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

my heart.
"I know it," she said, calmly; "my father hath told me all."
"Then," cried I, "if the power lie with you, as you hope for mercy to your own soul, be merciful! Save the maiden Helene from the death of shame, and me from becoming her murderer!"
"Ah," she answered, with delicatest meditative inflection, "this is indeed sweet. The mighty is fallen indeed. The proud one is suppliant now. The knee is bent that would not bend. Hearken, you and your puling babe, to the Princess Ysolinde! Were your lives in that glass, to save or to destroy--her life and your suffering--to make or to break, I would fling them to destruction, even as I cast this cup into the darkness!"
And as she spoke the wreathed beaker of Venice glass sped out of the window and crashed on the pavement without.
"Thus would I end your lives," she said, "for the shame that you two put upon me in the day of my weakness."
"Lady," I cried, eagerly, "you do yourself a wrong! Your heart is better than your word. Do this deed of mercy, I beseech you, if so be you can. And my life is yours forever!"
"Your life is mine, you say," cried she; "aye, and that means what? The wind that cries about the house. Your life is _mine_--it is a lie. Your life and love both are that chit's for whom you have despised--rejected--ME!"
And I grant that at that moment she looked noble enough in her anger as she stood discharging her words at me with hissing directness, like bolts shot twanging from the steel cross-bow.
"And, lest you should think that I have not the power to save you, I will tell you this--when you shall see the neck bared for the blade of the Red Axe, the fine tresses you love, that your eyes look upon with desire, all ruthlessly cut away by the shears of your assistants--ah, I know you will remember then that I, Ysolinde, whom you refused and slighted, had the power in her hand to deliver you both with a word, according to the immaculate laws of the Wolfmark. Aye, and more--power to raise you both to a pinnacle of bliss such as you can hardly conceive. In that hour, when you see me look down upon your anguish, you will know that I can speak the word. You will watch my lips till the axe falls, and under your hand the young life ebbs red. But the lips of Ysolinde will be silent!"
"Such knowledge is an easy boast, Lady Ysolinde!" I answered, thinking to taunt her, that she might reveal whether indeed she had the power she claimed.
"There," she said, pointing to the great collection of black-bound books and papers about the walls; "see, the secret is there--the secret for the lack of which you shall strike your beloved to the death to save her from the unnamable shame. I know it; my father has revealed it to me. I have seen the parchment in these hands. But--you shall never hear it, she never profit by it, and my vengeance shall be sweet--so sweet!"
And she laughed, with a strange crackling laugh that it was a pain to hear.
"God forgive you, Lady Ysolinde," said I, "if this be so. For if there be a God, you must burn in Great Hell for this deed you are about to do. Having had no mercy on the innocent, how shall you ask God to have mercy on you?"
"I will not ask Him!" she cried. "Instead of puling for mercy I will have had my revenge. And after that, come earth, heaven, or hell--I shall not care. All will then be the same to Ysolinde!"
I thought I would try her yet once more.
"The Little Playmate," I said, "the maid whom I have ever loved, though I am not worthy to touch her, is no chance child, no daughter of the Red Axe of Thorn. Leopold von Dessauer hath found and sent to Karl the Prince the full proofs that Helene is the daughter of the last and rightful Prince, and therefore in her own right Princess of Plassenburg."
"You lie, fool!" she cried--"you lie! You think to frighten me. And even if it were true--thrice, four times fool to tell me! For shall not I, the Princess of Plassenburg, the wife of the reigning Prince, stand for my own name and dignity. I would not help you now though a thousand fair heads, well-beloved, the desire of men, the envy of women, were to be rolled in the dust."
"Then farewell, Princess," I cried; "you are wronging to the death of deaths two that never did you wrong, who loved each other with the love of man and woman before ever you crossed their paths, and who since then have only sought your good. You wrong God also, and you lose your soul, divorcing it from the mercy of the Saviour of men. For be very sure that with that measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."
She did not answer, but stood with her hand still against the door-post, her head raised, and her lips curling scornfully, looking after me as I retired with a smiling and malicious pleasure.
So, without further speech, I went out from the presence of the Lady Ysolinde. And thus she had the first part of her revenge.


CHAPTER L
THE DUNGEON OF THE WOLFSBERG
And now I must see the Little Playmate. Judge ye whether or no my heart was torn in twain as I went up the long High Street of Thorn, back to the Wolfsberg, alone. For I had compelled Dessauer to return to Bishop Peter's, in order to avert popular suspicion, since our real names and errands were not yet known there.
And when I parted from him the old man was so worn out that I looked momently for him to drop on the rough causeway stones of the street.
Many pictures of my youth passed before me as I mounted towards the castle that night. I remembered the ride of the wild horsemen returning from the raid such long years agone, the old man who carried the babe, and the Red Axe himself, who now lay dead in the Tower--my father, Casimir's Justicer, clad now as then in crimson from head to heel.
Ere long I arrived at the Wolfsberg, and as I came near the Red Tower I saw that the gate was open. A little crowd of men with swords and partisans was issuing tumultuously from it. Then came six carrying a coffin. I stood aside to let them pass. And not till the last one brushed me did I ask what was their business abroad with a dead man at such a time of the night.
"'Tis one that had wrought much fear in his time," answered the soldier, for I had lighted on a sententious fellow--"one that made many swift ends, and now has come to one himself."
"You mean Gottfried Gottfried, the Duke's Justicer?" said I, speaking like one in a dream.
"Aye," he replied. "The Duke Otho is mightily afraid of the plague, and will not have a dead body over-night in his castle. Since they condemned the Saint Helena, God wot, the Duke is a fear-stricken man. He sleeps with half a dozen black riders at the back of his door, as though that made him any safer if a handful of minted gold were dealt out among the rascals. But when was a Prince ever wise?"
"My father's funeral," thought I. "Well, to-night it is, indeed, 'let the dead bury their dead'; Helene is yet alive!"
Surely I am not wanting in feeling, yet my heart was strangely chill and cold. Nevertheless, I turned and followed the procession a little way towards the walls. But even as I went, lo! the bell of the Wolfsberg slowly and brazenly clanged ten. I stopped. I had but two hours in which to visit the Little Playmate and tell her all.
"Good-bye, father," said I, standing with my hat off; "so you would wish me to do--you who met your God standing up--you who did an ill business greatly, because it was yours and you were born to it. Teach me, my father, to be worthy of you in this strait, to the like of which surely never was man brought before!"
The men-at-arms clattered roughly down the street, shifting their burden as if it had been so much kindling-wood, and quarrelling as to their turns. I heard their jests coming clear up the narrow street from far away.
I stood still as they approached a corner which they must turn.
I waved my hand to the coffin.
"Fare you well, true father; to-night and to-morrow may God help me also, like you, to meet my fate standing up!"
And the curve of the long street hid the ribald procession. My father was gone. I had made choice. The dead was burying his dead.
I went on towards the prison of the Wolfsberg; so it was nominated by a sort of grim superiority in that place which was all a prison--the castle which had lorded it so long over the red clustered roofs and stepped gables of Thorn, solely because it meant prisonment and death to the rebel or the refuser of the Duke's exactions.
Often had I seen the straggling procession of prisoners rise, head following head, up from that weary staircase, my father standing by, as they came up from the cells, counting his victims silently, like a shepherd who tells his flock as they pass through a gap in the sheepfold.
For me, alas! there was but one in that dread fold to-night. And she my one ewe lamb who ought to have lain in my bosom.
I clamored long at the gate ere I could make the drowsy jailer hear. As the minutes slipped away I grew more and more wild with fear and anger. At midnight I must face the Duke, and it was after ten--how long I knew not, but I feared every moment that I might hear the brazen clang as the hammer struck eleven.
For time seemed to make no impression on me at all that night.
At last the man came, shuffling, grumbling, and cursing, from his truckle-bed.
"What twice-condemned drunken roysterer may you be, that hath mistaken the prison of Duke Otho for a trull-house?
"An order from the Duke--to see a prisoner! Come to-morrow then, and, meanwhile, depart to Gehenna. Must a man be forever at the beck and call of every sleepless sot? 'Urgent'--is the Duke's mandate. Shove it through the lattice then, that a lantern may flash upon it."
I pushed under the door a broad piece of gold, which proved more to the purpose than much speech.
The door was opened and I showed my pass. That and the gold together worked wonders.
The jailer rattled his keys, donned a hood and woollen wrapper which he took down from a nail, and went coughing before me down the chill, draughty passages. I could hear the prisoners leaping from their couches within as the light of his cresset filtered beneath their doors. What hopes and fears stirred them! A summons, it might be, for some one in that dread warren to come up for a last look at the stars, a walk to the heading-place through the soft, velvet-dark night--then the block, the lightning flash of bright steel, a drench of something sweet and strong like wine upon the lips, and--silence, rest, oblivion.
But we passed the prison doors one by one, and the jailer of the Wolfsberg went coughing and rasping by to another part of the prison.
"'Tis an ill place for chills," he grumbled. "I have never been free of them since first