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The Dove in the Eagle's Nest

by Charlotte M. Yonge · English · Gutenberg #3139 · 635,404 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Dove in the Eagle's Nest

Author: Charlotte M. Yonge


        
Release date: March 1, 2002 [eBook #3139]
                Most recently updated: April 21, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3139

Credits: Transcribed from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOVE IN THE EAGLE'S NEST ***


Transcribed from the 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org




THE
DOVE IN THE EAGLE’S NEST


                                    BY

                            CHARLOTTE M. YONGE

                      [Picture: Sitting at the desk]

                     _ILLUSTRATED BY W. J. HENNESSY_

                                * * * * *

                                  London
                            MACMILLAN AND CO.
                               AND NEW YORK
                                   1890

                  _The Right of Translation is Reserved_

                                * * * * *

_First Edition_ (2 vols.  Crown 8vo), 1866.  _New Edition_ (1 vol.  Crown
                               8vo), 1869.

   _Reprinted_ 1871; January and November 1873; 1875; 1876; 1879; 1882;
                                  1883;
           1884; 1888.  _New Edition_, 1889.  _Reprinted_ 1890.




INTRODUCTION


IN sending forth this little book, I am inclined to add a few explanatory
words as to the use I have made of historical personages.  The origin of
the whole story was probably Freytag’s first series of pictures of German
Life: probably, I say, for its first commencement was a dream, dreamt
some weeks after reading that most interesting collection of sketches.
The return of the squire with the tidings of the death of the two knights
was vividly depicted in sleep; and, though without local habitation or
name, the scene was most likely to have been a reflection from the wild
scenes so lately read of.

In fact, waking thoughts decided that such a catastrophe could hardly
have happened anywhere but in Germany, or in Scotland; and the contrast
between the cultivation in the free cities and the savagery of the
independent barons made the former the more suitable region for the
adventures.  The time could only be before the taming and bringing into
order of the empire, when the Imperial cities were in their greatest
splendour, the last free nobles in course of being reduced from their
lawless liberty, and the House of Austria beginning to acquire its
preponderance over the other princely families.

M. Freytag’s books, and Hegewisch’s History of Maximilian, will, I think,
be found fully to bear out the picture I have tried to give of the state
of things in the reign of the Emperor Friedrich III., when, for want of
any other law, _Faust recht_, or fist right, ruled; _i.e._ an offended
nobleman, having once sent a _Fehde-brief_ to his adversary, was
thenceforth at liberty to revenge himself by a private war, in which, for
the wrong inflicted, no justice was exacted.

Hegewisch remarks that the only benefit of this custom was, that the
honour of subscribing a feud-brief was so highly esteemed that it induced
the nobles to learn to write!  The League of St. George and the Swabian
League were the means of gradually putting down this authorized condition
of deadly feud.

This was in the days of Maximilian’s youth.  He is a prince who seems to
have been almost as inferior in his foreign to what he was in his
domestic policy as was Queen Elizabeth.  He is chiefly familiar to us as
failing to keep up his authority in Flanders after the death of Mary of
Burgundy, as lingering to fulfil his engagement with Anne of Brittany
till he lost her and her duchy, as incurring ridicule by his ill-managed
schemes in Italy, and the vast projects that he was always forming
without either means or steadiness to carry them out, by his perpetual
impecuniosity and slippery dealing; and in his old age he has become
rather the laughing-stock of historians.

But there is much that is melancholy in the sight of a man endowed with
genius, unbalanced by the force of character that secures success, and
with an ardent nature whose intention overleapt obstacles that in
practice he found insuperable.  At home Maximilian raised the Imperial
power from a mere cipher to considerable weight.  We judge him as if he
had been born in the purple and succeeded to a defined power like his
descendants.  We forget that the head of the Holy Roman Empire had been,
ever since the extinction of the Swabian line, a mere mark for ambitious
princes to shoot at, with everything expected from him, and no means to
do anything.  Maximilian’s own father was an avaricious, undignified old
man, not until near his death Archduke of even all Austria, and with
anarchy prevailing everywhere under his nominal rule.  It was in the time
of Maximilian that the Empire became as compact and united a body as
could be hoped of anything so unwieldy, that law was at least
acknowledged, _Faust recht_ for ever abolished, and the Emperor became
once more a real power.

The man under whom all this was effected could have been no fool; yet, as
he said himself, he reigned over a nation of kings, who each chose to
rule for himself; and the uncertainty of supplies of men or money to be
gained from them made him so often fail necessarily in his engagements,
that he acquired a shiftiness and callousness to breaches of promise,
which became the worst flaw in his character.  But of the fascination of
his manner there can be no doubt.  Even Henry VIII.’s English
ambassadors, when forced to own how little they could depend on him, and
how dangerous it was to let subsidies pass through his fingers, still
show themselves under a sort of enchantment of devotion to his person,
and this in his old age, and when his conduct was most inexcusable and
provoking.

His variety of powers was wonderful.  He was learned in many languages—in
all those of his empire or hereditary states, and in many besides; and he
had an ardent love of books, both classical and modern.  He delighted in
music, painting, architecture, and many arts of a more mechanical
description; wrote treatises on all these, and on other subjects,
especially gardening and gunnery.  He was the inventor of an improved
lock to the arquebus, and first divined how to adapt the disposition of
his troops to the use of the newly-discovered fire-arms.  And in all
these things his versatile head and ready hand were personally employed,
not by deputy; while coupled with so much artistic taste was a violent
passion for hunting, which carried him through many hairbreadth ’scapes.
“It was plain,” he used to say, “that God Almighty ruled the world, or
how could things go on with a rogue like Alexander VI. at the head of the
Church, and a mere huntsman like himself at the head of the Empire.”  His
_bon-mots_ are numerous, all thoroughly characteristic, and showing that
brilliancy in conversation must have been one of his greatest charms.  It
seems as if only self-control and resolution were wanting to have made
him a Charles, or an Alfred, the Great.

The romance of his marriage with the heiress of Burgundy is one of the
best known parts of his life.  He was scarcely two-and-twenty when he
lost her, who perhaps would have given him the stability he wanted; but
his tender hove for her endured through life.  It is not improbable that
it was this still abiding attachment that made him slack in overcoming
difficulties in the way of other contracts, and that he may have hoped
that his engagement to Bianca Sforza would come to nothing, like so many
others.

The most curious record of him is, however, in two books, the materials
for which he furnished, and whose composition and illustration he
superintended, _Der Weise King_, and _Theurdank_, of both of which he is
well known to be the hero.  The White, or the Wise King, it is uncertain
which, is a history of his education and exploits, in prose.  Every
alternate page has its engraving, showing how the Young White King
obtains instruction in painting, architecture, language, and all arts and
sciences, the latter including magic—which he learns of an old woman with
a long-tailed demon sitting, like Mother Hubbard’s cat, on her
shoulder—and astrology.  In the illustration of this study an
extraordinary figure of a cross within a circle appears in the sky, which
probably has some connection with his scheme of nativity, for it also
appears on the breast of Ehrenhold, his constant companion in the
metrical history of his career, under the name of Theurdank.

The poetry of _Theurdank_ was composed by Maximilian’s old
writing-master, Melchior Pfinznig; but the adventures were the Kaisar’s
own, communicated by himself, and he superintended the wood-cuts.  The
name is explained to mean “craving glory,”—Gloriæmemor.  The Germans
laugh to scorn a French translator, who rendered it “Chermerci.”  It was
annotated very soon after its publication, and each exploit explained and
accounted for.  It is remarkable and touching in a man who married at
eighteen, and was a widower at twenty-two, that, in both books, the happy
union with his lady love is placed at the end—not at the beginning of the
book; and in _Theurdank_, at least, the eternal reunion is clearly meant.

In this curious book, König Römreich, by whom every contemporary
understood poor Charles of Burgundy—thus posthumously made King of Rome
by Maximilian, as the only honour in his power, betroths his daughter
Ehrenreich (rich in honour) to the Ritter Theurdank.  Soon after, by a
most mild version of Duke Charles’s frightful end, König Römreich is seen
on his back dying in a garden, and Ehrenreich (as Mary really did)
despatches a ring to summon her betrothed.

But here Theurdank returns for answer that he means first to win honour
by his exploits, and sets out with his comrade, Ehrenhold, in search
thereof.  Ehrenhold never appears of the smallest use to him in any of
the dire adventures into which he falls, but only stands complacently by,
and in effect may represent Fame, or perhaps that literary sage whom Don
Quixote always supposed to be at hand to record his deeds of prowess.

Next we are presented with the German impersonation of Satan as a wise
old magician, only with claws instead of feet, commissioning his three
captains (_hauptleutern_), Fürwitz, Umfallo, and Neidelhard, to beset and
ruin Theurdank.  They are interpreted as the dangers of youth, middle
life, and old age—Rashness, Disaster, and Distress (or Envy).  One at a
time they encounter him,—not once, but again and again; and he has ranged
under each head, in entire contempt of real order of time, the perils he
thinks owing to each foe.  Fürwitz most justly gets the credit of
Maximilian’s perils on the steeple of Ulm, though, unfortunately, the
artist has represented the daring climber as standing not much above the
shoulders of Fürwitz and Ehrenhold; and although the annotation tells us
that his “hinder half foot” overhung the scaffold, the danger in the
print is not appalling.  Fürwitz likewise inveigles him into putting the
point (_schnäbel_) of his shoe into the wheel of a mill for turning stone
balls, where he certainly hardly deserved to lose nothing but the beak of
his shoe.  This enemy also brings him into numerous unpleasant
predicaments on precipices, where he hangs by one hand; while the chamois
stand delighted on every available peak, Fürwitz grins malevolently, and
Ehrenhold stands pointing at him over his shoulder.  Time and place are
given in the notes for all these escapes.  After some twenty adventures
Fürwitz is beaten off, and Umfallo tries his powers.  Here the
misadventures do not involve so much folly on the hero’s part—though, to
be sure, he ventures into a lion’s den unarmed, and has to beat off the
inmates with a shovel.  But the other adventures are more rational.  He
catches a jester—of admirably foolish expression—putting a match to a
powder-magazine; he is wonderfully preserved in mountain avalanches and
hurricanes; reins up his horse on the verge of an abyss; falls through
ice in Holland and shows nothing but his head above it; cures himself of
a fever by draughts of water, to the great disgust of his physicians, and
escapes a fire bursting out of a tall stove.

Neidelhard brings his real battles and perils.  From this last he is in
danger of shipwreck, of assassination, of poison, in single combat, or in
battle; tumults of the people beset him; he is imprisoned as at Ghent.
But finally Neidelhard is beaten back; and the hero is presented to
Ehrenreich.  Ehrenhold recounts his triumphs, and accuses the three
captains.  One is hung, another beheaded, the third thrown headlong from
a tower, and a guardian angel then summons Theurdank to his union with
his Queen.  No doubt this reunion was the life-dream of the harassed,
busy, inconsistent man, who flashed through the turmoils of the early
sixteenth century.

The adventures of Maximilian which have been adverted to in the story are
all to be found in Theurdank, and in his early life he was probably the
brilliant eager person we have tried in some degree to describe.  In his
latter years it is well known that he was much struck by Luther’s
arguments; and, indeed, he had long been conscious of need of Church
reform, though his plans took the grotesque form of getting himself made
Pope, and taking all into his own hands.

Perhaps it was unwise to have ever so faintly sketched Ebbo’s career
through the ensuing troubles; but the history of the star and of the
spark in the stubble seemed to need completion; and the working out of
the character of the survivor was unfinished till his course had been
thought over from the dawn of the Wittenberg teaching, which must have
seemed no novelty to an heir of the doctrine of Tauler, and of the
veritably Catholic divines of old times.  The idea is of the supposed
course of a thoughtful, refined, conscientious man through the earlier
times of the Reformation, glad of the hope of cleansing the Church, but
hoping to cleanse, not to break away from her—a hope that Luther himself
long cherished, and which was not entirely frustrated till the
re-assembly at Trent in the next generation.  Justice has never been done
to the men who feared to loose their hold on the Church Catholic as the
one body to which the promises were made.  Their loyalty has been treated
as blindness, timidity, or superstition; but that there were many such
persons, and those among the very highest minds of their time, no one can
have any doubt after reading such lives as those of Friedrich the Wise of
Saxony, of Erasmus, of Vittoria Colonna, or of Cardinal Giustiniani.

_April_ 9, 1836.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“She was too young and too delicate to reject                _Page_ 37
civilization, and she let Christina braid her hair, bathe
her, and arrange her dress, with sensations of comfort
that were almost like health”  _Front_
Henceforth mine own lady-mother is the mistress of this            126
castle, and whoever speaks a rude word to her offends the
Freiherr von Adlerstein
“‘No; only I saw that you stayed here all alone,’ she              269
said, clasping her hands”




CHAPTER I
MASTER GOTTFRIED’S WORKSHOP


THE upper lattices of a tall, narrow window were open, and admitted the
view, of first some richly-tinted vine leaves and purpling grapes, then,
in dazzling freshness of new white stone, the lacework fabric of a
half-built minster spire, with a mason’s crane on the summit, bending as
though craving for a further supply of materials; and beyond, peeping
through every crevice of the exquisite open fretwork, was the intensely
blue sky of early autumn.

The lower longer panes of the window were closed, and the glass, divided
into circles and quarrels, made the scene less distinct; but still the
huge stone tower was traceable, and, farther off, the slope of a
gently-rising hill, clothed with vineyards blushing into autumn richness.
Below, the view was closed by the gray wall of a court-yard, laden with
fruit-trees in full bearing, and inclosing paved paths that radiated from
a central fountain, and left spaces between, where a few summer flowers
still lingered, and the remains of others showed what their past glory
had been.

The interior of the room was wainscoted, the floor paved with bright red
and cream-coloured tiles, and the tall stove in one corner decorated with
the same.  The eastern end of the apartment was adorned with an exquisite
small group carved in oak, representing the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth,
with the Holy Child instructed by Joseph in the use of tools, and the
Mother sitting with her book, “pondering these things in her heart.”  All
around were blocks of wood and carvings in varying states of
progress—some scarcely shaped out, and others in perfect completion.  And
the subjects were equally various.  Here was an adoring angel with folded
wings, clasped hands, and rapt face; here a majestic head of an apostle
or prophet; here a lovely virgin saint, seeming to play smilingly with
the instrument of her martyrdom; here a grotesque _miserere_ group,
illustrating a fairy tale, or caricaturing a popular fable here a
beauteous festoon of flowers and fruit, emulating nature in all save
colour; and on the work-table itself, growing under the master’s hand,
was a long wreath, entirely composed of leaves and seed-vessels in their
quaint and beauteous forms—the heart-shaped shepherd’s purse, the
mask-like skull-cap, and the crowned urn of the henbane.  The starred cap
of the poppy was actually being shaped under the tool, copied from a
green capsule, surmounted with purple velvety rays, which, together with
its rough and wavy leaf, was held in the hand of a young maiden who knelt
by the table, watching the work with eager interest.

She was not a beautiful girl—not one of those whose “bright eyes rain
influence, and judge the prize.”  She was too small, too slight, too
retiring for such a position.  If there was something lily-like in her
drooping grace, it was not the queen-lily of the garden that she
resembled, but the retiring lily of the valley—so purely, transparently
white was her skin, scarcely tinted by a roseate blush on the cheek, so
tender and modest the whole effect of her slender figure, and the soft,
downcast, pensive brown eyes, utterly dissimilar in hue from those of all
her friends and kindred, except perhaps the bright, quick ones of her
uncle, the master-carver.  Otherwise, his portly form, open visage, and
good-natured stateliness, as well as his furred cap and gold chain, were
thoroughly those of the German burgomaster of the fifteenth century; but
those glittering black eyes had not ceased to betray their French, or
rather Walloon, origin, though for several generations back the family
had been settled at Ulm.  Perhaps, too, it was Walloon quickness and
readiness of wit that had made them, so soon as they became affiliated,
so prominent in all the councils of the good free city, and so noted for
excellence in art and learning.  Indeed the present head of the family,
Master Gottfried Sorel, was so much esteemed for his learning that he had
once had serious thoughts of terming himself Magister Gothofredus
Oxalicus, and might have carried it out but for the very decided
objections of his wife, Dame Johanna, and his little niece, Christina, to
being dubbed by any such surname.

Master Gottfried had had a scapegrace younger brother named Hugh, who had
scorned both books and tools, had been the plague of the workshop, and,
instead of coming back from his wandering year of improvement, had joined
a band of roving Lanzknechts.  No more had been heard of him for a dozen
or fifteen years, when he suddenly arrived at the paternal mansion at
Ulm, half dead with intermittent fever, and with a young, broken-hearted,
and nearly expiring wife, his spoil in his Italian campaigns.  His rude
affection had utterly failed to console her for her desolated home and
slaughtered kindred, and it had so soon turned to brutality that, when
brought to comparative peace and rest in his brother’s home, there was
nothing left for the poor Italian but to lie down and die, commending her
babe in broken German to Hausfrau Johanna, and blessing Master Gottfried
for his flowing Latin assurances that the child should be to them even as
the little maiden who was lying in the God’s acre upon the hillside.

And verily the little Christina had been a precious gift to the bereaved
couple.  Her father had no sooner recovered than he returned to his
roving life, and, except for a report that he had been seen among the
retainers of one of the robber barons of the Swabian Alps, nothing had
been heard of him; and Master Gottfried only hoped to be spared the
actual pain and scandal of knowing when his eyes were blinded and his
head swept off at a blow, or when he was tumbled headlong into a moat,
suspended from a tree, or broken on the wheel: a choice of fates that was
sure sooner or later to befall him.  Meantime, both the burgomeister and
burgomeisterinn did their utmost to forget that the gentle little girl
was not their own; they set all their hopes and joys on her, and, making
her supply the place at once of son and daughter, they bred her up in all
the refinements and accomplishments in which the free citizens of Germany
took the lead in the middle and latter part of the fifteenth century.  To
aid her aunt in all house-wifely arts, to prepare dainty food and varied
liquors, and to spin, weave, and broider, was only a part of Christina’s
training; her uncle likewise set great store by her sweet Italian voice,
and caused her to be carefully taught to sing and play on the lute, and
he likewise delighted in hearing her read aloud to him from the
hereditary store of MSS. and from the dark volumes that began to proceed
from the press.  Nay, Master Gottfried had made experiments in printing
and wood-engraving on his own account, and had found no head so
intelligent, no hand so desirous to aid him, as his little Christina’s,
who, in all that needed taste and skill rather than strength, was worth
all his prentices and journeymen together.  Some fine bold wood-cuts had
been produced by their joint efforts; but these less important
occupations had of late been set aside by the engrossing interest of the
interior fittings of the great “Dome Kirk,” which for nearly a century
had been rising by the united exertions of the burghers, without any
assistance from without.  The foundation had been laid in 1377; and at
length, in the year of grace 1472, the crown of the apse had been closed
in, and matters were so forward that Master Gottfried’s stall work was
already in requisition for the choir.

“Three cubits more,” he reckoned.  “Child, hast thou found me fruits
enough for the completing of this border?”

“O yes, mine uncle.  I have the wild rosehip, and the flat shield of the
moonwort, and a pea-pod, and more whose names I know not.  But should
they all be seed and fruit?”

“Yea, truly, my Stina, for this wreath shall speak of the goodly fruits
of a completed life.”

“Even as that which you carved in spring told of the blossom and fair
promise of youth,” returned the maiden.  “Methinks the one is the most
beautiful, as it ought to be;” then, after a little pause, and some
reckoning, “I have scarce seed-pods enough in store, uncle; might we not
seek some rarer shapes in the herb-garden of Master Gerhard, the
physician?  He, too, might tell me the names of some of these.”

“True, child; or we might ride into the country beyond the walls, and
seek them.  What, little one, wouldst thou not?”

“So we go not far,” faltered Christina, colouring.

“Ha, thou hast not forgotten the fright thy companions had from the
Schlangenwald reitern when gathering Maydew?  Fear not, little coward; if
we go beyond the suburbs we will take Hans and Peter with their halberts.
But I believe thy silly little heart can scarce be free for enjoyment if
it can fancy a Reiter within a dozen leagues of thee.”

“At your side I would not fear.  That is, I would not vex thee by my
folly, and I might forget it,” replied Christina, looking down.

“My gentle child!” the old man said approvingly.  “Moreover, if our good
Raiser has his way, we shall soon be free of the reitern of
Schlangenwald, and Adlerstein, and all the rest of the mouse-trap barons.
He is hoping to form a league of us free imperial cities with all the
more reasonable and honest nobles, to preserve the peace of the country.
Even now a letter from him was read in the Town Hall to that effect; and,
when all are united against them, my lords-mousers must needs become
pledged to the league, or go down before it.”

“Ah! that will be well,” cried Christina.  “Then will our wagons be no
longer set upon at the Debateable Ford by Schlangenwald or Adlerstein;
and our wares will come safely, and there will be wealth enough to raise
our spire!  O uncle, what a day of joy will that be when Our Lady’s great
statue will be set on the summit!”

“A day that I shall scarce see, and it will be well if thou dost,”
returned her uncle, “unless the hearts of the burghers of Ulm return to
the liberality of their fathers, who devised that spire!  But what
trampling do I hear?”

There was indeed a sudden confusion in the house, and, before the uncle
and niece could rise, the door was opened by a prosperous apple-faced
dame, exclaiming in a hasty whisper, “Housefather, O Housefather, there
are a troop of reitern at the door, dismounting already;” and, as the
master came forward, brushing from his furred vest the shavings and dust
of his work, she added in a more furtive, startled accent, “and, if I
mistake not, one is thy brother!”

“He is welcome,” replied Master Gottfried, in his cheery fearless voice;
“he brought us a choice gift last time he came; and it may be he is ready
to seek peace among us after his wanderings.  Come hither, Christina, my
little one; it is well to be abashed, but thou art not a child who need
fear to meet a father.”

Christina’s extreme timidity, however, made her pale and crimson by
turns, perhaps by the infection of anxiety from her aunt, who could not
conceal a certain dissatisfaction and alarm, as the maiden, led on either
side by her adopted parents, thus advanced from the little studio into a
handsomely-carved wooden gallery, projecting into a great wainscoated
room, with a broad carved stair leading down into it.  Down this stair
the three proceeded, and reached the stone hall that lay beyond it, just
as there entered from the trellised porch, that covered the steps into
the street, a thin wiry man, in a worn and greasy buff suit, guarded on
the breast and arms with rusty steel, and a battered helmet with the
vizor up, disclosing a weather-beaten bronzed face, with somewhat wild
dark eyes, and a huge grizzled moustache forming a straight line over his
lips.  Altogether he was a complete model of the lawless Reiter or
Lanzknecht, the terror of Swabia, and the bugbear of Christina’s
imagination.  The poor child’s heart died within her as she perceived the
mutual recognition between her uncle and the new comer; and, while Master
Gottfried held out his hands with a cordial greeting of “Welcome, home,
brother Hugh,” she trembled from head to foot, as she sank on her knees,
and murmured, “Your blessing, honoured father.”

“Ha?  What, this is my girl?  What says she?  My blessing, eh?  There
then, thou hast it, child, such as I have to give, though they’ll tell
thee at Adlerstein that I am more wont to give the other sort of
blessing!  Now, give me a kiss, girl, and let me see thee!  How now!” as
he folded her in his rough arms; “thou art a mere feather, as slight as
our sick Jungfrau herself.”  And then, regarding her, as she stood
drooping, “Thou art not half the woman thy mother was—she was stately and
straight as a column, and tall withal.”

“True!” replied Hausfrau Johanna, in a marked tone; “but both she and her
poor babe had been so harassed and wasted with long journeys and
hardships, that with all our care of our Christina, she has never been
strong or well-grown.  The marvel is that she lived at all.”

“Our Christina is not beautiful, we know,” added her uncle, reassuringly
taking her hand; “but she is a good and meek maiden.”

“Well, well,” returned the Lanzknecht, “she will answer the purpose well
enough, or better than if she were fair enough to set all our fellows
together by the ears for her.  Camilla, I say—no, what’s her name,
Christina?—put up thy gear and be ready to start with me to-morrow
morning for Adlerstein.”

“For Adlerstein?” re-echoed the housemother, in a tone of horrified
dismay; and Christina would have dropped on the floor but for her uncle’s
sustaining hand, and the cheering glance with which he met her imploring
look.

“Let us come up to the gallery, and understand what you desire, brother,”
said Master Gottfried, gravely.  “Fill the cup of greeting, Hans.  Your
followers shall be entertained in the hall,” he added.

“Ay, ay,” quoth Hugh, “I will show you reason over a goblet of the old
Rosenburg.  Is it all gone yet, brother Goetz?  No?  I reckon there would
not be the scouring of a glass left of it in a week if it were at
Adlerstein.”

So saying, the trooper crossed the lower room, which contained a huge
tiled baking oven, various brilliantly-burnished cooking utensils, and a
great carved cupboard like a wooden bedstead, and, passing the door of
the bathroom, clanked up the oaken stairs to the gallery, the
reception-room of the house.  It had tapestry hangings to the wall, and
cushions both to the carved chairs and deep windows, which looked out
into the street, the whole storey projecting into close proximity with
the corresponding apartment of the Syndic Moritz, the goldsmith on the
opposite side.  An oaken table stood in the centre, and the gallery was
adorned with a dresser, displaying not only bright pewter, but goblets
and drinking cups of beautifully-shaped and coloured glass, and
saltcellars, tankards, &c. of gold and silver.

“Just as it was in the old man’s time,” said the soldier, throwing
himself into the housefather’s chair.  “A handful of Lanzknechts would
make short work with your pots and pans, good sister Johanna.”

“Heaven forbid!” said poor Johanna under her breath.  “Much good they do
you, up in a row there, making you a slave to furbishing them.  There’s
more sense in a chair like this—that does rest a man’s bones.  Here,
Camilla, girl, unlace my helmet!  What, know’st not how?  What is a woman
made for but to let a soldier free of his trappings?  Thou hast done it!
There!  Now my boots,” stretching out his legs.

“Hans shall draw off your boots, fair brother,” began the dame; but poor
Christina, the more anxious to propitiate him in little things, because
of the horror and dread with which his main purpose inspired her, was
already on her knees, pulling with her small quivering hands at the long
steel-guarded boot—a task to which she would have been utterly
inadequate, but for some lazy assistance from her father’s other foot.
She further brought a pair of her uncle’s furred slippers, while Reiter
Hugh proceeded to dangle one of the boots in the air, expatiating on its
frail condition, and expressing his intention of getting a new pair from
Master Matthias, the sutor, ere he should leave Ulm on the morrow.  Then,
again, came the dreaded subject; his daughter must go with him.

“What would you with Christina, brother?” gravely asked Master Gottfried,
seating himself on the opposite side of the stove, while out of sight the
frightened girl herself knelt on the floor, her head on her aunt’s knees,
trying to derive comfort from Dame Johanna’s clasping hands, and vehement
murmurs that they would not let their child be taken from them.  Alas!
these assurances were little in accordance with Hugh’s rough reply, “And
what is it to you what I do with mine own?”

“Only this, that, having bred her up as my child and intended heiress, I
might have some voice.”

“Oh! in choosing her mate!  Some mincing artificer, I trow, fiddling away
with wood and wire to make gauds for the fair-day!  Hast got him here?
If I like him, and she likes him, I’ll bring her back when her work is
done.”

“There is no such person as yet in the case,” said Gottfried.  “Christina
is not yet seventeen, and I would take my time to find an honest, pious
burgher, who will value this precious jewel of mine.”

“And let her polish his flagons to the end of her days,” laughed Hugh
grimly, but manifestly somewhat influenced by the notion of his brother’s
wealth.  “What, hast no child of thine own?” he added.

“None, save in Paradise,” answered Gottfried, crossing himself.  “And
thus, if Christina should remain with me, and be such as I would have
her, then, brother, my wealth, after myself and my good housewife, shall
be hers, with due provision for thee, if thou shouldst weary of thy wild
life.  Otherwise,” he added, looking down, and speaking in an under tone,
“my poor savings should go to the completion of the Dome Kirk.”

“And who told thee, Goetz, that I would do ought with the girl that
should hinder her from being the very same fat, sourkrout-cooking,
pewter-scrubbing housewife of thy mind’s eye?”

“I have heard nothing of thy designs as yet, brother Hugh, save that thou
wouldst take her to Adlerstein, which men greatly belie if it be not a
nest of robbers.”

“Aha! thou hast heard of Adlerstein!  We have made the backs of your
jolly merchants tingle as well as they could through their well-lined
doublets!  Ulm knows of Adlerstein, and the Debateable Ford!”

“It knows little to its credit,” said Gottfried, gravely; “and it knows
also that the Emperor is about to make a combination against all the
Swabian robber-holds, and that such as join not in it will fare the
worse.”

“Let Kaiser Fritz catch his bear ere he sells its hide!  He has never
tried to mount the Eagle’s Ladder!  Why, man, Adlerstein might be held
against five hundred men by sister Johanna with her rock and spindle!
’Tis a free barony, Master Gottfried, I tell thee—has never sworn
allegiance to Kaiser or Duke of Swabia either!  Freiherr Eberhard is as
much a king on his own rock as Kaiser Fritz ever was of the Romans, and
more too, for I never could find out that they thought much of our king
at Rome; and, as to gainsaying our old Freiherr, one might as well leap
over the abyss at once.”

“Yes, those old free barons are pitiless tyrants,” said Gottfried, “and I
scarce think I can understand thee aright when I hear thee say thou
wouldst carry thy daughter to such an abode.”

“It is the Freiherr’s command,” returned Hugh.  “Look you, they have had
wondrous ill-luck with their children; the Freiherrinn Kunigunde has had
a dozen at least, and only two are alive, my young Freiherr and my young
Lady Ermentrude; and no wonder, you would say, if you could see the
gracious Freiherrinn, for surely Dame Holda made a blunder when she
fished her out of the fountain woman instead of man.  She is Adlerstein
herself by birth, married her cousin, and is prouder and more dour than
our old Freiherr himself—fitter far to handle shield than swaddled babe.
And now our Jungfrau has fallen into a pining waste, that ’tis a pity to
see how her cheeks have fallen away, and how she mopes and fades.  Now,
the old Freiherr and her brother, they both dote on her, and would do
anything for her.  They thought she was bewitched, so we took old Mother
Ilsebill and tried her with the ordeal of water; but, look you, she sank
as innocent as a puppy dog, and Ursel was at fault to fix on any one
else.  Then one day, when I looked into the chamber, I saw the poor
maiden sitting, with her head hanging down, as if ’twas too heavy for
her, on a high-backed chair, no rest for her feet, and the wind blowing
keen all round her, and nothing to taste but scorched beef, or black
bread and sour wine, and her mother rating her for foolish fancies that
gave trouble.  And, when my young Freiherr was bemoaning himself that we
could not hear of a Jew physician passing our way to catch and bring up
to cure her, I said to him at last that no doctor could do for her what
gentle tendance and nursing would, for what the poor maiden needed was to
be cosseted and laid down softly, and fed with broths and possets, and
all that women know how to do with one another.  A proper scowl and hard
words I got from my gracious Lady, for wanting to put burgher softness
into an Adlerstein; but my old lord and his son opened on the scent at
once.  ‘Thou hast a daughter?’ quoth the Freiherr.  ‘So please your
gracious lordship,’ quoth I; ‘that is, if she still lives, for I left her
a puny infant.’  ‘Well,’ said my lord, ‘if thou wilt bring her here, and
her care restores my daughter to health and strength, then will I make
thee my body squire, with a right to a fourth part of all the spoil, and
feed for two horses in my stable.’  And young Freiherr Eberhard gave his
word upon it.”

Gottfried suggested that a sick nurse was the person required rather than
a child like Christina; but, as Hugh truly observed, no nurse would
voluntarily go to Adlerstein, and it was no use to wait for the hopes of
capturing one by raid or foray.  His daughter was at his own disposal,
and her services would be repaid by personal advantages to himself which
he was not disposed to forego; in effect these were the only means that
the baron had of requiting any attendance upon his daughter.

The citizens of old Germany had the strongest and most stringent ideas of
parental authority, and regarded daughters as absolute chattels of their
father; and Master Gottfried Sorel, though he alone had done the part of
a parent to his niece, felt entirely unable to withstand the nearer
claim, except by representations; and these fell utterly disregarded, as
in truth every counsel had hitherto done, upon the ears of Reiter Hugh,
ever since he had emerged from his swaddling clothes.  The plentiful
supper, full cup of wine, the confections, the soft chair, together
perhaps with his brother’s grave speech, soon, however, had the effect of
sending him into a doze, whence he started to accept civilly the proposal
of being installed in the stranger’s room, where he was speedily snoring
between two feather beds.

Then there could be freedom of speech in the gallery, where the uncle and
aunt held anxious counsel over the poor little dark-tressed head that
still lay upon good Johanna’s knees.  The dame was indignant and
resolute: “Take the child back with him into a very nest of robbers!—her
own innocent dove whom they had shielded from all evil like a very nun in
a cloister!  She should as soon think of yielding her up to be borne off
by the great Satan himself with his horns and hoofs.”

“Hugh is her father, housewife,” said the master-carver.

“The right of parents is with those that have done the duty of parents,”
returned Johanna.  “What said the kid in the fable to the goat that
claimed her from the sheep that bred her up?  I am ashamed of you,
housefather, for not better loving your own niece.”

“Heaven knows how I love her,” said Gottfried, as the sweet face was
raised up to him with a look acquitting him of the charge, and he bent to
smooth back the silken hair, and kiss the ivory brow; “but Heaven also
knows that I see no means of withholding her from one whose claim is
closer than my own—none save one; and to that even thou, housemother,
wouldst not have me resort.”

“What is it?” asked the dame, sharply, yet with some fear.

“To denounce him to the burgomasters as one of the Adlerstein retainers
who robbed Philipp der Schmidt, and have him fast laid by the heels.”

Christina shuddered, and Dame Johanna herself recoiled; but presently
exclaimed, “Nay, you could not do that, good man, but wherefore not
threaten him therewith?  Stand at his bedside in early dawn, and tell him
that, if he be not off ere daylight with both his cut-throats, the
halberdiers will be upon him.”

“Threaten what I neither could nor would perform, mother?  That were a
shrewish resource.”

“Yet would it save the child,” muttered Johanna.  But, in the meantime,
Christina was rising from the floor, and stood before them with loose
hair, tearful eyes, and wet, flushed cheeks.  “It must be thus,” she
said, in a low, but not unsteady voice.  “I can bear it better since I
have heard of the poor young lady, sick and with none to care for her.  I
will go with my father; it is my duty.  I will do my best; but oh! uncle,
so work with him that he may bring me back again.”

“This from thee, Stina!” exclaimed her aunt; “from thee who art sick for
fear of a lanzknecht!”

“The saints will be with me, and you will pray for me,” said Christina,
still trembling.

“I tell thee, child, thou knowst not what these vile dens are.  Heaven
forfend thou shouldst!” exclaimed her aunt.  “Go only to Father
Balthazar, housefather, and see if he doth not call it a sending of a
lamb among wolves.”

“Mind’st thou the carving I did for Father Balthazar’s own oratory?”
replied Master Gottfried.

“I talk not of carving!  I talk of our child!” said the dame, petulantly.

“_Ut agnus inter lupos_,” softly said Gottfried, looking tenderly, though
sadly, at his niece, who not only understood the quotation, but well
remembered the carving of the cross-marked lamb going forth from its fold
among the howling wolves.

“Alas!  I am not an apostle,” said she.

“Nay, but, in the path of duty, ’tis the same hand that sends thee
forth,” answered her uncle, “and the same will guard thee.”

“Duty, indeed!” exclaimed Johanna.  “As if any duty could lead that silly
helpless child among that herd of evil men, and women yet worse, with a
good-for-nothing father, who would sell her for a good horse to the first
dissolute Junker who fell in his way.”

“I will take care that he knows it is worth his while to restore her safe
to us.  Nor do I think so ill of Hugh as thou dost, mother.  And, for the
rest, Heaven and the saints and her own discretion must be her guard till
she shall return to us.”

“How can Heaven be expected to protect her when you are flying in its
face by not taking counsel with Father Balthazar?”

“That shalt thou do,” replied Gottfried, readily, secure that Father
Balthazar would see the matter in the same light as himself, and
tranquillize the good woman.  It was not yet so late but that a servant
could be despatched with a request that Father Balthazar, who lived not
many houses off in the same street, would favour the Burgomeisterinn
Sorel by coming to speak with her.  In a few minutes he appeared,—an aged
man, with a sensible face, of the fresh pure bloom preserved by a
temperate life.  He was a secular parish-priest, and, as well as his
friend Master Gottfried, held greatly by the views left by the famous
Strasburg preacher, Master John Tauler.  After the good housemother had,
in strong terms, laid the case before him, she expected a trenchant
decision on her own side, but, to her surprise and disappointment, he
declared that Master Gottfried was right, and that, unless Hugh Sorel
demanded anything absolutely sinful of his daughter, it was needful that
she should submit.  He repeated, in stronger terms, the assurance that
she would be protected in the endeavour to do right, and the Divine
promises which he quoted from the Latin Scriptures gave some comfort to
the niece, who understood them, while they impressed the aunt, who did
not.  There was always the hope that, whether the young lady died or
recovered, the conclusion of her illness would be the term of Christina’s
stay at Adlerstein, and with this trust Johanna must content herself.
The priest took leave, after appointing with Christina to meet her in the
confessional early in the morning before mass; and half the night was
spent by the aunt and niece in preparing Christina’s wardrobe for her
sudden journey.

Many a tear was shed over the tokens of the little services she was wont
to render, her half-done works, and pleasant studies so suddenly broken
off, and all the time Hausfrau Johanna was running on with a lecture on
the diligent preservation of her maiden discretion, with plentiful
warnings against swaggering men-at-arms, drunken lanzknechts, and, above
all, against young barons, who most assuredly could mean no good by any
burgher maiden.  The good aunt blessed the saints that her Stina was
likely only to be lovely in affectionate home eyes; but, for that matter,
idle men, shut up in a castle, with nothing but mischief to think of,
would be dangerous to Little Three Eyes herself, and Christina had best
never stir a yard from her lady’s chair, when forced to meet them.  All
this was interspersed with motherly advice how to treat the sick lady,
and receipts for cordials and possets; for Johanna began to regard the
case as a sort of second-hand one of her own.  Nay, she even turned it
over in her mind whether she should not offer herself as the Lady
Ermentrude’s sick-nurse, as being a less dangerous commodity than her
little niece: but fears for the well-being of the master-carver, and his
Wirthschaft, and still more the notion of gossip Gertrude Grundt hearing
that she had ridden off with a wild lanzknecht, made her at once reject
the plan, without even mentioning it to her husband or his niece.

By the time Hugh Sorel rolled out from between his feather beds, and was
about to don his greasy buff, a handsome new suit, finished point device,
and a pair of huge boots to correspond, had been laid by his bedside.

“Ho, ho!  Master Goetz,” said he, as he stumbled into the Stube, “I see
thy game.  Thou wouldst make it worth my while to visit the father-house
at Ulm?”

“It shall be worth thy while, indeed, if thou bringest me back my white
dove,” was Gottfried’s answer.

“And how if I bring her back with a strapping reiter son-in-law?” laughed
Hugh.  “What welcome should the fellow receive?”

“That would depend on what he might be,” replied Gottfried; and Hugh, his
love of tormenting a little allayed by satisfaction in his buff suit, and
by an eye to a heavy purse that lay by his brother’s hand on the table,
added, “Little fear of that.  Our fellows would look for lustier brides
than yon little pale face.  ’Tis whiter than ever this morning,—but no
tears.  That is my brave girl.”

“Yes, father, I am ready to do your bidding,” replied Christina, meekly.

“That is well, child.  Mark me, no tears.  Thy mother wept day and night,
and, when she had wept out her tears, she was sullen, when I would have
been friendly towards her.  It was the worse for her.  But, so long as
thou art good daughter to me, thou shalt find me good father to thee;”
and for a moment there was a kindliness in his eye which made it
sufficiently like that of his brother to give some consolation to the
shrinking heart that he was rending from all it loved; and she steadied
her voice for another gentle profession of obedience, for which she felt
strengthened by the morning’s orisons.

“Well said, child.  Now canst sit on old Nibelung’s croup?  His back-bone
is somewhat sharper than if he had battened in a citizen’s stall; but, if
thine aunt can find thee some sort of pillion, I’ll promise thee the best
ride thou hast had since we came from Innspruck, ere thou canst
remember.”

“Christina has her own mule,” replied her uncle, “without troubling
Nibelung to carry double.”

“Ho! her own!  An overfed burgomaster sort of a beast, that will turn
restive at the first sight of the Eagle’s Ladder!  However, he may carry
her so far, and, if we cannot get him up the mountain, I shall know what
to do with him,” he muttered to himself.

But Hugh, like many a gentleman after him, was recusant at the sight of
his daughter’s luggage; and yet it only loaded one sumpter mule, besides
forming a few bundles which could be easily bestowed upon the saddles of
his two knappen, while her lute hung by a silken string on her arm.  Both
she and her aunt thought she had been extremely moderate; but his cry
was, What could she want with so much?  Her mother had never been allowed
more than would go into a pair of saddle-bags; and his own Jungfrau—she
had never seen so much gear together in her life; he would be laughed to
scorn for his presumption in bringing such a fine lady into the castle;
it would be well if Freiherr Eberhard’s bride brought half as much.

Still he had a certain pride in it—he was, after all, by birth and
breeding a burgher—and there had been evidently a softening and
civilizing influence in the night spent beneath his paternal roof, and
old habits, and perhaps likewise in the submission he had met with from
his daughter.  The attendants, too, who had been pleased with their
quarters, readily undertook to carry their share of the burthen, and,
though he growled and muttered a little, he at length was won over to
consent, chiefly, as it seemed, by Christina’s obliging readiness to
leave behind the bundle that contained her holiday kirtle.

He had been spared all needless irritation.  Before his waking, Christina
had been at the priest’s cell, and had received his last blessings and
counsels, and she had, on the way back, exchanged her farewells and tears
with her two dearest friends, Barbara Schmidt, and Regina Grundt,
confiding to the former her cage of doves, and to the latter the myrtle,
which, like every German maiden, she cherished in her window, to supply
her future bridal wreath.  Now pale as death, but so resolutely composed
as to be almost disappointing to her demonstrative aunt, she quietly went
through her home partings; while Hausfrau Johanna adjured her father by
all that was sacred to be a true guardian and protector of the child, and
he could not forbear from a few tormenting auguries about the lanzknecht
son-in-law.  Their effect was to make the good dame more passionate in
her embraces and admonitions to Christina to take care of herself.  She
would have a mass said every day that Heaven might have a care of her!

Master Gottfried was going to ride as far as the confines of the free
city’s territory, and his round, sleek, cream-coloured palfrey, used to
ambling in civic processions, was as great a contrast to raw-boned,
wild-eyed Nibelung, all dappled with misty grey, as was the stately,
substantial burgher to his lean, hungry-looking brother, or Dame
Johanna’s dignified, curled, white poodle, which was forcibly withheld
from following Christina, to the coarse-bristled, wolfish-looking hound
who glared at the household pet with angry and contemptuous eyes, and
made poor Christina’s heart throb with terror whenever it bounded near
her.

Close to her uncle she kept, as beneath the trellised porches that came
down from the projecting gables of the burghers’ houses many a well-known
face gazed and nodded, as they took their way through the crooked
streets, many a beggar or poor widow waved her a blessing.  Out into the
market-place, with its clear fountain adorned with arches and statues,
past the rising Dome Kirk, where the swarms of workmen unbonneted to the
master-carver, and the reiter paused with an irreverent sneer at the
small progress made since he could first remember the building.  How poor
little Christina’s soul clung to every cusp of the lacework spire, every
arch of the window, each of which she had hailed as an achievement!  The
tears had well-nigh blinded her in a gush of feeling that came on her
unawares, and her mule had his own way as he carried her under the arch
of the tall and beautifully-sculptured bridge tower, and over the noble
bridge across the Danube.

Her uncle spoke much, low and earnestly, to his brother.  She knew it was
in commendation of her to his care, and an endeavour to impress him with
a sense of the kind of protection she would require, and she kept out of
earshot.  It was enough for her to see her uncle still, and feel that his
tenderness was with her, and around her.  But at last he drew his rein.
“And now, my little one, the daughter of my heart, I must bid thee
farewell,” he said.

Christina could not be restrained from springing from her mule, and
kneeling on the grass to receive his blessing, her face hidden in her
hands, that her father might not see her tears.

“The good God bless thee, my child,” said Gottfried, who seldom invoked
the saints; “bless thee, and bring thee back in His own good time.  Thou
hast been a good child to us; be so to thine own father.  Do thy work,
and come back to us again.”

The tears rained down his cheeks, as Christina’s head lay on his bosom,
and then with a last kiss he lifted her again on her mule, mounted his
horse, and turned back to the city, with his servant.

Hugh was merciful enough to let his daughter gaze long after the
retreating figure ere he summoned her on.  All day they rode, at first
through meadow lands and then through more broken, open ground, where at
mid-day they halted, and dined upon the plentiful fare with which the
housemother had provided them, over which Hugh smacked his lips, and
owned that they did live well in the old town!  Could Christina make such
sausages?

“Not as well as my aunt.”

“Well, do thy best, and thou wilt win favour with the baron.”

The evening began to advance, and Christina was very weary, as the purple
mountains that she had long watched with a mixture of fear and hope began
to look more distinct, and the ground was often in abrupt ascents.  Her
father, without giving space for complaints, hurried her on.  He must
reach the Debateable Ford ere dark.  It was, however, twilight when they
came to an open space, where, at the foot of thickly forest-clad rising
ground, lay an expanse of turf and rich grass, through which a stream
made its way, standing in a wide tranquil pool as if to rest after its
rough course from the mountains.  Above rose, like a dark wall, crag upon
crag, peak on peak, in purple masses, blending with the sky; and Hugh,
pointing upwards to a turreted point, apparently close above their heads,
where a star of light was burning, told her that there was Adlerstein,
and this was the Debateable Ford.

In fact, as he explained, while splashing through the shallow expanse,
the stream had changed its course.  It was the boundary between the lands
of Schlangenwald and Adlerstein, but it had within the last sixty years
burst forth in a flood, and had then declined to return to its own bed,
but had flowed in a fresh channel to the right of the former one.  The
Freiherren von Adlerstein claimed the ground to the old channel, the
Graffen von Schlangenwald held that the river was the landmark; and the
dispute had a greater importance than seemed explained from the worth of
the rushy space of ground in question, for this was the passage of the
Italian merchants on their way from Constance, and every load that was
overthrown in the river was regarded as the lawful prey of the noble on
whose banks the catastrophe befell.

Any freight of goods was anxiously watched by both nobles, and it was not
their fault if no disaster befell the travellers.  Hugh talked of the
Schlangenwald marauders with the bitterness of a deadly feud, but
manifestly did not breathe freely till his whole convoy were safe across
both the wet and the dry channel.

Christina supposed they should now ascend to the castle; but her father
laughed, saying that the castle was not such a step off as she fancied,
and that they must have daylight for the Eagle’s Stairs.  He led the way
through the trees, up ground that she thought mountain already, and
finally arrived at a miserable little hut, which served the purpose of an
inn.

He was received there with much obsequiousness, and was plainly a great
authority there.  Christina, weary and frightened, descended from her
mule, and was put under the protection of a wild, rough-looking peasant
woman, who stared at her like something from another world, but at length
showed her a nook behind a mud partition, where she could spread her
mantle, and at least lie down, and tell her beads unseen, if she could
not sleep in the stifling, smoky atmosphere, amid the sounds of carousal
among her father and his fellows.

The great hound came up and smelt to her.  His outline was so-wolfish,
that she had nearly screamed: but, more in terror at the men who might
have helped her than even at the beast, she tried to smooth him with her
trembling hand, whispered his name of “Festhold,” and found him licking
her hand, and wagging his long rough tail.  And he finally lay down at
her feet, as though to protect her.

“Is it a sign that good angels will not let me be hurt?” she thought,
and, wearied out, she slept.




CHAPTER II
THE EYRIE


CHRISTINA SOREL awoke to a scene most unlike that which had been wont to
meet her eyes in her own little wainscoted chamber high in the gabled
front of her uncle’s house.  It was a time when the imperial free towns
of Germany had advanced nearly as far as those of Italy in civilization,
and had reached a point whence they retrograded grievously during the
Thirty Years’ War, even to an extent that they have never entirely
recovered.  The country immediately around them shared the benefits of
their civilization, and the free peasant-proprietors lived in great ease
and prosperity, in beautiful and picturesque farmsteads, enjoying a
careless abundance, and keeping numerous rural or religious feasts, where
old Teutonic mythological observances had received a Christian colouring
and adaptation.

In the mountains, or around the castles, it was usually very different.
The elective constitution of the empire, the frequent change of dynasty,
the many disputed successions, had combined to render the sovereign
authority uncertain and feeble, and it was seldom really felt save in the
hereditary dominions of the Kaiser for the time being.  Thus, while the
cities advanced in the power of self-government, and the education it
conveyed, the nobles, especially those whose abodes were not easily
accessible, were often practically under no government at all, and felt
themselves accountable to no man.  The old wild freedom of the Suevi, and
other Teutonic tribes, still technically, and in many cases practically,
existed.  The Heretogen, Heerzogen, or, as we call them, Dukes, had
indeed accepted employment from the Kaiser as his generals, and had
received rewards from him; the Gerefen, or Graffen, of all kinds were his
judges, the titles of both being proofs of their holding commissions
from, and being thus dependent on, the court.  But the Freiherren, a word
very inadequately represented by our French term of baron, were
absolutely free, “never in bondage to any man,” holding their own, and
owing no duty, no office; poorer, because unendowed by the royal
authority, but holding themselves infinitely higher, than the pensioners
of the court.  Left behind, however, by their neighbours, who did their
part by society, and advanced with it, the Freiherren had been for the
most part obliged to give up their independence and fall into the system,
but so far in the rear, that they ranked, like the barons of France and
England, as the last order of nobility.

Still, however, in the wilder and more mountainous parts of the country,
some of the old families of unreduced, truly free Freiherren lingered,
their hand against every man, every man’s hand against them, and ever
becoming more savage, both positively and still more proportionately, as
their isolation and the general progress around them became greater.  The
House of Austria, by gradually absorbing hereditary states into its own
possessions, was, however, in the fifteenth century, acquiring a
preponderance that rendered its possession of the imperial throne almost
a matter of inheritance, and moreover rendered the supreme power far more
effective than it had ever previously been.  Freidrich III. a man still
in full vigour, and with an able and enterprising son already elected to
the succession, was making his rule felt, and it was fast becoming
apparent that the days of the independent baronies were numbered, and
that the only choice that would soon be left them would be between making
terms and being forcibly reduced.  Von Adlerstein was one of the oldest
of these free families.  If the lords of the Eagle’s Stone had ever
followed the great Konrads and Freidrichs of Swabia in their imperial
days, their descendants had taken care to forget the weakness, and
believed themselves absolutely free from all allegiance.

And the wildness of their territory was what might be expected from their
hostility to all outward influences.  The hostel, if it deserved the
name, was little more than a charcoal-burner’s hut, hidden in the woods
at the foot of the mountain, serving as a halting-place for the
Freiherren’s retainers ere they attempted the ascent.  The inhabitants
were allowed to ply their trade of charring wood in the forest on
condition of supplying the castle with charcoal, and of affording a
lodging to the followers on occasions like the present.

Grimy, half-clad, and brawny, with the whites of his eyes gleaming out of
his black face, Jobst the Kohler startled Christina terribly when she
came into the outer room, and met him returning from his night’s work,
with his long stoking-pole in his hand.  Her father shouted with laughter
at her alarm.

“Thou thinkest thyself in the land of the kobolds and dwarfs, my girl!
Never mind, thou wilt see worse than honest Jobst before thou hast done.
Now, eat a morsel and be ready—mountain air will make thee hungry ere
thou art at the castle.  And, hark thee, Jobst, thou must give
stable-room to yon sumpter-mule for the present, and let some of my
daughter’s gear lie in the shed.”

“O father!” exclaimed Christina, in dismay.

“We’ll bring it up, child, by piecemeal,” he said in a low voice, “as we
can; but if such a freight came to the castle at once, my lady would have
her claws on it, and little more wouldst thou ever see thereof.
Moreover, I shall have enough to do to look after thee up the ascent,
without another of these city-bred beasts.”

“I hope the poor mule will be well cared for.  I can pay for—” began
Christina; but her father squeezed her arm, and drowned her soft voice in
his loud tones.

“Jobst will take care of the beast, as belonging to me.  Woe betide him,
if I find it the worse!”—and his added imprecations seemed unnecessary,
so earnest were the asseverations of both the man and his wife that the
animal should be well cared for.

“Look you, Christina,” said Hugh Sorel, as soon as he had placed her on
her mule, and led her out of hearing, “if thou hast any gold about thee,
let it be the last thing thou ownest to any living creature up there.”
Then, as she was about to speak—“Do not even tell me.  I _will_ not
know.”  The caution did not add much to Christina’s comfort; but she
presently asked, “Where is thy steed, father?”

“I sent him up to the castle with the Schneiderlein and Yellow Lorentz,”
answered the father.  “I shall have ado enough on foot with thee before
we are up the Ladder.”

The father and daughter were meantime proceeding along a dark path
through oak and birch woods, constantly ascending, until the oak grew
stunted and disappeared, and the opening glades showed steep, stony,
torrent-furrowed ramparts of hillside above them, looking to Christina’s
eyes as if she were set to climb up the cathedral side like a snail or a
fly.  She quite gasped for breath at the very sight, and was told in
return to wait and see what she would yet say to the Adlerstreppe, or
Eagle’s Ladder.  Poor child! she had no raptures for romantic scenery;
she knew that jagged peaks made very pretty backgrounds in illuminations,
but she had much rather have been in the smooth meadows of the environs
of Ulm.  The Danube looked much more agreeable to her, silver-winding
between its green banks, than did the same waters leaping down with noisy
voices in their stony, worn beds to feed the river that she only knew in
his grave breadth and majesty.  Yet, alarmed as she was, there was
something in the exhilaration and elasticity of the mountain air that
gave her an entirely new sensation of enjoyment and life, and seemed to
brace her limbs and spirits for whatever might be before her; and,
willing to show herself ready to be gratified, she observed on the
freshness and sweetness of the air.

“Thou find’st it out, child?  Ay, ’tis worth all the feather-beds and
pouncet-boxes in Ulm; is it not?  That accursed Italian fever never left
me till I came up here.  A man can scarce draw breath in your foggy
meadows below there.  Now then, here is the view open.  What think you of
the Eagle’s Nest?”

For, having passed beyond the region of wood they had come forth upon the
mountain-side.  A not immoderately steep slope of boggy, mossy-looking
ground covered with bilberries, cranberries, &c. and with bare rocks here
and there rising, went away above out of her ken; but the path she was
upon turned round the shoulder of the mountain, and to the left, on a
ledge of rock cut off apparently on their side by a deep ravine, and with
a sheer precipice above and below it, stood a red stone pile, with one
turret far above the rest.

“And this is Schloss Adlerstein?” she exclaimed.

“That is Schloss Adlerstein; and there shalt thou be in two hours’ time,
unless the devil be more than usually busy, or thou mak’st a fool of
thyself.  If so, not Satan himself could save thee.”

It was well that Christina had resolution to prevent her making a fool of
herself on the spot, for the thought of the pathway turned her so dizzy
that she could only shut her eyes, trusting that her father did not see
her terror.  Soon the turn round to the side of the mountain was made,
and the road became a mere track worn out on the turf on the hillside,
with an abyss beneath, close to the edge of which the mule, of course,
walked.

When she ventured to look again, she perceived that the ravine was like
an enormous crack open on the mountain-side, and that the stream that
formed the Debateable Ford flowed down the bottom of it.  The ravine
itself went probably all the way up the mountain, growing shallower as it
ascended higher; but here, where Christina beheld it, it was extremely
deep, and savagely desolate and bare.  She now saw that the Eagle’s
Ladder was a succession of bare gigantic terraces of rock, of which the
opposite side of the ravine was composed, and on one of which stood the
castle.  It was no small mystery to her how it had ever been built, or
how she was ever to get there.  She saw in the opening of the ravine the
green meadows and woods far below; and, when her father pointed out to
her the Debateable Ford, apparently much nearer to the castle than they
themselves were at present, she asked why they had so far overpassed the
castle, and come by this circuitous course.

“Because,” said Hugh, “we are not eagles outright.  Seest thou not, just
beyond the castle court, this whole crag of ours breaks off short, falls
like the town wall straight down into the plain?  Even this cleft that we
are crossing by, the only road a horse can pass, breaks off short and
sudden too, so that the river is obliged to take leaps which nought else
but a chamois could compass.  A footpath there is, and Freiherr Eberhard
takes it at all times, being born to it; but even I am too stiff for the
like.  Ha! ha!  Thy uncle may talk of the Kaiser and his League, but he
would change his note if we had him here.”

“Yet castles have been taken by hunger,” said Christina.

“What, knowest thou so much?—True!  But look you,” pointing to a white
foamy thread that descended the opposite steeps, “yonder beck dashes
through the castle court, and it never dries; and see you the ledge the
castle stands on?  It winds on out of your sight, and forms a path which
leads to the village of Adlerstein, out on the other slope of the
mountains; and ill were it for the serfs if they victualled not the
castle well.”

The fearful steepness of the ground absorbed all Christina’s attention.
The road, or rather stairs, came down to the stream at the bottom of the
fissure, and then went again on the other side up still more tremendous
steeps, which Hugh climbed with a staff, sometimes with his hand on the
bridle, but more often only keeping a watchful eye on the sure-footed
mule, and an arm to steady his daughter in the saddle when she grew
absolutely faint with giddiness at the abyss around her.  She was too
much in awe of him to utter cry or complaint, and, when he saw her effort
to subdue her mortal terror, he was far from unkind, and let her feel his
protecting strength.

Presently a voice was heard above—“What, Sorel, hast brought her!
Trudchen is wearying for her.”

The words were in the most boorish dialect and pronunciation, the
stranger to Christina’s ears, because intercourse with foreign merchants,
and a growing affectation of Latinism, had much refined the city language
to which she was accustomed; and she was surprised to perceive by her
father’s gesture and address that the speaker must be one of the lords of
the castle.  She looked up, and saw on the pathway above her a tall,
large-framed young man, his skin dyed red with sun and wind, in odd
contrast with his pale shaggy hair, moustache, and beard, as though the
weather had tanned the one and bleached the other.  His dress was a still
shabbier buff suit than her father had worn, but with a
richly-embroidered belt sustaining a hunting-horn with finely-chased
ornaments of tarnished silver, and an eagle’s plume was fastened into his
cap with a large gold Italian coin.  He stared hard at the maiden, but
vouchsafed her no token of greeting—only distressed her considerably by
distracting her father’s attention from her mule by his questions about
the journey, all in the same rude, coarse tone and phraseology.  Some
amount of illusion was dispelled.  Christina was quite prepared to find
the mountain lords dangerous ruffians, but she had expected the graces of
courtesy and high birth; but, though there was certainly an air of
command and freedom of bearing about the present specimen, his manners
and speech were more uncouth than those of any newly-caught apprentice of
her uncle, and she could not help thinking that her good aunt Johanna
need not have troubled herself about the danger of her taking a liking to
any such young Freiherr as she here beheld.

By this time a last effort of the mule had climbed to the level of the
castle.  As her father had shown her, there was precipice on two sides of
the building; on the third, a sheer wall of rock going up to a huge
height before it reached another of the Eagle’s Steps; and on the fourth,
where the gateway was, the little beck had been made to flow in a deep
channel that had been hollowed out to serve as a moat, before it bounded
down to swell the larger water-course in the ravine.  A temporary bridge
had been laid across; the drawbridge was out of order, and part of Hugh’s
business had been to procure materials for mending its apparatus.
Christina was told to dismount and cross on foot.  The unrailed board, so
close to the abyss, and with the wild water foaming above and below, was
dreadful to her; and, though she durst not speak, she hung back with an
involuntary shudder, as her father, occupied with the mule, did not think
of giving her a hand.  The young baron burst out into an unrestrained
laugh—a still greater shock to her feelings; but at the same time he
roughly took her hand, and almost dragged her across, saying, “City
bred—ho, ho!”  “Thanks, sir,” she strove to say, but she was very near
weeping with the terror and strangeness of all around.

The low-browed gateway, barely high enough to admit a man on horseback,
opened before her, almost to her feelings like the gate of the grave, and
she could not help crossing herself, with a silent prayer for protection,
as she stepped under it, and came into the castle court—not such a court
as gave its name to fair courtesy, but, if truth must be told, far more
resembling an ill-kept, ill-savoured stable-yard, with the piggeries
opening into it.  In unpleasantly close quarters, the Schneiderlein, or
little tailor, _i.e._ the biggest and fiercest of all the knappen, was
grooming Nibelung; three long-backed, long-legged, frightful swine were
grubbing in a heap of refuse; four or five gaunt ferocious-looking dogs
came bounding up to greet their comrade Festhold; and a great old
long-bearded goat stood on the top of the mixen, looking much disposed to
butt at any newcomer.  The Sorel family had brought cleanliness from
Flanders, and Hausfrau Johanna was scrupulously dainty in all her
appointments.  Christina scarcely knew how she conveyed herself and her
blue kirtle across the bemired stones to the next and still darker
portal, under which a wide but rough ill-hewn stair ascended.  The
stables, in fact, occupied the lower floor of the main building, and not
till these stairs had ascended above them did they lead out into the
castle hall.  Here were voices—voices rude and harsh, like those
Christina had shrunk from in passing drinking booths.  There was a long
table, with rough men-at-arms lounging about, and staring rudely at her;
and at the upper end, by a great open chimney, sat, half-dozing, an
elderly man, more rugged in feature than his son; and yet, when he roused
himself and spoke to Hugh, there was a shade more of breeding, and less
of clownishness in his voice and deportment, as if he had been less
entirely devoid of training.  A tall darkly-robed woman stood beside
him—it was her harsh tone of reproof and command that had so startled
Christina as she entered—and her huge towering cap made her look gigantic
in the dim light of the smoky hall.  Her features had been handsome, but
had become hardened into a grim wooden aspect; and with sinking spirits
Christina paused at the step of the daïs, and made her reverence, wishing
she could sink beneath the stones of the pavement out of sight of these
terrible personages.

“So that’s the wench you have taken all this trouble for,” was
Freiherrinn Kunigunde’s greeting.  “She looks like another sick baby to
nurse; but I’ll have no trouble about her;—that is all.  Take her up to
Ermentrude; and thou, girl, have a care thou dost her will, and puttest
none of thy city fancies into her head.”

“And hark thee, girl,” added the old Freiherr, sitting up.  “So thou
canst nurse her well, thou shalt have a new gown and a stout husband.”

“That way,” pointed the lady towards one of the four corner towers; and
Christina moved doubtfully towards it, reluctant to quit her father, her
only protector, and afraid to introduce herself.  The younger Freiherr,
however, stepped before her, went striding two or three steps at a time
up the turret stair, and, before Christina had wound her way up, she
heard a thin, impatient voice say, “Thou saidst she was come, Ebbo.”

“Yes, even so,” she heard Freiherr Eberhard return; “but she is slow and
town-bred.  She was afraid of crossing the moat.”  And then both laughed,
so that Christina’s cheeks tingled as she emerged from the turret into
another vaulted room.  “Here she is,” quoth the brother; “now will she
make thee quite well.”

It was a very bare and desolate room, with no hangings to the rough stone
walls, and scarcely any furniture, except a great carved bedstead, one
wooden chair, a table, and some stools.  On the bare floor, in front of
the fire, her arm under her head, and a profusion of long hair falling
round her like flax from a distaff, lay wearily a little figure, beside
whom Sir Eberhard was kneeling on one knee.

“Here is my sisterling,” said he, looking up to the newcomer.  “They say
you burgher women have ways of healing the sick.  Look at her.  Think you
you can heal her?”

In an excess of dumb shyness Ermentrude half rose, and effectually
hindered any observations on her looks by hiding her face away upon her
brother’s knee.  It was the gesture of a child of five years old, but
Ermentrude’s length of limb forbade Christina to suppose her less than
fourteen or fifteen.  “What, wilt not look at her?” he said, trying to
raise her head; and then, holding out one of her wasted, feverish hands
to Christina, he again asked, with a wistfulness that had a strange
effect from the large, tall man, almost ten years her elder, “Canst thou
cure her, maiden?”

“I am no doctor, sir,” replied Christina; “but I could, at least, make
her more comfortable.  The stone is too hard for her.”

“I will not go away; I want the fire,” murmured the sick girl, holding
out her hands towards it, and shivering.

Christina quickly took off her own thick cloth mantle, well lined with
dressed lambskins, laid it on the floor, rolled the collar of it over a
small log of wood—the only substitute she could see for a pillow—and
showed an inviting couch in an instant.  Ermentrude let her brother lay
her down, and then was covered with the ample fold.  She smiled as she
turned up her thin, wasted face, faded into the same whitey-brown tint as
her hair.  “That is good,” she said, but without thanks; and, feeling the
soft lambswool: “Is that what you burgher-women wear?  Father is to give
me a furred mantle, if only some court dame would pass the Debateable
Ford.  But the Schlangenwaldern got the last before ever we could get
down.  Jobst was so stupid.  He did not give us warning in time; but he
is to be hanged next time if he does not.”

Christina’s blood curdled as she heard this speech in a weak little
complaining tone, that otherwise put her sadly in mind of Barbara
Schmidt’s little sister, who had pined and wasted to death.  “Never mind,
Trudchen,” answered the brother kindly; “meantime I have kept all the
wild catskins for thee, and may be this—this—_she_ could sew them up into
a mantle for thee.”

“O let me see,” cried the young lady eagerly; and Sir Eberhard, walking
off, presently returned with an armful of the beautiful brindled furs of
the mountain cat, reminding Christina of her aunt’s gentle domestic
favourite.  Ermentrude sat up, and regarded the placing out of them with
great interest; and thus her brother left her employed, and so much
delighted that she had not flagged, when a great bell proclaimed that it
was the time for the noontide meal, for which Christina, in spite of all
her fears of the company below stairs, had been constrained by mountain
air to look forward with satisfaction.

Ermentrude, she found, meant to go down, but with no notion of the
personal arrangements that Christina had been wont to think a needful
preliminary.  With all her hair streaming, down she went, and was so
gladly welcomed by her father that it was plain that her presence was
regarded as an unusual advance towards recovery, and Christina feared
lest he might already be looking out for the stout husband.  She had much
to tell him about the catskin cloak, and then she was seized with eager
curiosity at the sight of Christina’s bundles, and especially at her
lute, which she must hear at once.

“Not now,” said her mother, “there will be jangling and jingling enough
by and by—meat now.”

The whole establishment were taking their places—or rather tumbling into
them.  A battered, shapeless metal vessel seemed to represent the
salt-cellar, and next to it Hugh Sorel seated himself, and kept a place
for her beside him.  Otherwise she would hardly have had seat or food.’
She was now able to survey the inmates of the castle.  Besides the family
themselves, there were about a dozen men, all ruffianly-looking, and of
much lower grade than her father, and three women.  One, old Ursel, the
wife of Hatto the forester, was a bent, worn, but not ill-looking woman,
with a motherly face; the younger ones were hard, bold creatures, from
whom Christina felt a shrinking recoil.  The meal was dressed by Ursel
and her kitchen boy.  From a great cauldron, goat’s flesh and broth
together were ladled out into wooden bowls.  That every one provided
their own spoon and knife—no fork—was only what Christina was used to in
the most refined society, and she had the implements in a pouch hanging
to her girdle; but she was not prepared for the unwashed condition of the
bowls, nor for being obliged to share that of her father—far less for the
absence of all blessing on the meal, and the coarse boisterousness of
manners prevailing thereat.  Hungry as she was, she did not find it easy
to take food under these circumstances, and she was relieved when
Ermentrude, overcome by the turmoil, grew giddy, and was carried upstairs
by her father, who laid her down upon her great bed, and left her to the
attendance of Christina.  Ursel had followed, but was petulantly repulsed
by her young lady in favour of the newcomer, and went away grumbling.

Nestled on her bed, Ermentrude insisted on hearing the lute, and
Christina had to creep down to fetch it, with some other of her goods, in
trembling haste, and redoubled disgust at the aspect of the meal, which
looked even more repulsive in this later stage, and to one who was no
longer partaking of it.

Low and softly, with a voice whence she could scarcely banish tears, and
in dread of attracting attention, Christina sung to the sick girl, who
listened with a sort of rude wonder, and finally was lulled to sleep.
Christina ventured to lay down her instrument and move towards the
window, heavily mullioned with stone, barred with iron, and glazed with
thick glass; being in fact the only glazed window in the castle.  To her
great satisfaction it did not look out over the loathsome court, but over
the opening of the ravine.  The apartment occupied the whole floor of the
keep; it was stone-paved, but the roof was boarded, and there was a round
turret at each angle.  One contained the staircase, and was that which
ran up above the keep, served as a watch-tower, and supported the Eagle
banner.  The other three were empty, and one of these, which had a strong
door, and a long loophole window looking out over the open country,
Christina hoped that she might appropriate.  The turret was immediately
over the perpendicular cliff that descended into the plain.  A stone
thrown from the window would have gone straight down, she knew not where.
Close to her ears rushed the descending waterfall in its leap over the
rock side, and her eyes could rest themselves on the green meadow land
below, and the smooth water of the Debateable Ford; nay—far, far away
beyond retreating ridges of wood and field—she thought she could track a
silver line and, guided by it, a something that might be a city.  Her
heart leapt towards it, but she was recalled by Ermentrude’s fretfully
imperious voice.

“I was only looking forth from the window, lady,” she said, returning.

“Ah! thou saw’st no travellers at the Ford?” cried Ermentrude, starting
up with lively interest.

“No, lady; I was gazing at the far distance.  Know you if it be indeed
Ulm that we see from these windows?”

“Ulm?  That is where thou comest from?” said Ermentrude languidly.

“My happy home, with my dear uncle and aunt!  O, if I can but see it
hence, it will be joy!”

“I do not know.  Let me see,” said Ermentrude, rising; but at the window
her pale blue eyes gazed vacantly as if she did not know what she was
looking at or for.

“Ah! if the steeple of the Dome Kirk were but finished, I could not
mistake it,” said Christina.  “How beauteous the white spire will look
from hence!”

“Dome Kirk?” repeated Ermentrude; “what is that?”

Such an entire blank as the poor child’s mind seemed to be was
inconceivable to the maiden, who had been bred up in the busy hum of men,
where the constant resort of strange merchants, the daily interests of a
self-governing municipality, and the numerous festivals, both secular and
religious, were an unconscious education, even without that which had
been bestowed upon her by teachers, as well as by her companionship with
her uncle, and participation in his studies, taste and arts.

Ermentrude von Adlerstein had, on the contrary, not only never gone
beyond the Kohler’s hut on the one side, and the mountain village on the
other, but she never seen more of life than the festival at the wake the
hermitage chapel there on Midsummer-day.  The only strangers who ever
came to the castle were disbanded lanzknechts who took service with her
father, or now and then a captive whom he put to ransom.  She knew
absolutely nothing of the world, except for a general belief that
Freiherren lived there to do what they chose with other people, and that
the House of Adlerstein was the freest and noblest in existence.  Also
there was a very positive hatred to the house of Schlangenwald, and no
less to that of Adlerstein Wildschloss, for no reason that Christina
could discover save that, being a younger branch of the family, they had
submitted to the Emperor.  To destroy either the Graf von Schlangenwald,
or her Wildschloss cousin, was evidently the highest gratification
Ermentrude could conceive; and, for the rest, that her father and brother
should make successful captures at the Debateable Ford was the more
abiding, because more practicable hope.  She had no further ideas, except
perhaps to elude her mother’s severity, and to desire her brother’s
success in chamois-hunting.  The only mental culture she had ever
received was that old Ursel had taught her the Credo, Pater Noster, and
Ave, as correctly as might be expected from a long course of traditionary
repetitions of an incomprehensible language.  And she knew besides a few
German rhymes and jingles, half Christian, half heathen, with a legend or
two which, if the names were Christian, ran grossly wild from all
Christian meaning or morality.  As to the amenities, nay, almost the
proprieties, of life, they were less known in that baronial castle than
in any artisan’s house at Ulm.  So little had the sick girl figured them
to herself, that she did not even desire any greater means of ease than
she possessed.  She moaned and fretted indeed, with aching limbs and
blank weariness, but without the slightest formed desire for anything to
remove her discomfort, except the few ameliorations she knew, such as
sitting on her brother’s knee, with her head on his shoulder, or tasting
the mountain berries that he gathered for her.  Any other desire she
exerted herself to frame was for finery to be gained from the spoils of
travellers.

And this was Christina’s charge, whom she must look upon as the least
alien spirit in this dreadful castle of banishment!  The young and old
lords seemed to her savage bandits, who frightened her only less than did
the proud sinister expression of the old lady, for she had not even the
merit of showing any tenderness towards the sickly girl, of whom she was
ashamed, and evidently regarded the town-bred attendant as a contemptible
interloper.

Long, long did the maiden weep and pray that night after Ermentrude had
sunk to sleep.  She strained her eyes with home-sick longings to detect
lights where she thought Ulm might be; and, as she thought of her uncle
and aunt, the poodle and the cat round the stove, the maids spinning and
the prentices knitting as her uncle read aloud some grave good book, most
probably the legend of the saint of the day, and contrasted it with the
rude gruff sounds of revelry that found their way up the turret stairs,
she could hardly restrain her sobs from awakening the young lady whose
bed she was to share.  She thought almost with envy of her own patroness,
who was cast into the lake of Bolsena with a millstone about her neck—a
better fate, thought she, than to live on in such an abode of
loathsomeness and peril.

But then had not St. Christina floated up alive, bearing up her millstone
with her?  And had not she been put into a dungeon full of venomous
reptiles who, when they approached her, had all been changed to harmless
doves?  Christina had once asked Father Balthazar how this could be; and
had he not replied that the Church did not teach these miracles as
matters of faith, but that she might there discern in figure how meek
Christian holiness rose above all crushing burthens, and transformed the
rudest natures.  This poor maiden-dying, perhaps; and oh! how unfit to
live or die!—might it be her part to do some good work by her, and infuse
some Christian hope, some godly fear?  Could it be for this that the
saints had led her hither?




CHAPTER III
THE FLOTSAM AND JETSAM OF THE DEBATEABLE FORD


LIFE in Schloss Adlerstein was little less intolerable than Christina’s
imagination had depicted it.  It was entirely devoid of all the graces of
chivalry, and its squalor and coarseness, magnified into absurdity by
haughtiness and violence, were almost inconceivable.  Fortunately for
her, the inmates of the castle resided almost wholly below stairs in the
hall and kitchen, and in some dismal dens in the thickness of their
walls.  The height of the keep was intended for dignity and defence,
rather than for habitation; and the upper chamber, with its great
state-bed, where everybody of the house of Adlerstein was born and died,
was not otherwise used, except when Ermentrude, unable to bear the
oppressive confusion below stairs, had escaped thither for quietness’
sake.  No one else wished to inhabit it.  The chamber above was filled
with the various appliances for the defence of the castle; and no one
would have ever gone up the turret stairs had not a warder been usually
kept on the roof to watch the roads leading to the Ford.  Otherwise the
Adlersteiners had all the savage instinct of herding together in as small
a space as possible.

Freiherrin Kunigunde hardly ever mounted to her daughter’s chamber.  All
her affection was centred on the strong and manly son, of whom she was
proud, while the sickly pining girl, who would hardly find a mate of her
own rank, and who had not even dowry enough for a convent, was such a
shame and burthen to her as to be almost a distasteful object.  But
perversely, as it seemed to her, the only daughter was the darling of
both father and brother, who were ready to do anything to gratify the
girl’s sick fancies, and hailed with delight her pleasure in her new
attendant.  Old Ursel was at first rather envious and contemptuous of the
childish, fragile stranger, but her gentleness disarmed the old woman;
and, when it was plain that the young lady’s sufferings were greatly
lessened by tender care, dislike gave way to attachment, and there was
little more murmuring at the menial services that were needed by the two
maidens, even when Ermentrude’s feeble fancies, or Christina’s views of
dainty propriety, rendered them more onerous than before.  She was even
heard to rejoice that some Christian care and tenderness had at last
reached her poor neglected child.

It was well for Christina that she had such an ally.  The poor child
never crept down stairs to the dinner or supper, to fetch food for
Ermentrude, or water for herself, without a trembling and shrinking of
heart and nerves.  Her father’s authority guarded her from rude actions,
but from rough tongues he neither could nor would guard her, nor
understand that what to some would have been a compliment seemed to her
an alarming insult; and her chief safeguard lay in her own insignificance
and want of attraction, and still more in the modesty that concealed her
terror at rude jests sufficiently to prevent frightening her from
becoming an entertainment.

Her father, whom she looked on as a cultivated person in comparison with
the rest of the world, did his best for her after his own views, and
gradually brought her all the properties she had left at the Kohler’s
hut.  Therewith she made a great difference in the aspect of the chamber,
under the full sanction of the lords of the castle.  Wolf, deer, and
sheep skins abounded; and with these, assisted by her father and old
Hatto, she tapestried the lower part of the bare grim walls, a great
bear’s hide covered the neighbourhood of the hearth, and cushions were
made of these skins, and stuffed from Ursel’s stores of feathers.  All
these embellishments were watched with great delight by Ermentrude, who
had never been made of so much importance, and was as much surprised as
relieved by such attentions.  She was too young and too delicate to
reject civilization, and she let Christina braid her hair, bathe her, and
arrange her dress, with sensations of comfort that were almost like
health.  To train her into occupying herself was however, as Christina
soon found, in her present state, impossible.  She could spin and sew a
little, but hated both; and her clumsy, listless fingers only soiled and
wasted Christina’s needles, silk, and lute strings, and such damage was
not so easily remedied as in the streets of Ulm.  She was best provided
for when looking on at her attendant’s busy hands, and asking to be sung
to, or to hear tales of the active, busy scenes of the city life—the
dresses, fairs, festivals, and guild processions.

[Picture: “She was too young and too delicate to reject civilization, and
 she let Christina braid her hair, bathe her, and arrange her dress, with
      sensations of comfort that were almost like health.”—Page 37]

The gentle nursing and the new interests made her improve in health, so
that her father was delighted, and Christina began to hope for a return
home.  Sometimes the two girls would take the air, either, on still days,
upon the battlements, where Ermentrude watched the Debateable Ford, and
Christina gazed at the Danube and at Ulm; or they would find their way to
a grassy nook on the mountain-side, where Christina gathered gentians and
saxifrage, trying to teach her young lady that they were worth looking
at, and sighing at the thought of Master Gottfried’s wreath when she met
with the asphodel seed-vessels.  Once the quiet mule was brought into
requisition; and, with her brother walking by her, and Sorel and his
daughter in attendance, Ermentrude rode towards the village of
Adlerstein.  It was a collection of miserable huts, on a sheltered slope
towards the south, where there was earth enough to grow some wretched rye
and buckwheat, subject to severe toll from the lord of the soil.  Perched
on a hollow rock above the slope was a rude little church, over a cave
where a hermit had once lived and died in such odour of sanctity that,
his day happening to coincide with that of St. John the Baptist, the
Blessed Freidmund had acquired the credit of the lion’s share both of the
saint’s honours and of the old solstitial feast of Midsummer.  This wake
was the one gaiety of the year, and attracted a fair which was the sole
occasion of coming honestly by anything from the outer world; nor had his
cell ever lacked a professional anchorite.

The Freiherr of his day had been a devout man, who had gone a pilgrimage
with Kaiser Friedrich of the Red Beard, and had brought home a bit of
stone from the council chamber of Nicæa, which he had presented to the
little church that he had built over the cavern.  He had named his son
Friedmund; and there were dim memories of his days as of a golden age,
before the Wildschlossen had carried off the best of the property, and
when all went well.

This was Christina’s first sight of a church since her arrival, except
that in the chapel, which was a dismal neglected vault, where a ruinous
altar and mouldering crucifix testified to its sacred purpose.  The old
baron had been excommunicated for twenty years, ever since he had harried
the wains of the Bishop of Augsburg on his way to the Diet; and, though
his household and family were not under the same sentence, “Sunday didna
come abune the pass.”  Christina’s entreaty obtained permission to enter
the little building, but she had knelt there only a few moments before
her father came to hurry her away, and her supplications that he would
some day take her to mass there were whistled down the wind; and indeed
the hermit was a layman, and the church was only served on great
festivals by a monk from the convent of St. Ruprecht, on the distant side
of the mountain, which was further supposed to be in the Schlangenwald
interest.  Her best chance lay in infusing the desire into Ermentrude,
who by watching her prayers and asking a few questions had begun to
acquire a few clearer ideas.  And what Ermentrude wished had always
hitherto been acquiesced in by the two lords.

The elder baron came little into Christina’s way.  He meant to be kind to
her, but she was dreadfully afraid of him, and, when he came to visit his
daughter, shrank out of his notice as much as possible, shuddering most
of all at his attempts at civilities.  His son she viewed as one of the
thickwitted giants meant to be food for the heroism of good knights of
romance.  Except that he was fairly conversant with the use of weapons,
and had occasionally ridden beyond the shadow of his own mountain, his
range was quite as limited as his sister’s; and he had an equal scorn for
all beyond it.  His unfailing kindness to his sister was however in his
favour, and he always eagerly followed up any suggestion Christina made
for her pleasure.

Much of his time was spent on the child, whose chief nurse and playmate
he had been throughout her malady; and when she showed him the stranger’s
arrangements, or repeated to him, in a wondering, blundering way, with
constant appeals to her attendant, the new tales she had heard, he used
to listen with a pleased awkward amazement at his little Ermentrude’s
astonishing cleverness, joined sometimes with real interest, which was
evinced by his inquiries of Christina.  He certainly did not admire the
little, slight, pale bower-maiden, but he seemed to look upon her like
some strange, almost uncanny, wise spirit out of some other sphere, and
his manner towards her had none of the offensive freedom apparent in even
the old man’s patronage.  It was, as Ermentrude once said, laughing,
almost as if he feared that she might do something to him.

Christina had expected to see a ruffian, and had found a boor; but she
was to be convinced that the ruffian existed in him.  Notice came up to
the castle of a convoy of waggons, and all was excitement.  Men-at-arms
were mustered, horses led down the Eagle’s Ladder, and an ambush prepared
in the woods.  The autumn rains were already swelling the floods, and the
passage of the ford would be difficult enough to afford the assailants an
easy prey.

The Freiherrinn Kunigunde herself, and all the women of the castle,
hurried into Ermentrude’s room to enjoy the view from her window.  The
young lady herself was full of eager expectation, but she knew enough of
her maiden to expect no sympathy from her, and loved her well enough not
to bring down on her her mother’s attention; so Christina crept into her
turret, unable to withdraw her eyes from the sight, trembling, weeping,
praying, longing for power to give a warning signal.  Could they be her
own townsmen stopped on the way to dear Ulm?

She could see the waggons in mid-stream, the warriors on the bank; she
heard the triumphant outcries of the mother and daughter in the outer
room.  She saw the overthrow, the struggle, the flight of a few scattered
dark figures on the farther side, the drawing out of the goods on the
nearer.  Oh! were those leaping waves bearing down any good men’s corpses
to the Danube, slain, foully slain by her own father and this gang of
robbers?

She was glad that Ermentrude went down with her mother to watch the
return of the victors.  She crouched on the floor, sobbing, shuddering
with grief and indignation, and telling her beads alike for murdered and
murderers, till, after the sounds of welcome and exultation, she heard
Sir Eberhard’s heavy tread, as he carried his sister up stairs.
Ermentrude went up at once to Christina.

“After all there was little for us!” she said.  “It was only a wain of
wine barrels; and now will the drunkards down stairs make good cheer.
But Ebbo could only win for me this gold chain and medal which was round
the old merchant’s neck.”

“Was he slain?” Christina asked with pale lips.

“I only know I did not kill him,” returned the baron; “I had him down and
got the prize, and that was enough for me.  What the rest of the fellows
may have done, I cannot say.”

“But he has brought thee something, Stina,” continued Ermentrude.  “Show
it to her, brother.”

“My father sends you this for your care of my sister,” said Eberhard,
holding out a brooch that had doubtless fastened the band of the
unfortunate wine-merchant’s bonnet.

“Thanks, sir; but, indeed, I may not take it,” said Christina, turning
crimson, and drawing back.

“So!” he exclaimed, in amaze; then bethinking himself,—“They are no
townsfolk of yours, but Constance cowards.”

“Take it, take it, Stina, or you will anger my father,” added Ermentrude.

“No, lady, I thank the barons both, but it were sin in me,” said
Christina, with trembling voice.

“Look you,” said Eberhard; “we have the full right—’tis a seignorial
right—to all the goods of every wayfarer that may be overthrown in our
river—as I am a true knight!” he added earnestly.

“A true knight!” repeated Christina, pushed hard, and very indignant in
all her terror.  “The true knight’s part is to aid, not rob, the weak.”
And the dark eyes flashed a vivid light.

“Christina!” exclaimed Ermentrude in the extremity of her amazement,
“know you what you have said?—that Eberhard is no true knight!”

He meanwhile stood silent, utterly taken by surprise, and letting his
little sister fight his battles.

“I cannot help it, Lady Ermentrude,” said Christina, with trembling lips,
and eyes filling with tears.  “You may drive me from the castle—I only
long to be away from it; but I cannot stain my soul by saying that spoil
and rapine are the deeds of a true knight.”

“My mother will beat you,” cried Ermentrude, passionately, ready to fly
to the head of the stairs; but her brother laid his hand upon her.

“Tush, Trudchen; keep thy tongue still, child!  What does it hurt me?”

And he turned on his heels and went down stairs.  Christina crept into
her turret, weeping bitterly and with many a wild thought.  Would they
visit her offence on her father?  Would they turn them both out together?
If so, would not her father hurl her down the rocks rather than return
her to Ulm?  Could she escape?  Climb down the dizzy rocks, it might be,
succour the merchant lying half dead on the meadows, protect and be
protected, be once more among God-fearing Christians?  And as she felt
her helplessness, the selfish thoughts passed into a gush of tears for
the murdered man, lying suffering there, and for his possible wife and
children watching for him.  Presently Ermentrude peeped in.

“Stina, Stina, don’t cry; I will not tell my mother!  Come out, and
finish my kerchief!  Come out!  No one shall beat you.”

“That is not what I wept for, lady,” said Christina.  “I do not think you
would bring harm on me.  But oh!  I would I were at home!  I grieve for
the bloodshed that I must see and may not hinder, and for that poor
merchant.”

“Oh,” said Ermentrude, “you need not fear for him!  I saw his own folk
return and lift him up.  But what is he to thee or to us?”

“I am a burgher maid, lady,” said Christina, recovering herself, and
aware that it was of little use to bear testimony to such an auditor as
poor little Ermentrude against the deeds of her own father and brother,
which had in reality the sort of sanction Sir Eberhard had mentioned,
much akin to those coast rights that were the temptation of wreckers.

Still she could not but tremble at the thought of her speech, and went
down to supper in greater trepidation than usual, dreading that she
should be expected to thank the Freiherr for his gift.  But, fortunately,
manners were too rare at Adlerstein for any such omission to be
remarkable, and the whole establishment was in a state of noisy triumph
and merriment over the excellence of the French wine they had captured,
so that she slipped into her seat unobserved.

Every available drinking-horn and cup was full.  Ermentrude was eagerly
presented with draughts by both father and brother, and presently Sir
Eberhard exclaimed, turning towards the shrinking Christina with a rough
laugh, “Maiden, I trow thou wilt not taste?”

Christina shook her head, and framed a negative with her lips.

“What’s this?” asked her father, close to whom she sat.  “Is’t a
fast-day?”

There was a pause.  Many were present who regarded a fast-day much more
than the lives or goods of their neighbours.  Christina again shook her
head.

“No matter,” said good-natured Sir Eberhard, evidently wishing to avert
any ill consequence from her.  “’Tis only her loss.”

The mirth went on rough and loud, and Christina felt this the worst of
all the miserable meals she had partaken of in fear and trembling at this
place of her captivity.  Ermentrude, too, was soon in such a state of
excitement, that not only was Christina’s womanhood bitterly ashamed and
grieved for her, but there was serious danger that she might at any
moment break out with some allusion to her maiden’s recusancy in her
reply to Sir Eberhard.

Presently however Ermentrude laid down her head and began to cry—violent
headache had come on—and her brother took her in his arms to carry her up
the stairs; but his potations had begun before hers, and his step was far
from steady; he stumbled more than once on the steps, shook and
frightened his sister, and set her down weeping petulantly.  And then
came a more terrible moment; his awe of Christina had passed away; he
swore that she was a lovely maiden, with only too free a tongue, and that
a kiss must be the seal of her pardon.

A house full of intoxicated men, no living creature who would care to
protect her, scarce even her father!  But extremity of terror gave her
strength.  She spoke resolutely—“Sir Eberhard, your sister is ill—you are
in no state to be here.  Go down at once, nor insult a free maiden.”

Probably the low-toned softness of the voice, so utterly different from
the shrill wrangling notes of all the other women he had known, took him
by surprise.  He was still sober enough to be subdued, almost cowed, by
resistance of a description unlike all he had ever seen; his alarm at
Christina’s superior power returned in full force, he staggered to the
stairs, Christina rushed after him, closed the heavy door with all her
force, fastened it inside, and would have sunk down to weep but for
Ermentrude’s peevish wail of distress.

Happily Ermentrude was still a child, and, neglected as she had been, she
still had had no one to make her precocious in matters of this kind.  She
was quite willing to take Christina’s view of the case, and not resent
the exclusion of her brother; indeed, she was unwell enough to dread the
loudness of his voice and rudeness of his revelry.

So the door remained shut, and Christina’s resolve was taken that she
would so keep it while the wine lasted.  And, indeed, Ermentrude had so
much fever all that night and the next day that no going down could be
thought of.  Nobody came near the maidens but Ursel, and she described
one continued orgie that made Christina shudder again with fear and
disgust.  Those below revelled without interval, except for sleep; and
they took their sleep just where they happened to sink down, then
returned again to the liquor.  The old baroness repaired to the kitchen
when the revelry went beyond even her bearing; but all the time the wine
held out, the swine in the court were, as Ursel averred, better company
than the men in the hall.  Yet there might have been worse even than
this; for old Ursel whispered that at the bottom of the stairs there was
a trap-door.  Did the maiden know what it covered?  It was an oubliette.
There was once a Strasburg armourer who had refused ransom, and talked of
appealing to the Kaiser.  He trod on that door and—Ursel pointed
downwards.  “But since that time,” she said, “my young lord has never
brought home a prisoner.”

No wonder that all this time Christina cowered at the discordant sounds
below, trembled, and prayed while she waited on her poor young charge,
who tossed and moaned in fever and suffering.  She was still far from
recovered when the materials of the debauch failed, and the household
began to return to its usual state.  She was soon restlessly pining for
her brother; and when her father came up to see her, received him with
scant welcome, and entreaties for Ebbo.  She knew she should be better if
she might only sit on his knee, and lay her head on his shoulder.  The
old Freiherr offered to accommodate her; but she rejected him petulantly,
and still called for Ebbo, till he went down, promising that her brother
should come.

With a fluttering heart Christina awaited the noble whom she had perhaps
insulted, and whose advances had more certainly insulted her.  Would he
visit her with his anger, or return to that more offensive familiarity?
She longed to flee out of sight, when, after a long interval, his heavy
tread was heard; but she could not even take refuge in her turret, for
Ermentrude was leaning against her.  Somehow, the step was less assured
than usual; he absolutely knocked at the door; and, when he came in, he
acknowledged her by a slight inclination of the head.  If she only had
known it, this was the first time that head had ever been bent to any
being, human or Divine; but all she did perceive was that Sir Eberhard
was in neither of the moods she dreaded, only desperately shy and
sheepish, and extremely ashamed, not indeed of his excess, which would
have been, even to a much tamer German baron, only a happy accident, but
of what had passed between himself and her.

He was much grieved to perceive how much ground Ermentrude had lost, and
gave himself up to fondling and comforting her; and in a few days more,
in their common cares for the sister, Christina lost her newly-acquired
horror of the brother, and could not but be grateful for his forbearance;
while she was almost entertained by the increased awe of herself shown by
this huge robber baron.




CHAPTER IV
SNOW-WREATHS WHEN ’TIS THAW


ERMENTRUDE had by no means recovered the ground she had lost, before the
winter set in; and blinding snow came drifting down day and night,
rendering the whole view, above and below, one expanse of white, only
broken by the peaks of rock which were too steep to sustain the snow.
The waterfall lengthened its icicles daily, and the whole court was
heaped with snow, up even to the top of the high steps to the hall; and
thus, Christina was told, would it continue all the winter.  What had
previously seemed to her a strangely door-like window above the porch now
became the only mode of egress, when the barons went out bear or
wolf-hunting, or the younger took his crossbow and hound to provide the
wild-fowl, which, under Christina’s skilful hands, would tempt the feeble
appetite of Ermentrude when she was utterly unable to touch the salted
meats and sausages of the household.

In spite of all endeavours to guard the windows and keep up the fire, the
cold withered the poor child like a fading leaf, and she needed more and
more of tenderness and amusement to distract her attention from her
ailments.  Christina’s resources were unfailing.  Out of the softer pine
and birch woods provided for the fire, she carved a set of draughtsmen,
and made a board by ruling squares on the end of a settle, and painting
the alternate ones with a compound of oil and charcoal.  Even the old
Baron was delighted with this contrivance, and the pleasure it gave his
daughter.  He remembered playing at draughts in that portion of his youth
which had been a shade more polished, and he felt as if the game were
making Ermentrude more hike a lady.  Christina was encouraged to proceed
with a set of chessmen, and the shaping of their characteristic heads
under her dexterous fingers was watched by Ermentrude like something
magical.  Indeed, the young lady entertained the belief that there was no
limit to her attendant’s knowledge or capacity.

Truly there was a greater brightness and clearness beginning to dawn even
upon poor little Ermentrude’s own dull mind.  She took more interest in
everything: songs were not solely lullabies, but she cared to talk them
over; tales to which she would once have been incapable of paying
attention were eagerly sought after; and, above all, the spiritual
vacancy that her mind had hitherto presented was beginning to be filled
up.  Christina had brought her own books—a library of extraordinary
extent for a maiden of the fifteenth century, but which she owed to her
uncle’s connexion with the arts of wood-cutting and printing.  A Vulgate
from Dr. Faustus’s own press, a mass book and breviary, Thomas à Kempis’s
_Imitation_ and the _Nuremburg Chronicle_ all in Latin, and the poetry of
the gentle Minnesinger and bird lover, Walther von Vogelweide, in the
vernacular: these were her stock, which Hausfrau Johanna had viewed as a
foolish encumbrance, and Hugh Sorel would never have transported to the
castle unless they had been so well concealed in Christina’s kirtles that
he had taken them for parts of her wardrobe.

Most precious were they now, when, out of the reach of all teaching save
her own, she had to infuse into the sinking girl’s mind the great
mysteries of life and death, that so she might not leave the world
without more hope or faith than her heathen forefathers.  For that
Ermentrude would live Christina had never hoped, since that fleeting
improvement had been cut short by the fever of the wine-cup; the look,
voice, and tone had become so completely the same as those of Regina
Grundt’s little sister who had pined and died.  She knew she could not
cure, but she could, she felt she could, comfort, cheer, and soften, and
she no longer repined at her enforced sojourn at Adlerstein.  She
heartily loved her charge, and could not bear to think how desolate
Ermentrude would be without her.  And now the poor girl had become
responsive to her care.  She was infinitely softened in manner, and
treated her parents with forms of respect new to them; she had learnt
even to thank old Ursel, dropped her imperious tone, and struggled with
her petulance; and, towards her brother, the domineering, uncouth
adherence was becoming real, tender affection; while the dependent,
reverent love she bestowed upon Christina was touching and endearing in
the extreme.

Freiherr von Adlerstein saw the change, and congratulated himself on the
effect of having a town-bred bower woman; nay, spoke of the advantage it
would be to his daughter, if he could persuade himself to make the
submission to the Kaiser which the late improvements decided on at the
Diet were rendering more and more inevitable.  _Now_ how happy would be
the winner of his gentle Ermentrude!

Freiherrinn von Adlerstein thought the alteration the mere change from
child to woman, and felt insulted by the supposition that any one might
not have been proud to match with a daughter of Adlerstein, be she what
she might.  As to submission to the Kaiser, that was mere folly and
weakness—kaisers, kings, dukes, and counts had broken their teeth against
the rock of Adlerstein before now!  What had come over her husband and
her son to make them cravens?

For Freiherr Eberhard was more strongly convinced than was his father of
the untenableness of their present position.  Hugh Sorel’s reports of
what he heard at Ulm had shown that the league that had been discussed at
Regensburg was far more formidable than anything that had ever previously
threatened Schloss Adlerstein, and that if the Graf von Schlangenwald
joined in the coalition, there would be private malice to direct its
efforts against the Adlerstein family.  Feud-letters or challenges had
been made unlawful for ten years, and was not Adlerstein at feud with the
world?

Nor did Eberhard look on the submission with the sullen rage and grief
that his father felt in bringing himself to such a declension from the
pride of his ancestors.  What the young Baron heard up stairs was
awakening in him a sense of the poorness and narrowness of his present
life.  Ermentrude never spared him what interested her; and, partly from
her lips, partly through her appeals to her attendant, he had learnt that
life had better things to offer than independence on these bare rocks,
and that homage might open the way to higher and worthier exploits than
preying upon overturned waggons.

Dietrich of Berne and his two ancestors, whose lengthy legend Christina
could sing in a low, soft recitative, were revelations to him of what she
meant by a true knight—the lion in war, the lamb in peace; the quaint
oft-repeated portraits, and still quainter cities, of the Chronicle, with
her explanations and translations, opened his mind to aspirations for
intercourse with his fellows, for an honourable name, and for esteem in
its degree such as was paid to Sir Parzival, to Karl the Great, or to
Rodolf of Hapsburgh, once a mountain lord like himself.  Nay, as
Ermentrude said, stroking his cheek, and smoothing the flaxen beard, that
somehow had become much less rough and tangled than it used to be, “Some
day wilt thou be another Good Freiherr Eberhard, whom all the
country-side loved, and who gave bread at the castle-gate to all that
hungered.”

Her brother believed nothing of her slow declension in strength,
ascribing all the change he saw to the bitter cold, and seeing but little
even of that alteration, though he spent many hours in her room, holding
her in his arms, amusing her, or talking to her and to Christina.  All
Christina’s fear of him was gone.  As long as there was no liquor in the
house, and he was his true self, she felt him to be a kind friend, bound
to her by strong sympathy in the love and care for his sister.  She could
talk almost as freely before him as when alone with her young lady; and
as Ermentrude’s religious feelings grew stronger, and were freely
expressed to him, surely his attention was not merely kindness and
patience with the sufferer.

The girl’s soul ripened rapidly under the new influences during her
bodily decay; and, as the days lengthened, and the stern hold of winter
relaxed upon the mountains, Christina looked with strange admiration upon
the expression that had dawned upon the features once so vacant and dull,
and listened with the more depth of reverence to the sweet words of
faith, hope and love, because she felt that a higher, deeper teaching
than she could give must have come to mould the spirit for the new world
to which it was hastening.

    “Like an army defeated,
    The snow had retreated,”

out of the valley, whose rich green shone smiling round the pool into
which the Debateable Ford spread.  The waterfall had burst its icy bonds,
and dashed down with redoubled voice, roaring rather than babbling.  Blue
and pink hepaticas—or, as Christina called them, liver-krauts—had pushed
up their starry heads, and had even been gathered by Sir Eberhard, and
laid on his sister’s pillow.  The dark peaks of rock came out all
glistening with moisture, and the snow only retained possession of the
deep hollows and crevices, into which however its retreat was far more
graceful than when, in the city, it was trodden by horse and man, and
soiled with smoke.

Christina dreaded indeed that the roads should be open, but she could not
love the snow; it spoke to her of dreariness, savagery, and captivity,
and she watched the dwindling stripes with satisfaction, and hailed the
fall of the petty avalanches from one Eagle’s Step to another as her
forefathers might have rejoiced in the defeat of the Frost giants.

But Ermentrude had a love for the white sheet that lay covering a gorge
running up from the ravine.  She watched its diminution day by day with a
fancy that she was melting away with it; and indeed it was on the very
day that a succession of drifting showers had left the sheet alone, and
separated it from the masses of white above, that it first fully dawned
upon the rest of the family that, for the little daughter of the house,
spring was only bringing languor and sinking instead of recovery.

Then it was that Sir Eberhard first really listened to her entreaty that
she might not die without a priest, and comforted her by passing his word
to her that, if—he would not say when—the time drew near, he would bring
her one of the priests who had only come from St. Ruprecht’s cloister on
great days, by a sort of sufferance, to say mass at the Blessed
Friedmund’s hermitage chapel.

The time was slow in coming.  Easter had passed with Ermentrude far too
ill for Christina to make the effort she had intended of going to the
church, even if she could get no escort but old Ursel—the sheet of snow
had dwindled to a mere wreath—the ford looked blue in the sunshine—the
cascade tinkled merrily down its rock—mountain primroses peeped out,
when, as Father Norbert came forth from saying his ill-attended
Pentecostal mass, and was parting with the infirm peasant hermit, a tall
figure strode up the pass, and, as the villagers fell back to make way,
stood before the startled priest, and said, in a voice choked with grief,
“Come with me.”

“Who needs me?” began the astonished monk.

“Follow him not, father!” whispered the hermit.  “It is the young
Freiherr.—Oh have mercy on him, gracious sir; he has done your noble
lordships no wrong.”

“I mean him no ill,” replied Eberhard, clearing his voice with
difficulty; “I would but have him do his office.  Art thou afraid,
priest?”

“Who needs my office?” demanded Father Norbert.  “Show me fit cause, and
what should I dread?  Wherefore dost thou seek me?”

“For my sister,” replied Eberhard, his voice thickening again.  “My
little sister lies at the point of death, and I have sworn to her that a
priest she shall have.  Wilt thou come, or shall I drag thee down the
pass?”

“I come, I come with all my heart, sir knight,” was the ready response.
“A few moments and I am at your bidding.”

He stepped back into the hermit’s cave, whence a stair led up to the
chapel.  The anchorite followed him, whispering—“Good father, escape!
There will be full time ere he misses you.  The north door leads to the
Gemsbock’s Pass; it is open now.”

“Why should I baulk him?  Why should I deny my office to the dying?” said
Norbert.

“Alas! holy father, thou art new to this country, and know’st not these
men of blood!  It is a snare to make the convent ransom thee, if not
worse.  The Freiherrinn is a fiend for malice, and the Freiherr is
excommunicate.”

“I know it, my son,” said Norbert; “but wherefore should their child
perish unassoilzied?”

“Art coming, priest?” shouted Eberhard, from his stand at the mouth of
the cave.

And, as Norbert at once appeared with the pyx and other appliances that
he had gone to fetch, the Freiherr held out his hand with an offer to
“carry his gear for him;” and, when the monk refused, with an inward
shudder at entrusting a sacred charge to such unhallowed hands, replied,
“You will have work enow for both hands ere the castle is reached.”

But Father Norbert was by birth a sturdy Switzer, and thought little of
these Swabian Alps; and he climbed after his guide through the most
rugged passages of Eberhard’s shortest and most perpendicular cut without
a moment’s hesitation, and with agility worthy of a chamois.  The young
baron turned for a moment, when the level of the castle had been gained,
perhaps to see whether he were following, but at the same time came to a
sudden, speechless pause.

On the white masses of vapour that floated on the opposite side of the
mountain was traced a gigantic shadowy outline of a hermit, with head
bent eagerly forward, and arm outstretched.

The monk crossed himself.  Eberhard stood still for a moment, and then
said, hoarsely,—“The Blessed Friedmund!  He is come for her;” then strode
on towards the postern gate, followed by Brother Norbert, a good deal
reassured both as to the genuineness of the young Baron’s message and the
probable condition of the object of his journey, since the patron saint
of her race was evidently on the watch to speed her departing spirit.

Sir Eberhard led the way up the turret stairs to the open door, and the
monk entered the death-chamber.  The elder Baron sat near the fire in the
large wooden chair, half turned towards his daughter, as one who must
needs be present, but with his face buried in his hands, unable to endure
the spectacle.  Nearer was the tall form of his wife, standing near the
foot of the bed, her stern, harsh features somewhat softened by the
feelings of the moment.  Ursel waited at hand, with tears running down
her furrowed cheeks.

For such as these Father Norbert was prepared; but he little expected to
meet so pure and sweet a gaze of reverential welcome as beamed on him
from the soft, dark eyes of the little white-checked maiden who sat on
the bed, holding the sufferer in her arms.  Still less had he anticipated
the serene blessedness that sat on the wasted features of the dying girl,
and all the anguish of labouring breath.

She smiled a smile of joy, held up her hand, and thanked her brother.
Her father scarcely lifted his head, her mother made a rigid curtsey, and
with a grim look of sorrow coming over her features, laid her hand over
the old Baron’s shoulder.  “Come away, Herr Vater,” she said; “he is
going to hear her confession, and make her too holy for the like of us to
touch.”

The old man rose up, and stepped towards his child.  Ermentrude held out
her arms to him, and murmured—

“Father, father, pardon me; I would have been a better daughter if I had
only known—”  He gathered her in his arms; he was quite past speaking;
and they only heard his heavy breathing, and one more whisper from
Ermentrude—“And oh! father, one day wilt thou seek to be absolved?”
Whether he answered or not they knew not; he only gave her repeated
kisses, and laid her down on her pillows, then rushed to the door, and
the passionate sobs of the strong man’s uncontrolled nature might be
heard upon the stair.  The parting with the others was not necessarily so
complete, as they were not, like him, under censure of the Church; but
Kunigunde leant down to kiss her; and, in return to her repetition of her
entreaty for pardon, replied, “Thou hast it, child, if it will ease thy
mind; but it is all along of these new fancies that ever an Adlerstein
thought of pardon.  There, there, I blame thee not, poor maid; it thou
wert to die, it may be even best as it is.  Now must I to thy father; he
is troubled enough about this gear.”

But when Eberhard moved towards his sister, she turned to the priest, and
said, imploringly, “Not far, not far!  Oh! let them,” pointing to
Eberhard and Christina, “let them not be quite out of sight!”

“Out of hearing is all that is needed, daughter,” replied the priest; and
Ermentrude looked content as Christina moved towards the empty north
turret, where, with the door open, she was in full view, and Eberhard
followed her thither.  It was indeed fully out of earshot of the child’s
faint, gasping confession.  Gravely and sadly both stood there.
Christina looked up the hillside for the snow-wreath.  The May sunshine
had dissolved it; the green pass lay sparkling without a vestige of its
white coating.  Her eyes full of tears, she pointed the spot out to
Eberhard.  He understood; but, leaning towards her, told, under his
breath, of the phantom he had seen.  Her eyes expanded with awe of the
supernatural.  “It was the Blessed Friedmund,” said Eberhard.  “Never
hath he so greeted one of our race since the pious Freiherrinn
Hildegarde.  Maiden, hast thou brought us back a blessing?”

“Ah! well may she be blessed—well may the saints stoop to greet her,”
murmured Christina, with strangled voice, scarcely able to control her
sobs.

Father Norbert came towards them.  The simple confession had been heard,
and he sought the aid of Christina in performing the last rites of the
Church.

“Maiden,” he said to her, “thou hast done a great and blessed work, such
as many a priest might envy thee.”

Eberhard was not excluded during the final services by which the soul was
to be dismissed from its earthly dwelling-place.  True, he comprehended
little of their import, and nothing of the words, but he gazed meekly,
with uncovered head, and a bewildered look of sadness, while Christina
made her responses and took her part with full intelligence and deep
fervour, sorrowing indeed for the companion who had become so dear to
her, but deeply thankful for the spiritual consolation that had come at
last.  Ermentrude lay calm, and, as it were, already rapt into a higher
world, lighting up at the German portions of the service, and not wholly
devoid of comprehension of the spirit even of the Latin, as indeed she
had come to the border of the region where human tongues and languages
are no more.

She was all but gone when the rite of extreme unction was completed, and
they could only stand round her, Eberhard, Christina, Ursel, and the old
Baroness, who had returned again, watching the last flutterings of the
breath, the window thrown wide open that nothing might impede the passage
of the soul to the blue vault above.

The priest spoke the beautiful commendation, “Depart, O Christian soul.”
There was a faint gesture in the midst for Christina to lift her in her
arms—a sign to bend down and kiss her brow—but her last look was for her
brother, her last murmur, “Come after me; be the Good Baron Ebbo.”




CHAPTER V
THE YOUNG FREIHERR


ERMENTRUDE VON ADLERSTEIN slept with her forefathers in the vaults of the
hermitage chapel, and Christina Sorel’s work was done.

Surely it was time for her to return home, though she should be more
sorry to leave the mountain castle than she could ever have believed
possible.  She entreated her father to take her home, but she received a
sharp answer that she did not know what she was talking of: the
Schlangenwald Reitern were besetting all the roads; and moreover the Ulm
burghers had taken the capture of the Constance wine in such dudgeon that
for a retainer of Adlerstein to show himself in the streets would be an
absolute asking for the wheel.

But was there any hope for her?  Could he not take her to some nunnery
midway, and let her write to her uncle to fetch her from thence?

He swore at woman’s pertinacity, but allowed at last that if the plan,
talked of by the Barons, of going to make their submission to the Emperor
at Linz, with a view to which all violence at the ford had ceased, should
hold good, it might be possible thus to drop her on their way.

With this Christina must needs content herself.  Poor child, not only had
Ermentrude’s death deprived her of the sole object of her residence at
Schloss Adlerstein, but it had infinitely increased the difficulties of
her position.  No one interfered with her possession of the upper room
and its turrets; and it was only at meal times that she was obliged to
mingle with the other inhabitants, who, for the most part, absolutely
overlooked the little shrinking pale maiden but with one exception, and
that the most perplexing of all.  She had been on terms with Freiherr
Eberhard that were not so easily broken off as if she had been an old
woman of Ursel’s age.  All through his sister’s decline she had been his
comforter, assistant, director, living in intercourse and sympathy that
ought surely to cease when she was no longer his sister’s attendant, yet
which must be more than ever missed in the full freshness of the stroke.

Even on the earliest day of bereavement, a sudden thought of Hausfrau
Johanna flashed upon Christina, and reminded her of the guard she must
keep over herself if she would return to Ulm the same modest girl whom
her aunt could acquit of all indiscretion.  Her cheeks flamed, as she sat
alone, with the very thought, and the next time she heard the well-known
tread on the stair, she fled hastily into her own turret chamber, and
shut the door.  Her heart beat fast.  She could hear Sir Eberhard moving
about the room, and listened to his heavy sigh as he threw himself into
the large chair.  Presently he called her by name, and she felt it
needful to open her door and answer, respectfully,

“What would you, my lord?”

“What would I?  A little peace, and heed to her who is gone.  To see my
father and mother one would think that a partridge had but flown away.  I
have seen my father more sorrowful when his dog had fallen over the
abyss.”

“Mayhap there is more sorrow for a brute that cannot live again,” said
Christina.  “Our bird has her nest by an Altar that is lovelier and
brighter than even our Dome Kirk will ever be.”

“Sit down, Christina,” he said, dragging a chair nearer the hearth.  “My
heart is sore, and I cannot bear the din below.  Tell me where my bird is
flown.”

“Ah! sir; pardon me.  I must to the kitchen,” said Christina, crossing
her hands over her breast, to still her trembling heart, for she was very
sorry for his grief, but moving resolutely.

“Must?  And wherefore?  Thou hast nought to do there; speak truth!  Why
not stay with me?” and his great light eyes opened wide.

“A burgher maid may not sit down with a noble baron.”

“The devil!  Has my mother been plaguing thee, child?”

“No, my lord,” said Christina, “she reeks not of me; but”—steadying her
voice with great difficulty—“it behoves me the more to be discreet.”

“And you would not have me come here!” he said, with a wistful tone of
reproach.

“I have no power to forbid you; but if you do, I must betake me to Ursel
in the kitchen,” said Christina, very low, trembling and half choked.

“Among the rude wenches there!” he cried, starting up.  “Nay, nay, that
shall not be!  Rather will I go.”

“But this is very cruel of thee, maiden,” he added, lingering, “when I
give thee my knightly word that all should be as when she whom we both
loved was here,” and his voice shook.

“It could not so be, my lord,” returned Christina with drooping, blushing
face; “it would not be maidenly in me.  Oh, my lord, you are kind and
generous, make it not hard for me to do what other maidens less lonely
have friends to do for them!”

“Kind and generous?” said Eberhard, leaning over the back of the chair as
if trying to begin a fresh score.  “This from you, who told me once I was
no true knight!”

“I shall call you a true knight with all my heart,” cried Christina, the
tears rushing into her eyes, “if you will respect my weakness and
loneliness.”

He stood up again, as if to move away; then paused, and, twisting his
gold chain, said, “And how am I ever to be what the happy one bade me, if
you will not show me how?”

“My error would never show you the right,” said Christina, with a strong
effort at firmness, and retreating at once through the door of the
staircase, whence she made her way to the kitchen, and with great
difficulty found an excuse for her presence there.

It had been a hard struggle with her compassion and gratitude, and, poor
little Christina felt with dismay, with something more than these.  Else
why was it that, even while principle and better sense summoned her back
to Ulm, she experienced a deadly weariness of the city-pent air, of the
grave, heavy roll of the river, nay, even of the quiet, well-regulated
household?  Why did such a marriage as she had thought her natural
destiny, with some worthy, kind-hearted brother of the guild, become so
hateful to her that she could only aspire to a convent life?  This same
burgomaster would be an estimable man, no doubt, and those around her
were ruffians, but she felt utterly contemptuous and impatient of him.
And why was the interchange of greetings, the few words at meals, worth
all the rest of the day besides to her?  Her own heart was the traitor,
and to her own sensations the poor little thing had, in spirit at least,
transgressed all Aunt Johanna’s precepts against young Barons.  She wept
apart, and resolved, and prayed, cruelly ashamed of every start of joy or
pain that the sight of Eberhard cost her.  From almost the first he had
sat next her at the single table that accommodated the whole household at
meals, and the custom continued, though on some days he treated her with
sullen silence, which she blamed herself for not rejoicing in, sometimes
he spoke a few friendly words; but he observed, better than she could
have dared to expect, her test of his true knighthood, and never again
forced himself into her apartment, though now and then he came to the
door with flowers, with mountain strawberries, and once with two young
doves.  “Take them, Christina,” he said, “they are very like yourself;”
and he always delayed so long that she was forced to be resolute, and
shut the door on him at last.

Once, when there was to be a mass at the chapel, Hugh Sorel, between a
smile and a growl, informed his daughter that he would take her thereto.
She gladly prepared, and, bent on making herself agreeable to her father,
did not once press on him the necessity of her return to Ulm.  To her
amazement and pleasure, the young Baron was at church, and when on the
way home, he walked beside her mule, she could see no need of sending him
away.

He had been in no school of the conventionalities of life, and, when he
saw that Hugh Sorel’s presence had obtained him this favour, he wistfully
asked, “Christina, if I bring your father with me, will you not let me
in?”

“Entreat me not, my lord,” she answered, with fluttering breath.

She felt the more that she was right in this decision, when she
encountered her father’s broad grin of surprise and diversion, at seeing
the young Baron help her to dismount.  It was a look of receiving an idea
both new, comical, and flattering, but by no means the look of a father
who would resent the indignity of attentions to his daughter from a man
whose rank formed an insuperable barrier to marriage.

The effect was a new, urgent, and most piteous entreaty, that he would
find means of sending her home.  It brought upon her the hearing put into
words what her own feelings had long shrunk from confessing to herself.

“Ah!  Why, what now?  What, is the young Baron after thee?  Ha! ha!
petticoats are few enough up here, but he must have been ill off ere he
took to a little ghost like thee!  I saw he was moping and doleful, but I
thought it was all for his sister.”

“And so it is, father.”

“Tell me that, when he watches every turn of that dark eye of thine—the
only good thing thou took’st of mine!  Thou art a witch, Stina.”

“Hush, oh hush, for pity’s sake, father, and let me go home!”

“What, thou likest him not?  Thy mind is all for the mincing goldsmith
opposite, as I ever told thee.”

“My mind is—is to return to my uncle and aunt the true-hearted maiden
they parted with,” said Christina, with clasped hands.  “And oh, father,
as you were the son of a true and faithful mother, be a father to me now!
Jeer not your motherless child, but protect her and help her.”

Hugh Sorel was touched by this appeal, and he likewise recollected how
much it was for his own interest that his brother should be satisfied
with the care he took of his daughter.  He became convinced that the
sooner she was out of the castle the better, and at length bethought him
that, among the merchants who frequented the Midsummer Fair at the
Blessed Friedmund’s Wake, a safe escort might be found to convey her back
to Ulm.

If the truth were known, Hugh Sorel was not devoid of a certain feeling
akin to contempt, both for his young master’s taste, and for his
forbearance in not having pushed matters further with a being so
helpless, meek, and timid as Christina, more especially as such slackness
had not been his wont in other cases where his fancy had been caught.

But Sorel did not understand that it was not physical beauty that here
had been the attraction, though to some persons, the sweet, pensive eyes,
the delicate, pure skin, the slight, tender form, might seem to exceed in
loveliness the fully developed animal comeliness chiefly esteemed at
Adlerstein.  It was rather the strangeness of the power and purity of
this timid, fragile creature, that had struck the young noble.  With all
their brutal manners reverence for a lofty female nature had been in the
German character ever since their Velleda prophesied to them, and this
reverence in Eberhard bowed at the feet of the pure gentle maiden, so
strong yet so weak, so wistful and entreating even in her resolution,
refined as a white flower on a heap of refuse, wise and dexterous beyond
his slow and dull conception, and the first being in whom he had ever
seen piety or goodness; and likewise with a tender, loving spirit of
consolation such as he had both beheld and tasted by his sister’s
deathbed.

There was almost a fear mingled with his reverence.  If he had been more
familiar with the saints, he would thus have regarded the holy virgin
martyrs, nay, even Our Lady herself; and he durst not push her so hard as
to offend her, and excite the anger or the grief that he alike dreaded.
He was wretched and forlorn without the resources he had found in his
sister’s room; the new and better cravings of his higher nature had been
excited only to remain unsupplied and disappointed; and the affectionate
heart in the freshness of its sorrow yearned for the comfort that such
conversation had supplied: but the impression that had been made on him
was still such, that he knew that to use rough means of pressing his
wishes would no more lead to his real gratification than it would to
appropriate a snow-bell by crushing it in his gauntlet.

And it was on feeble little Christina, yielding in heart, though not in
will, that it depended to preserve this reverence, and return unscathed
from this castle, more perilous now than ever.




CHAPTER VI
THE BLESSED FRIEDMUND’S WAKE


MIDSUMMER-DAY arrived, and the village of Adlerstein presented a most
unusual spectacle.  The wake was the occasion of a grand fair for all the
mountain-side, and it was an understood thing that the Barons, instead of
molesting the pedlars, merchants, and others who attended it, contented
themselves with demanding a toll from every one who passed the Kohler’s
hut on the one side, or the Gemsbock’s Pass on the other; and this toll,
being the only coin by which they came honestly in the course of the
year, was regarded as a certainty and highly valued.  Moreover, it was
the only time that any purchases could be made, and the flotsam of the
ford did not always include all even of the few requirements of the
inmates of the castle; it was the only holiday, sacred or secular, that
ever gladdened the Eagle’s Rock.

So all the inmates of the castle prepared to enjoy themselves, except the
heads of the house.  The Freiherr had never been at one of these wakes
since the first after he was excommunicated, when he had stalked round to
show his indifference to the sentence; and the Freiherrinn snarled out
such sentences of disdain towards the concourse, that it might be
supposed that she hated the sight of her kind; but Ursel had all the
household purchases to make, and the kitchen underlings were to take
turns to go and come, as indeed were the men-at-arms, who were set to
watch the toll-bars.

Christina had packed up a small bundle, for the chance of being unable to
return to the castle without missing her escort, though she hoped that
the fair might last two days, and that she should thus be enabled to
return and bring away the rest of her property.  She was more and more
resolved on going, but her heart was less and less inclined to departure.
And bitter had been her weeping through all the early light hours of the
long morning—weeping that she tried to think was all for Ermentrude; and
all, amid prayers she could scarce trust herself to offer, that the
generous, kindly nature might yet work free of these evil surroundings,
and fulfil the sister’s dying wish, she should never see it; but, when
she should hear that the Debateable Ford was the Friendly Ford, then
would she know that it was the doing of the Good Baron Ebbo.  Could she
venture on telling him so?  Or were it not better that there were no
farewell?  And she wept again that he should think her ungrateful.  She
could not persuade herself to release the doves, but committed the charge
to Ursel to let them go in case she should not return.

So tear-stained was her face, that, ashamed that it should be seen, she
wrapped it closely in her hood and veil when she came down and joined her
father.  The whole scene swam in tears before her eyes when she saw the
whole green slope from the chapel covered with tents and booths, and
swarming with pedlars and mountaineers in their picturesque dresses.
Women and girls were exchanging the yarn of their winter’s spinning for
bright handkerchiefs; men drove sheep, goats, or pigs to barter for
knives, spades, or weapons; others were gazing at simple shows—a dancing
bear or ape—or clustering round a Minnesinger; many even then
congregating in booths for the sale of beer.  Further up, on the flat
space of sward above the chapel, were some lay brothers, arranging for
the representation of a mystery—a kind of entertainment which Germany
owed to the English who came to the Council of Constance, and which the
monks of St. Ruprecht’s hoped might infuse some religious notions into
the wild, ignorant mountaineers.

First however Christina gladly entered the church.  Crowded though it
were, it was calmer than the busy scene without.  Faded old tapestry was
decking its walls, representing apparently some subject entirely alien to
St. John or the blessed hermit; Christina rather thought it was Mars and
Venus, but that was all the same to every one else.  And there was a
terrible figure of St. John, painted life-like, with a real hair-cloth
round his loins, just opposite to her, on the step of the Altar; also
poor Friedmund’s bones, dressed up in a new serge amice and hood; the
stone from Nicæa was in a gilded box, ready in due time to be kissed; and
a preaching friar (not one of the monks of St. Ruprecht’s) was in the
midst of a sermon, telling how St. John presided at the Council of Nicæa
till the Emperor Maximius cut off his head at the instance of
Herodius—full justice being done to the dancing—and that the blood was
sprinkled on this very stone, whereupon our Holy Father the Pope decreed
that whoever would kiss the said stone, and repeat the Credo five times
afterwards, should be capable of receiving an indulgence for 500 years:
which indulgence must however be purchased at the rate of six groschen,
to be bestowed in alms at Rome.  And this inestimable benefit he, poor
Friar Peter, had come from his brotherhood of St. Francis at Offingen
solely to dispense to the poor mountaineers.

It was disappointing to find this profane mummery going on instead of the
holy services to which Christina had looked forward for strength and
comfort; she was far too well instructed not to be scandalized at the
profane deception which was ripening fast for Luther, only thirty years
later; and, when the stone was held up by the friar in one hand, the
printed briefs of indulgence in the other, she shrunk back.  Her father
however said, “Wilt have one, child?  Five hundred years is no bad
bargain.”

“My uncle has small trust in indulgences,” she whispered.

“All lies, of course,” quoth Hugh; “yet they’ve the Pope’s seal, and I
have more than half a mind to get one.  Five hundred years is no joke,
and I am sure of purgatory, since I bought this medal at the Holy House
of Loretto.”

And he went forward, and invested six groschen in one of the papers, the
most religious action poor Christina had ever seen him perform.  Other
purchasers came forward—several, of the castle _knappen_, and a few
peasant women who offered yarn or cheeses as equivalents for money, but
were told with some insolence to go and sell their goods, and bring the
coin.

After a time, the friar, finding his traffic slack, thought fit to
remove, with his two lay assistants, outside the chapel, and try the
effects of an out-of-door sermon.  Hugh Sorel, who had been hitherto
rather diverted by the man’s gestures and persuasions, now decided on
going out into the fair in quest of an escort for his daughter, but as
she saw Father Norbert and another monk ascending from the stairs leading
to the hermit’s cell, she begged to be allowed to remain in the church,
where she was sure to be safe, instead of wandering about with him in the
fair.

He was glad to be unencumbered, though he thought her taste unnatural;
and, promising to return for her when he had found an escort, he left
her.

Father Norbert had come for the very purpose of hearing confessions, and
Christina’s next hour was the most comfortable she had spent since
Ermentrude’s death.

After this however the priests were called away, and long, long did
Christina first kneel and then sit in the little lonely church, hearing
the various sounds without, and imagining that her father had forgotten
her, and that he and all the rest were drinking, and then what would
become of her?  Why had she quitted old Ursel’s protection?

Hours of waiting and nameless alarm must have passed, for the sun was
waxing low, when at length she heard steps coming up the hermit’s cell,
and a head rose above the pavement which she recognized with a wild throb
of joy, but, repressing her sense of gladness, she only exclaimed, “Oh,
where is my father!”

“I have sent him to the toll at the Gemsbock’s Pass,” replied Sir
Eberhard, who had by this time come up the stairs, followed by Brother
Peter and the two lay assistants.  Then, as Christina turned on him her
startled, terrified eyes in dismay and reproach for such thoughtlessness,
he came towards her, and, bending his head and opening his hand, he
showed on his palm two gold rings.  “There, little one,” he said; “now
shalt thou never again shut me out.”

Her senses grew dizzy.  “Sir,” she faintly said, “this is no place to
delude a poor maiden.”

“I delude thee not.  The brother here waits to wed us.”

“Impossible!  A burgher maid is not for such as you.”

“None but a burgher maid will I wed,” returned Sir Eberhard, with all the
settled resolution of habits of command.  “See, Christina, thou art
sweeter and better than any lady in the land; thou canst make me what
she—the blessed one who lies there—would have me.  I love thee as never
knight loved lady.  I love thee so that I have not spoken a word to
offend thee when my heart was bursting; and”—as he saw her irrepressible
tears—“I think thou lovest me a little.”

“Ah!” she gasped with a sob, “let me go.”

“Thou canst not go home; there is none here fit to take charge of thee.
Or if there were, I would slay him rather than let thee go.  No, not so,”
he said, as he saw how little those words served his cause; “but without
thee I were a mad and desperate man.  Christina, I will not answer for
myself if thou dost not leave this place my wedded wife.”

“Oh!” implored Christina, “if you would only betroth me, and woo me like
an honourable maiden from my home at Ulm!”

“Betroth thee, ay, and wed thee at once,” replied Eberhard, who, all
along, even while his words were most pleading, had worn a look and
manner of determined authority and strength, good-natured indeed, but
resolved.  “I am not going to miss my opportunity, or baulk the friar.”

The friar, who had meantime been making a few needful arrangements for
the ceremony, advanced towards them.  He was a good-humoured, easy-going
man, who came prepared to do any office that came in his way on such
festival days at the villages round; and peasant marriages at such times
were not uncommon.  But something now staggered him, and he said
anxiously—

“This maiden looks convent-bred!  Herr Reiter, pardon me; but if this be
the breaking of a cloister, I can have none of it.”

“No such thing,” said Eberhard; “she is town-bred, that is all.”

“You would swear to it, on the holy mass yonder, both of you?” said the
friar, still suspiciously.

“Yea,” replied Eberhard, “and so dost thou, Christina.”

This was the time if ever to struggle against her destiny.  The friar
would probably have listened to her if she had made any vehement
opposition to a forced marriage, and if not, a few shrieks would have
brought perhaps Father Norbert, and certainly the whole population; but
the horror and shame of being found in such a situation, even more than
the probability that she might meet with vengeance rather than
protection, withheld her.  Even the friar could hardly have removed her,
and this was her only chance of safety from the Baroness’s fury.  Had she
hated and loathed Sir Eberhard, perhaps she had striven harder, but his
whole demeanour constrained and quelled her, and the chief effort she
made against yielding was the reply, “I am no cloister maid, holy father,
but—”

The “but” was lost in the friar’s jovial speech.  “Oh, then, all is well!
Take thy place, pretty one, there, by the door, thou know’st it should be
in the porch, but—ach, I understand!” as Eberhard quietly drew the bolt
within.  “No, no, little one, I have no time for bride scruples and
coyness; I have to train three dull-headed louts to be Shem, Ham, and
Japhet before dark.  Hast confessed of late?”

“This morning, but—” said Christina, and “This morning,” to her great
joy, said Eberhard, and, in her satisfaction thereat, her second “but”
was not followed up.

The friar asked their names, and both gave the Christian name alone; then
the brief and simple rite was solemnized in its shortest form.  Christina
had, by very force of surprise and dismay, gone through all without signs
of agitation, except the quivering of her whole frame, and the icy
coldness of the hand, where Eberhard had to place the ring on each finger
in turn.

But each mutual vow was a strange relief to her long-tossed and divided
mind, and it was rest indeed to let her affection have its will, and own
him indeed as a protector to be loved instead of shunned.  When all was
over, and he gathered the two little cold hands into his large one, his
arm supporting her trembling form, she felt for the moment, poor little
thing, as if she could never be frightened again.

Parish registers were not, even had this been a parish church, but
Brother Peter asked, when he had concluded, “Well, my son, which of his
flock am I to report to your Pfarrer as linked together?”

“The less your tongue wags on that matter till I call on you, the
better,” was the stern reply.  “Look you, no ill shall befall you if you
are wise, but remember, against the day I call you to bear witness, that
you have this day wedded Baron Eberhard von Adlerstein the younger, to
Christina, the daughter of Hugh Sorel, the Esquire of Ulm.”

“Thou hast played me a trick, Sir Baron!” said the friar, somewhat
dismayed, but more amused, looking up at Eberhard, who, as Christina now
saw, had divested himself of his gilt spurs, gold chain, silvered belt
and horn, and eagle’s plume, so as to have passed for a simple
lanzknecht.  “I would have had no such gear as this!”

“So I supposed,” said Eberhard coolly.

“Young folks! young folks!” laughed the friar, changing his tone, and
holding up his finger slyly; “the little bird so cunningly nestled in the
church to fly out my Lady Baroness!  Well, so thou hast a pretty, timid
lambkin there, Sir Baron.  Take care you use her mildly.”

Eberhard looked into Christina’s face with a smile, that to her, at
least, was answer enough; and he held out half a dozen links of his gold
chain to the friar, and tossed a coin to each of the lay brethren.

“Not for the poor friar himself,” explained Brother Peter, on receiving
this marriage fee; “it all goes to the weal of the brotherhood.”

“As you please,” said Eberhard.  “Silence, that is all!  And thy
friary—?”

“The poor house of St. Francis at Offingen for the present, noble sir,”
said the priest.  “There will you hear of me, if you find me not.  And
now, fare thee well, my gracious lady.  I hope one day thou wilt have
more words to thank the poor brother who has made thee a noble Baroness.”

“Ah, good father, pardon my fright and confusion,” Christina tried to
murmur, but at that moment a sudden glow and glare of light broke out on
the eastern rock, illuminating the fast darkening little church with a
flickering glare, that made her start in terror as if the fires of heaven
were threatening this stolen marriage; but the friar and Eberhard both
exclaimed, “The Needfire alight already!”  And she recollected how often
she had seen these bonfires on Midsummer night shining red on every hill
around Ulm.  Loud shouts were greeting the uprising flame, and the people
gathering thicker and thicker on the slope.  The friar undid the door to
hasten out into the throng, and Eberhard said he had left his spurs and
belt in the hermit’s cell, and must return thither, after which he would
walk home with his bride, moving at the same time towards the stair, and
thereby causing a sudden scuffle and fall.  “So, master hermit,” quoth
Eberhard, as the old man picked himself up, looking horribly frightened;
“that’s your hermit’s abstraction, is it?  No whining, old man, I am not
going to hurt thee, so thou canst hold thy tongue.  Otherwise I will
smoke thee out of thy hole like a wild cat!  What, thou aiding me with my
belt, my lovely one?  Thanks; the snap goes too hard for thy little
hands.  Now, then, the fire will light us gaily down the mountain side.”

But it soon appeared that to depart was impossible, unless by forcing a
way through the busy throng in the full red glare of the firelight, and
they were forced to pause at the opening of the hermit’s cave, Christina
leaning on her husband’s arm, and a fold of his mantle drawn round her to
guard her from the night-breeze of the mountain, as they waited for a
quiet space in which to depart unnoticed.  It was a strange, wild scene!
The fire was on a bare, flat rock, which probably had been yearly so
employed ever since the Kelts had brought from the East the rite that
they had handed on to the Swabians—the Beltane fire, whose like was
blazing everywhere in the Alps, in the Hartz, nay, even in England,
Scotland, and on the granite points of Ireland.  Heaped up for many
previous days with faggots from the forest, then apparently
inexhaustible, the fire roared and crackled, and rose high, red and
smoky, into the air, paling the moon, and obscuring the stars.  Round it,
completely hiding the bonfire itself, were hosts of dark figures swarming
to approach it—all with a purpose.  All held old shoes or superannuated
garments in their hands to feed the flame; for it was esteemed needful
that every villager should contribute something from his house—once, no
doubt, as an offering to Bel, but now as a mere unmeaning observance.
And shrieks of merriment followed the contribution of each too well-known
article of rubbish that had been in reserve for the Needfire!  Girls and
boys had nuts to throw in, in pairs, to judge by their bounces of future
chances of matrimony.  Then came a shouting, tittering, and falling back,
as an old boor came forward like a priest with something heavy and
ghastly in his arms, which was thrown on with a tremendous shout,
darkened the glow for a moment, then hissed, cracked, and emitted a
horrible odour.

It was a horse’s head, the right owner of which had been carefully kept
for the occasion, though long past work.  Christina shuddered, and felt
as if she had fallen upon a Pagan ceremony; as indeed was true enough,
only that the Adlersteiners attached no meaning to the performance,
except a vague notion of securing good luck.

With the same idea the faggots were pulled down, and arranged so as to
form a sort of lane of fire.  Young men rushed along it, and then bounded
over the diminished pile, amid loud shouts of laughter and either
admiration or derision; and, in the meantime, a variety of odd, recusant
noises, grunts, squeaks, and lowings proceeding from the darkness were
explained to the startled little bride by her husband to come from all
the cattle of the mountain farms around, who were to have their weal
secured by being driven through the Needfire.

It may well be imagined that the animals were less convinced of the
necessity of this performance than their masters.  Wonderful was the
clatter and confusion, horrible the uproar raised behind to make the poor
things proceed at all, desperate the shout when some half-frantic
creature kicked or attempted a charge wild the glee when a persecuted
goat or sheep took heart of grace, and flashed for one moment between the
crackling, flaring, smoking walls.  When one cow or sheep off a farm
went, all the others were pretty sure to follow it, and the owner had
then only to be on the watch at the other end to turn them back, with
their flame-dazzled eyes, from going unawares down the precipice, a fate
from which the passing through the fire was evidently not supposed to
ensure them.  The swine, those special German delights, were of course
the most refractory of all.  Some, by dint of being pulled away from the
lane of fire, were induced to rush through it; but about half-way they
generally made a bolt, either sidelong through the flaming fence or
backwards among the legs of their persecutors, who were upset amid loud
imprecations.  One huge, old, lean, high-backed sow, with a large family,
truly feminine in her want of presence of mind, actually charged into the
midst of the bonfire itself, scattering it to the right and left with her
snout, and emitting so horrible a smell of singed bacon, that it might
almost be feared that some of her progeny were anticipating the invention
of Chinese roasting-pigs.  However, their proprietor, Jobst, counted them
out all safe on the other side, and there only resulted some sighs and
lamentations among the seniors, such as Hatto and Ursel, that it boded
ill to have the Needfire trodden out by an old sow.

All the castle live-stock were undergoing the same ceremony.  Eberhard
concerned himself little about the vagaries of the sheep and pigs, and
only laughed a little as the great black goat, who had seen several
Midsummer nights, and stood on his guard, made a sudden short run and
butted down old Hatto, then skipped off like a chamois into the darkness,
unheeding, the old rogue, the whispers that connected his unlucky hue
with the doings of the Walpurgisnacht.  But when it came to the horses,
Eberhard could not well endure the sight of the endeavours to force them,
snorting, rearing, and struggling, through anything so abhorrent to them
as the hedge of fire.

The Schneiderlein, with all the force of his powerful arm, had hold of
Eberhard’s own young white mare, who, with ears turned back, nostrils
dilated, and wild eyes, her fore-feet firmly planted wide apart, was
using her whole strength for resistance; and, when a heavy blow fell on
her, only plunged backwards, and kicked without advancing.  It was more
than Eberhard could endure, and Christina’s impulse was to murmur, “O do
not let him do it;” but this he scarcely heard, as he exclaimed, “Wait
for me here!” and, as he stepped forward, sent his voice before him,
forbidding all blows to the mare.

The creature’s extreme terror ceased at once upon hearing his voice, and
there was an instant relaxation of all violence of resistance as he came
up to her, took her halter from the Schneiderlein, patted her glossy
neck, and spoke to her.  But the tumult of warning voices around him
assured him that it would be a fatal thing to spare the steed the passage
through the fire, and he strove by encouragements and caresses with voice
and hand to get her forward, leading her himself; but the poor beast
trembled so violently, and, though making a few steps forward, stopped
again in such exceeding horror of the flame, that Eberhard had not the
heart to compel her, turned her head away, and assured her that she
should not be further tormented.

“The gracious lordship is wrong,” said public opinion, by the voice of
old Bauer Ulrich, the sacrificer of the horse’s head.  “Heaven forfend
that evil befall him and that mare in the course of the year.”

And the buzz of voices concurred in telling of the recusant pigs who had
never developed into sausages, the sheep who had only escaped to be eaten
by wolves, the mule whose bones had been found at the bottom of an abyss.

Old Ursel was seriously concerned, and would have laid hold on her young
master to remonstrate, but a fresh notion had arisen—Would the gracious
Freiherr set a-rolling the wheel, which was already being lighted in the
fire, and was to conclude the festivities by being propelled down the
hill—figuring, only that no one present knew it, the sun’s declension
from his solstitial height?  Eberhard made no objection; and Christina,
in her shelter by the cave, felt no little dismay at being left alone
there, and moreover had a strange, weird feeling at the wild, uncanny
ceremony he was engaged in, not knowing indeed that it was sun-worship,
but afraid that it could be no other than unholy sorcery.

The wheel, flaring or reddening in all its spokes, was raised from the
bonfire, and was driven down the smoothest piece of green sward, which
formed an inclined plane towards the stream.  If its course was smooth,
and it only became extinguished by leaping into the water, the village
would flourish; and prosperity above all was expected if it should spring
over the narrow channel, and attempt to run up the other side.  Such
things had happened in the days of the good Freiherren Ebbo and Friedel,
though the wheel had never gone right since the present baron had been
excommunicated; but his heir having been twice seen at mass in this last
month great hopes were founded upon him.

There was a shout to clear the slope.  Eberhard, in great earnest and
some anxiety, accepted the gauntlet that he was offered to protect his
hand, steadied the wheel therewith, and, with a vigorous impulse from
hand and foot, sent it bounding down the slope, among loud cries and a
general scattering of the idlers who had crowded full into the very path
of the fiery circle, which flamed up brilliantly for the moment as it met
the current of air.  But either there was an obstacle in the way, or the
young Baron’s push had not been quite straight: the wheel suddenly
swerved aside, its course swerved to the right, maugre all the
objurgations addressed to it as if it had been a living thing, and the
next moment it had disappeared, all but a smoky, smouldering spot of red,
that told where it lay, charring and smoking on its side, without having
fulfilled a quarter of its course.

People drew off gravely and silently, and Eberhard himself was strangely
discomfited when he came back to the hermitage, and, wrapping Christina
in his cloak, prepared to return, so soon as the glare of the fire should
have faded from his eyesight enough to make it safe to tread so
precipitous a path.  He had indeed this day made a dangerous venture, and
both he and Christina could not but feel disheartened by the issue of all
the omens of the year, the more because she had a vague sense of wrong in
consulting or trusting them.  It seemed to her all one frightened,
uncomprehended dream ever since her father had left her in the chapel;
and, though conscious of her inability to have prevented her marriage,
yet she blamed herself, felt despairing as she thought of the future,
and, above all, dreaded the Baron and the Baroness and their anger.
Eberhard, after his first few words, was silent, and seemed solely
absorbed in leading her safely along the rocky path, sometimes lifting
her when he thought her in danger of stumbling.  It was one of the
lightest, shortest nights of the year, and a young moon added to the
brightness in open places, while in others it made the rocks and stones
cast strange elvish shadows.  The distance was not entirely lost; other
Beltane fires could be seen, like beacons, on every hill, and the few
lights in the castle shone out like red fiery eyes in its heavy dark pile
of building.

Before entering, Eberhard paused, pulled off his own wedding-ring, and
put it into his bosom, and taking his bride’s hand in his, did the same
for her, and bade her keep the ring till they could wear them openly.

“Alas! then,” said Christina, “you would have this secret?”

“Unless I would have to seek thee down the oubliette, my little one,”
said Eberhard “or, what might even be worse, see thee burnt on the
hillside for bewitching me with thine arts!  No, indeed, my darling.
Were it only my father, I could make him love thee; but my mother—I could
not trust her where she thought the honour of our house concerned.  It
shall not be for long.  Thou know’st we are to make peace with the
Kaiser, and then will I get me employment among Kürfurst Albrecht’s
companies of troops, and then shalt thou prank it as my Lady Freiherrinn,
and teach me the ways of cities.”

“Alas!  I fear me it has been a great sin!” sighed the poor little wife.

“For thee—thou couldst not help it,” said Eberhard; “for me—who knows how
many deadly ones it may hinder?  Cheer up, little one; no one can harm
thee while the secret is kept.”

Poor Christina had no choice but submission; but it was a sorry bridal
evening, to enter her husband’s home in shrinking terror; with the threat
of the oubliette before her, and with a sense of shame and deception
hanging upon her, making the wonted scowl of the old baroness cut her
both with remorse and dread.

She did indeed sit beside her bridegroom at the supper, but how little
like a bride! even though he pushed the salt-cellar, as if by accident,
below her place.  She thought of her myrtle, tended in vain at home by
Barbara Schmidt; she thought of Ulm courtships, and how all ought to have
been; the solemn embassage to her uncle, the stately negotiations; the
troth plight before the circle of ceremonious kindred and merry maidens,
of whom she had often been one—the subsequent attentions of the betrothed
on all festival days, the piles of linen and all plenishings accumulated
since babyhood, and all reviewed and laid out for general admiration (Ah!
poor Aunt Johanna still spinning away to add to the many webs in her
walnut presses!)—then the grand procession to fetch home the bride, the
splendid festival with the musicians, dishes, and guest-tables to the
utmost limit that was allowed by the city laws, and the bride’s hair so
joyously covered by her matron’s curch amid the merriment of her
companion maidens.

Poor child!  After she had crept away to her own room, glad that her
father was not yet returned, she wept bitterly over the wrong that she
felt she had done to the kind uncle and aunt, who must now look in vain
for their little Christina, and would think her lost to them, and to all
else that was good.  At least she had had the Church’s blessing—but that,
strange to say, was regarded, in burgher life before the Reformation, as
rather the ornament of a noble marriage than as essential to the civil
contract; and a marriage by a priest was regarded by the citizens rather
as a means of eluding the need of obtaining the parent’s consent, than as
a more regular and devout manner of wedding.  However, Christina felt
this the one drop of peace.  The blessings and prayers were warm at her
heart, and gave her hope.  And as to drops of joy, of them there was no
lack, for had not she now a right to love Eberhard with all her heart and
conscience, and was not it a wonderful love on his part that had made him
stoop to the little white-faced burgher maid, despised even by her own
father?  O better far to wear the maiden’s uncovered head for him than
the myrtle wreath for any one else!




CHAPTER VII
THE SCHNEIDERLEIN’S RETURN


THE poor little unowned bride had more to undergo than her imagination
had conceived at the first moment.

When she heard that the marriage was to be a secret, she had not
understood that Eberhard was by no means disposed to observe much more
caution than mere silence.  A rough, though kindly man, he did not
thoroughly comprehend the shame and confusion that he was bringing upon
her by departing from his former demeanour.  He knew that, so enormous
was the distance then supposed to exist between the noble and the
burgher, there was no chance of any one dreaming of the true state of the
case, and that as long as Christina was not taken for his wife, there was
no personal danger for her from his mother, who—so lax were the morals of
the German nobility with regard to all of inferior rank—would tolerate
her with complacency as his favourite toy; and he was taken by surprise
at the agony of grief and shame with which she slowly comprehended his
assurance that she had nothing to fear.

There was no help for it.  The oubliette would probably be the portion of
the low-born girl who had interfered with the sixteen quarterings of the
Adlerstein shield, and poor Christina never stepped across its trap-door
without a shudder lest it should open beneath her.  And her father would
probably have been hung from the highest tower, in spite of his shrewd
care to be aware of nothing.  Christina consoled herself with the hope
that he knew all the time why he had been sent out of the way, for, with
a broad grin that had made her blush painfully, he had said he knew she
would be well taken care of, and that he hoped she was not breaking her
heart for want of an escort.  She tried to extort Eberhard’s permission
to let him at least know how it was; but Eberhard laughed, saying he
believed the old fox knew just as much as he chose; and, in effect,
Sorel, though now and then gratifying his daughter’s scruples, by serving
as a shield to her meetings with the young Baron, never allowed himself
to hear a hint of the true state of affairs.

Eberhard’s love and reverence were undiminished, and the time spent with
him would have been perfectly happy could she ever have divested herself
of anxiety and alarm; but the periods of his absence from the castle were
very terrible to her, for the other women of the household, quick to
perceive that she no longer repelled him, had lost that awe that had
hitherto kept them at a distance from her, and treated her with a
familiarity, sometimes coarse, sometimes spiteful, always hateful and
degrading.  Even old Ursel had become half-pitying, half-patronizing; and
the old Baroness, though not molesting her, took not the slightest notice
of her.

This state of things lasted much longer than there had been reason to
expect at the time of the marriage.  The two Freiherren then intended to
set out in a very short time to make their long talked-of submission to
the Emperor at Ratisbon; but, partly from their German tardiness of
movement, partly from the obstinate delays interposed by the proud old
Freiherrinn, who was as averse as ever to the measure, partly from
reports that the Court was not yet arrived at Ratisbon, the expedition
was again and again deferred, and did not actually take place till
September was far advanced.

Poor Christina would have given worlds to go with them, and even
entreated to be sent to Ulm with an avowal of her marriage to her uncle
and aunt, but of this Eberhard would not hear.  He said the Ulmers would
thus gain an hostage, and hamper his movements; and, if her wedding was
not to be confessed—poor child!—she could better bear to remain where she
was than to face Hausfrau Johanna.  Eberhard was fully determined to
enrol himself in some troop, either Imperial, or, if not, among the Free
Companies, among whom men of rank were often found, and he would then
fetch or send for his wife and avow her openly, so soon as she should be
out of his mother’s reach.  He longed to leave her father at home, to be
some protection to her, but Hugh Sorel was so much the most intelligent
and skilful of the retainers as to be absolutely indispensable to the
party—he was their only scribe; and moreover his new suit of buff
rendered him a creditable member of a troop that had been very hard to
equip.  It numbered about ten men-at-arms, only three being left at home
to garrison the castle—namely, Hatto, who was too old to take; Hans, who
had been hopelessly lame and deformed since the old Baron had knocked him
off a cliff in a passion; and Squinting Mätz, a runaway servant, who had
murdered his master, the mayor of Strasburg, and might be caught and put
to death if any one recognized him.  If needful the villagers could
always be called in to defend the castle: but of this there was little or
no danger—the Eagle’s Steps were defence enough in themselves, and the
party were not likely to be absent more than a week or ten days—a
grievous length of time, poor Christina thought, as she stood straining
her eyes on the top of the watch-tower, to watch them as far as possible
along the plain.  Her heart was very sad, and the omen of the burning
wheel so continually haunted her that even in her sleep that night she
saw its brief course repeated, beheld its rapid fall and extinction, and
then tracked the course of the sparks that darted from it, one rising and
gleaming high in air till it shone like a star, another pursuing a fitful
and irregular, but still bright course amid the dry grass on the
hillside, just as she had indeed watched some of the sparks on that
night, minding her of the words of the Allhallow-tide legend: “_Fulgebunt
justi et tanquam scintillæ in arundinete discurrent_”—a sentence which
remained with her when awake, and led her to seek it out in her Latin
Bible in the morning.

Reluctantly had she gone down to the noontide meal, feeling, though her
husband and father were far less of guardians than they should have been,
yet that there was absolute rest, peace, and protection in their presence
compared with what it was to be alone with Freiherrinn Kunigunde and her
rude women without them.  A few sneers on her daintiness and uselessness
had led her to make an offer of assisting in the grand chopping of
sausage meat and preparation of winter stores, and she had been answered
with contempt that my young lord would not have her soil her delicate
hands, when one of the maids who had been sent to fetch beer from the
cellar came back with startled looks, and the exclamation, “There is the
Schneiderlein riding up the Eagle’s Ladder upon Freiherr Ebbo’s white
mare!”

All the women sprang up together, and rushed to the window, whence they
could indeed recognize both man and horse; and presently it became plain
that both were stained with blood, weary, and spent; indeed, nothing but
extreme exhaustion would have induced the man-at-arms to trust the tired,
stumbling horse up such a perilous path.

Loud were the exclamations, “Ah! no good could come of not leading that
mare through the Johannisfeuer.”

“This shameful expedition!  Only harm could befall.  This is thy doing,
thou mincing city-girl.”

“All was certain to go wrong when a pale mist widow came into the place.”

The angry and dismayed cries all blended themselves in confusion in the
ears of the only silent woman present; the only one that sounded
distinctly on her brain was that of the last speaker, “A pale, mist
widow,” as, holding herself a little in the rear of the struggling,
jostling little mob of women, who hardly made way even for their
acknowledged lady, she followed with failing limbs the universal rush to
the entrance as soon as man and horse had mounted the slope and were lost
sight of.

A few moments more, and the throng of expectants was at the foot of the
hall steps, just as the lanzknecht reached the arched entrance.  His
comrade Hans took his bridle, and almost lifted him from his horse; he
reeled and stumbled as, pale, battered, and bleeding, he tried to advance
to Freiherinn Kunigunde, and, in answer to her hasty interrogation,
faltered out, “Ill news, gracious lady.  We have been set upon by the
accursed Schlangenwaldern, and I am the only living man left.”

Christina scarce heard even these last words; senses and powers alike
failed her, and she sank back on the stone steps in a deathlike swoon.

When she came to herself she was lying on her bed, Ursel and Else,
another of the women, busy over her, and Ursel’s voice was saying, “Ah,
she is coming round.  Look up, sweet lady, and fear not.  You are our
gracious Lady Baroness.”

“Is he here?  O, has he said so?  O, let me see him—Sir Eberhard,”
faintly cried Christina with sobbing breath.

“Ah, no, no,” said the old woman; “but see here,” and she lifted up
Christina’s powerless, bloodless hand, and showed her the ring on the
finger.  Her bosom had been evidently searched when her dress was
loosened in her swoon, and her ring found and put in its place.  “There,
you can hold up your head with the best of them; he took care of that—my
dear young Freiherr, the boy that I nursed,” and the old woman’s burst of
tears brought back the truth to Christina’s reviving senses.

“Oh, tell me,” she said, trying to raise herself, “was it indeed so?  O
say it was not as he said!”

“Ah, woe’s me, woe’s me, that it was even so,” lamented Ursel; “but oh,
be still, look not so wild, dear lady.  The dear, true-hearted young
lord, he spent his last breath in owning you for his true lady, and in
bidding us cherish you and our young baron that is to be.  And the
gracious lady below—she owns you; there is no fear of her now; so vex not
yourself, dearest, most gracious lady.”

Christina did not break out into the wailing and weeping that the old
nurse expected; she was still far too much stunned and overwhelmed, and
she entreated to be told all, lying still, but gazing at Ursel with
piteous bewildered eyes.  Ursel and Else helping one another out, tried
to tell her, but they were much confused; all they knew was that the
party had been surprised at night in a village hostel by the
Schlangenwaldern, and all slain, though the young Baron had lived long
enough to charge the Schneiderlein with his commendation of his wife to
his mother; but all particulars had been lost in the general confusion.

“Oh, let me see the Schneiderlein,” implored Christina, by this time able
to rise and cross the room to the large carved chair; and Ursel
immediately turned to her underling, saying, “Tell the Schneiderlein that
the gracious Lady Baroness desires his presence.”

Else’s wooden shoes clattered down stairs, but the next moment she
returned.  “He cannot come; he is quite spent, and he will let no one
touch his arm till Ursel can come, not even to get off his doublet.”

“I will go to him,” said Christina, and, revived by the sense of being
wanted, she moved at once to the turret, where she kept some rag and some
ointment, which she had found needful in the latter stages of
Ermentrude’s illness—indeed, household surgery was a part of regular
female education, and Christina had had plenty of practice in helping her
charitable aunt, so that the superiority of her skill to that of Ursel
had long been avowed in the castle.  Ursel made no objection further than
to look for something that could be at once converted into a widow’s
veil—being in the midst of her grief quite alive to the need that no
matronly badge should be omitted—but nothing came to hand in time, and
Christina was descending the stairs, on her way to the kitchen, where she
found the fugitive man-at-arms seated on a rough settle, his head and
wounded arm resting on the table, while groans of pain, weariness, and
impatience were interspersed with imprecations on the stupid awkward
girls who surrounded him.

Pity and the instinct of affording relief must needs take the precedence
even of the desire to hear of her husband’s fate; and, as the girls
hastily whispered, “Here she is,” and the lanzknecht hastily tried to
gather himself up, and rise with tokens of respect; she bade him remain
still, and let her see what she could do for him.  In fact, she at once
perceived that he was in no condition to give a coherent account of
anything, he was so completely worn out, and in so much suffering.  She
bade at once that some water should be heated, and some of the broth of
the dinner set on the fire; then with the shears at her girdle, and her
soft, light fingers, she removed the torn strip of cloth that had been
wound round the arm, and cut away the sleeve, showing the arm not broken,
but gashed at the shoulder, and thence the whole length grazed and
wounded by the descent of the sword down to the wrist.  So tender was her
touch, that he scarcely winced or moaned under her hand; and, when she
proceeded, with Ursel’s help, to bathe the wound with the warm water, the
relief was such that the wearied man absolutely slumbered during the
process, which Christina protracted on that very account.  She then
dressed and bandaged the arm, and proceeded to skim—as no one else in the
castle would do—the basin of soup, with which she then fed her patient as
he leant back in the corner of the settle, at first in the same
somnolent, half-conscious state in which he had been ever since the
relief from the severe pain; but after a few spoonfuls the light and life
came back to his eye, and he broke out, “Thanks, thanks, gracious lady!
This is the Lady Baroness for me!  My young lord was the only wise man!
Thanks, lady; now am I my own man again.  It had been long ere the old
Freiherrinn had done so much for me!  I am your man, lady, for life or
death!”  And, before she knew what he was about, the gigantic
Schneiderlein had slid down on his knees, seized her hand, and kissed
it—the first act of homage to her rank, but most startling and
distressing to her.  “Nay,” she faltered, “prithee do not; thou must
rest.  Only if—if thou canst only tell me if he, my own dear lord, sent
me any greeting, I would wait to hear the rest till thou hast slept.”

“Ah! the dog of Schlangenwald!” was the first answer; then, as he
continued, “You see, lady, we had ridden merrily as far as Jacob Müller’s
hostel, the traitor,” it became plain that he meant to begin at the
beginning.  She allowed Ursel to seat her on the bench opposite to his
settle, and, leaning forward, heard his narrative like one in a dream.
There, the Schneiderlein proceeded to say, they put up for the night,
entirely unsuspicious of evil; Jacob Müller, who was known to himself, as
well as to Sorel and to the others, assuring them that the way was clear
to Ratisbon, and that he heard the Emperor was most favourably disposed
to any noble who would tender his allegiance.  Jacob’s liquors were
brought out, and were still in course of being enjoyed, when the house
was suddenly surrounded by an overpowering number of the retainers of
Schlangenwald, with their Count himself at their head.  He had been
evidently resolved to prevent the timely submission of the enemies of his
race, and suddenly presenting himself before the elder Baron, had
challenged him to instantaneous battle, claiming credit to himself for
not having surprised them when asleep.  The disadvantage had been
scarcely less than if this had been the case, for the Adlersteinern were
all half-intoxicated, and far inferior in numbers—at least, on the
showing of the Schneiderlein—and a desperate fight had ended by his being
flung aside in a corner, bound fast by the ankles and wrists, the only
living prisoner, except his young lord, who, having several terrible
wounds, the worst in his chest, was left unbound.

Both lay helpless, untended, and silent, while the revel that had been so
fatal to them was renewed by their captors, who finally all sunk into a
heavy sleep.  The torches were not all spent, and the moonlight shone
into the room, when the Schneiderlein, desperate from the agony caused by
the ligature round his wounded arm, sat up and looked about him.  A knife
thrown aside by one of the drunkards lay near enough to be grasped by his
bound hands, and he had just reached it when Sir Eberhard made a sign to
him to put it into his hand, and therewith contrived to cut the rope
round both hands and feet—then pointed to the door.

There was nothing to hinder an escape; the men slept the sleep of the
drunken; but the Schneiderlein, with the rough fidelity of a retainer,
would have lingered with a hope of saving his master.  But Eberhard shook
his head, and signed again to escape; then, making him bend down close to
him, he used all his remaining power to whisper, as he pressed his sword
into the retainer’s hand,—

“Go home; tell my mother—all the world—that Christina Sorel is my wife,
wedded on the Friedmund Wake by Friar Peter of Offingen, and if she
should bear a child, he is my true and lawful heir.  My sword for him—my
love to her.  And if my mother would not be haunted by me, let her take
care of her.”

These words were spoken with extreme difficulty, for the nature of the
wound made utterance nearly impossible, and each broken sentence cost a
terrible effusion of blood.  The final words brought on so choking and
fatal a gush that, said the Schneiderlein, “he fell back as I tried to
hold him up, and I saw that it was all at an end, and a kind and friendly
master and lord gone from me.  I laid him down, and put his cross on his
breast that I had seen him kissing many a time that evening; and I
crossed his hands, and wiped the blood from them and his face.  And,
lady, he had put on his ring; I trust the robber caitiff’s may have left
it to him in his grave.  And so I came forth, walking soft, and opening
the door in no small dread, not of the snoring swine, but of the dogs
without.  But happily they were still, and even by the door I saw all our
poor fellows stark and stiff.”

“My father?” asked Christina.

“Ay! with his head cleft open by the Graf himself.  He died like a true
soldier, lady, and we have lost the best head among us in him.  Well, the
knave that should have watched the horses was as drunken as the rest of
them, and I made a shift to put the bridle on the white mare and ride
off.”

Such was the narrative of the Schneiderlein, and all that was left to
Christina was the picture of her husband’s dying effort to guard her, and
the haunting fancy of those long hours of speechless agony on the floor
of the hostel, and how direful must have been his fears for her.  Sad and
overcome, yet not sinking entirely while any work of comfort remained,
her heart yearned over her companion in misfortune, the mother who had
lost both husband and son; and all her fears of the dread Freiherrinn
could not prevent her from bending her steps, trembling and palpitating
as she was, towards the hall, to try whether the daughter-in-law’s right
might be vouchsafed to her, of weeping with the elder sufferer.

The Freiherrinn sat by the chimney, rocking herself to and fro, and
holding consultation with Hatto.  She started as she saw Christina
approaching, and made a gesture of repulsion; but, with the feeling of
being past all terror in this desolate moment, Christina stepped nearer,
knelt, and, clasping her hands, said, “Your pardon, lady.”

“Pardon!” returned the harsh voice, even harsher for very grief, “thou
hast naught to fear, girl.  As things stand, thou canst not have thy
deserts.  Dost hear?”

“Ah, lady, it was not such pardon that I meant.  If you would let me be a
daughter to you.”

“A daughter!  A wood-carver’s girl to be a daughter of Adlerstein!” half
laughed the grim Baroness.  “Come here, wench,” and Christina underwent a
series of sharp searching questions on the evidences of her marriage.

“So,” ended the old lady, “since better may not be, we must own thee for
the nonce.  Hark ye all, this is the Frau Freiherrinn, Freiherr
Eberhard’s widow, to be honoured as such,” she added, raising her voice.
“There, girl, thou hast what thou didst strive for.  Is not that enough?”

“Alas! lady,” said Christina, her eyes swimming in tears, “I would fain
have striven to be a comforter, or to weep together.”

“What! to bewitch me as thou didst my poor son and daughter, and
well-nigh my lord himself!  Girl!  Girl!  Thou know’st I cannot burn thee
now; but away with thee; try not my patience too far.”

And, more desolate than ever, the crushed and broken-hearted Christina, a
widow before she had been owned a wife, returned to the room that was now
so full of memories as to be even more home than Master Gottfried’s
gallery at Ulm.




CHAPTER VIII
PASSING THE OUBLIETTE


WHO can describe the dreariness of being snowed-up all the winter with
such a mother-in-law as Freiherrinn Kunigunde?

Yet it was well that the snow came early, for it was the best defence of
the lonely castle from any attack on the part of the Schlangenwaldern,
the Swabian League, or the next heir, Freiherr Kasimir von Adlerstein
Wildschloss.  The elder Baroness had, at least, the merit of a stout
heart, and, even with her sadly-reduced garrison, feared none of them.
She had been brought up in the faith that Adlerstein was impregnable, and
so she still believed; and, if the disaster that had cut off her husband
and son was to happen at all, she was glad that it had befallen before
the homage had been paid.  Probably the Schlangenwald Count knew how
tough a morsel the castle was like to prove, and Wildschloss was serving
at a distance, for nothing was heard of either during the short interval
while the roads were still open.  During this time an attempt had been
made through Father Norbert to ascertain what had become of the corpses
of the two Barons and their followers, and it had appeared that the Count
had carried them all off from the inn, no doubt to adorn his castle with
their limbs, or to present them to the Emperor in evidence of his zeal
for order.  The old Baron could not indeed have been buried in
consecrated ground, nor have masses said for him; but for the weal of her
son’s soul Dame Kunigunde gave some of her few ornaments, and Christina
added her gold earrings, and all her scanty purse, that both her husband
and father might be joined in the prayers of the Church—trying with all
her might to put confidence in Hugh Sorel’s Loretto relic, and the
Indulgence he had bought, and trusting with more consolatory thoughts to
the ever stronger dawnings of good she had watched in her own Eberhard.

She had some consoling intercourse with the priest while all this was
pending; but throughout the winter she was entirely cut off from every
creature save the inmates of the castle, where, as far as the old lady
was concerned, she only existed on sufferance, and all her meekness and
gentleness could not win for her more than the barest toleration.

That Eberhard had for a few hours survived his father, and that thus the
Freiherrinn Christina was as much the Dowager Baroness as Kunigunde
herself, was often insisted on in the kitchen by Ursel, Hatto, and the
Schneiderlein, whom Christina had unconsciously rendered her most devoted
servant, not only by her daily care of his wound, but by her kind
courteous words, and by her giving him his proper name of Heinz, dropping
the absurd _nom de guerre_ of the Schneiderlein, or little tailor, which
had been originally conferred on him in allusion to the valiant
Tailorling who boasted of having killed seven flies at a blow, and had
been carried on chiefly because of the contradiction between such a title
and his huge brawny strength and fierce courage.  Poor Eberhard, with his
undaunted bravery and free reckless good-nature, a ruffian far more by
education than by nature, had been much loved by his followers.  His
widow would have reaped the benefit of that affection even if her
exceeding sweetness had not gained it on her own account; and this giant
was completely gained over to her, when, amid all her sorrow and
feebleness, she never failed to minister to his sufferings to the utmost,
while her questions about his original home, and revival of the name of
his childhood, softened him, and awoke in him better feelings.  He would
have died to serve her, and she might have headed an opposition party in
the castle, had she not been quite indifferent to all save her grief;
and, except by sitting above the salt at the empty table, she laid no
claim to any honours or authority, and was more seldom than ever seen
beyond what was now called her own room.

At last, when for the second time she was seeing the snow wreaths
dwindle, and the drops shine forth in moisture again, while the mountain
paths were set free by the might of the springtide sun, she spoke almost
for the first time with authority, as she desired Heinz to saddle her
mule, and escort her to join in the Easter mass at the Blessed
Friedmund’s Chapel.  Ursel heaped up objections; but so urgent was
Christina for confession and for mass, that the old woman had not the
heart to stop her by a warning to the elder Baroness, and took the
alternative of accompanying her.  It was a glorious sparkling Easter Day,
lovely blue sky above, herbage and flowers glistening below, snow
dazzling in the hollows, peasants assembling in holiday garb, and all
rejoicing.  Even the lonely widow, in her heavy veil and black mufflings,
took hope back to her heart, and smiled when at the church door a little
child came timidly up to her with a madder-tinted Easter egg—a gift once
again like the happy home customs of Ulm.  She gave the child a kiss—she
had nothing else to give, but the sweet face sent it away strangely glad.

The festival mass in all its exultation was not fully over, when anxious
faces began to be seen at the door, and whisperings went round and many
passed out.  Nobody at Adlerstein was particular about silence in church,
and, when the service was not in progress, voices were not even lowered,
and, after many attempts on the part of the Schneiderlein to attract the
attention of his mistress, his voice immediately succeeded the _Ite missa
est_, “Gracious lady, we must begone.  Your mule is ready.  There is a
party at the Debateable Ford, whether Schlangenwald or Wildschloss we
know not yet, but either way you must be the first thing placed in
safety.”

Christina turned deadly pale.  She had long been ready to welcome death
as a peaceful friend; but, sheltered as her girlhood had been in the
quiet city, she had never been brought in contact with warfare, and her
nervous, timid temperament made the thought most appalling and frightful
to her, certain as she was that the old Baroness would resist to the
uttermost.  Father Norbert saw her extreme terror, and, with the thought
that he might comfort and support her, perhaps mediate between the
contending parties, plead that it was holy-tide, and proclaim the peace
of the church, or at the worst protect the lady herself, he offered his
company; but, though she thanked him, it was as if she scarcely
understood his kindness, and a shudder passed over her whenever the
serfs, hastily summoned to augment the garrison, came hurrying down the
path, or turned aside into the more rugged and shorter descents.  It was
strange, the good father thought, that so timorous and fragile a being
should have her lot cast amid these rugged places and scenes of violence,
with no one to give her the care and cherishing she so much required.

Even when she crept up the castle stairs, she was met with an angry
rebuke, not so much for the peril she had incurred as for having tak

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