You think her not merely pretty, then, but beautiful?" she asked.
I nodded.
"More beautiful than I?"
'Fore God I denied not my love, though I own I have many a time been less tempted, and yet have lied back and forth like a Frankfort Jew.
"Yes," said I, "I think so."
"You love her, then?" said the Lady Ysolinde, rising quickly to her feet; "and you told me that you loved none in this city."
"I love her, indeed," I said. "She is my little sister. As you mean love, I do not love her. But I love her notwithstanding. All my life I have never thought of doing anything else. And that she is beautiful, all who have eyes in their head may see."
This appeased her somewhat. I think it must have been looking for my fortune in the crystal and the ink-pool that made her so eager to know all that concerned me--which none had ever been so importunate to find out before.
"I must come and see this Little Playmate of yours," she said. "It is an ill-done thing that so fair a maid should be shut up in the tower of such a pagan castle--the Wolfsberg; it is indeed well named. Word has reached me to-day that the Princess of Plassenburg has need of a bower maiden. Now the Princess can make her choice from many noble families. But if the Little Playmate be as beautiful as you say, 'tis high time that she should not be left immured in the Red Tower of the Wolfsberg. True, the Duke, like a careful man, neither makes nor mells with womankind. 'Tis his only virtue. But any questing Ritterling or roaring free companion might bear her off."
"I think not," said I, smiling, "so long as the Red Axe of the Mark has a polished edge and Gottfried Gottfried can send it sheer through an ox's neck as he stands chewing the cud."
I hardly think that I ever boasted of my father's prowess before. And, indeed, I had some skill in the axe-play myself, but only in the way of sport.
"All one," said Ysolinde. "Your father, like great Caesar and Duke Casimir, is but mortal, and may stumble across the wooden stump some day himself and find his neck-bone in twain! None so wise that he can tell when the Silent Rider shall meet him in the wood, leading by the bridle the pale horse whose name is Death, and beckoning him to mount and ride."
The Lady Ysolinde paused a while, touching her lips thoughtfully with her fingers.
"Let your Playmate come," she said. "There is room, I warrant, for her and you both at Plassenburg. You shall keep each other company when you have the homesickness, and on the journey she can