Joan of the Sword Hand

Gratefully and silently Von Orseln lifted his mistress's hand to his lips. The tall woman on the bed smiled faintly.

"It is well that your Highness is so happy in her servants. I also have one who can hold his peace."

She pointed to the Wordless Man, who now stood with the candelabra in his hand, mute and immutable by his mistress's bedhead, as if watching that none should do her harm.

There was an interval of silence in the room, filled up by the hoarse persistent booming of the storm without and the shuddering shocks of the wind on the lonely house. Then the woman spoke again in a low, distinct voice.

"Since it is your right to know my name, I am Theresa von Lynar – who have also a right to call myself 'of Hohenstein' – and your dead father's widow!"

In an instant the reserve of Joan's sternly equal mind was broken up. She dropped her sword clattering on the floor and started angrily forward towards the bed.

"It is a lie most foul," she cried; "my father lived unwed for many years – nay, ever since my mother's death, who died in giving me life, he never so much as looked on woman. It is a thing well known in the Duchy!"

The woman did not answer directly.

"Max Ulrich, bring the silver casket," she said, taking from her neck a little silver key.

The Wordless Man, seeing her action, came forward and took the key. He went out of the room, and after an interval which seemed interminable he returned with a peculiarly shaped casket. It was formed like a heart, and upon it, curiously worked in gold and precious stones, Joan saw her father's motto and the armorial bearings of Hohenstein.

The woman touched a spring with well-practised hand, the silver heart divided, and a roll of parchment fell upon the bed. With a strange smile she gave it to Joan, beckoning her with an upward nod to approach.

"I give this precious document without fear into your hands. It is my very soul. But it is safe with the daughter of Henry the Lion."

Joan took the crackling parchment. It had three seals attached to it and the first part was in her father's own handwriting.

"I declare by these presents that I have married, according to the customs of Hohenstein and the laws of the Empire, Theresa von Lynar, daughter of the Count von Lynar of Jutland. But this marriage shall not, by any of its occasions or consequents, affect the succession of my daughter Joanna to the Duchy of Hohenstein and the Principalities of Kernsberg and Marienfeld. To which we subscribe our names as conjointly agreeing thereto in the presence of his High Eminence the Cardinal Adrian, Archbishop of Cologne and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire."

Then followed the three signatures, and beneath, in another handwriting, Joan read the following: —

"These persons, Henry Duke of Hohenstein and Theresa von Lynar, were married by me subject to the above conditions mutually agreed upon in the Church of Olsen near to the Kurische Haff, in the presence of Julius Count von Lynar and his sons Wolf and Mark, in the year 14 – , the day being the eve of St. John. – Adrian, Archiepiscop. et Elector."

After her first shock of surprise was over Joan noted carefully the date. It was one year after her own birth, and therefore the like period after the death of her mother, the openly acknowledged Duchess of Hohenstein.

The quick eyes of the woman on the bed had followed hers as they read carefully down the parchment, eagerly and also apprehensively, like those of a mother who for some weighty reason has placed her child in peril.

Joan folded the parchment and handed it back. Then she stood silent waiting for an explanation.

The woman took up her parable calmly, like one who has long comprehended that such a crisis must one day arrive, and who knows her part thoroughly.

"I, who speak to you, am Theresa von Lynar. Your father saw me first at the coronation of our late sovereign, Christian, King of Denmark. And we loved one another. For this cause I moved my brother and his sons to build Castle Lynar on the shores of the Northern Sea. For this cause I accompanied him thither. For many years at Castle Lynar, and also at this place, called the Hermitage of the Dunes, Henry of Kernsberg and I dwelt in such happiness as mortals seldom know. I loved your father, obeyed him, adored him, lived only for him. But there came a spring when my brother, being like your father a hot and passionate man, quarrelled with Duke Henry, threatening to go before the Diet of the Empire if I were not immediately acknowledged Duchess and my son Maurice von Lynar made the heir of Hohenstein. But I, being true to my oath and promise, left my brother and abode here alone with my husband when he could escape from his Dukedom, living like a simple squire and his dame. Those were happy days and made up for much. Then in an evil day I sent my son to my brother to train as his own son in arms and the arts of war. But he, being at enmity with my husband, made ready to carry the lad before the Diet of the Empire, that he might be declared heir to his father. Then, in his anger, Henry the Lion rose and swept Castle Lynar with fire and sword, leaving none alive but this boy only, whom he meant to take back and train with his captains. But on the way home, even as he rode southward through the forest towards Kernsberg, he reeled in the saddle and passed ere he could speak a word, even the name of those he loved. So the boy remained a captive at Kernsberg, called by my brother's name, and knowing even to this day nothing of his father."

And as the woman ceased speaking Werner von Orseln nodded gravely and sadly.

"This thing concerning my lord's death is true," he said; "I was present. These arms received him as he fell. He was dead ere we laid him on the ground!"

Theresa von Lynar raised herself. She had spoken thus far reclining on the bed from which Joan had risen. Now she sat up and for a little space rested her hands on her lap ere she went on.

"Then my son, whom, not knowing, you had taken pity upon and raised to honour, and who is now your faithful servant, sent a secret messenger that you would come to abide secretly with me till a certain dark day had overpassed in Kernsberg. And then there sprang up in my heart a dreadful conceit that he loved you, knowing young blood and hearing the fame of your beauty, and I was afraid for the greatness of the sin – that one should love his sister."

Joan made a quick gesture of dissent, but the woman went on.

"I thought, being a woman alone, and one also, who had given all freely up for love's sake, that he would certainly love you even as I had loved. And when I saw you in my house, so cold and so proud, and when I thought within me that but for you my son would have been a mighty prince, a strange terrible anger and madness came over me, darkening my soul. For a moment I would have slain you. But I could not, because you were asleep. And, even as you stirred, I heard you speak the name of a man, as only one who loves can speak it. I know right well how that is, having listened to it with a glad heart in the night. The name was – "

"Hold!" cried Joan of the Sword Hand. "I believe you – I forgive you!"

"The name," continued Theresa von Lynar, "was not that of my son! And now," she went on, slowly rising from the couch to her height, "I am ready. I bid you slay me for the evil deed my heart was willing for a moment to do!"

Joan looked at her full in the eyes for the space of a breath. Then suddenly she held out her hand and answered like her father's daughter.

"Nay," she said, "I only marvel that you did not strike me to the heart, because of your son's loss and my father's sin!"

CHAPTER XXV

BORNE ON THE GREAT WAVE

It chanced that in the chamber from which Werner von Orseln had come so swiftly at the cry of the Wordless Man, Boris and Jorian, after sleeping through the disturbances above them and the first burst of the storm, were waked by the blowing open of the lattice as the wind reached its height. Jorian lay still on his pallet and slily kicked Boris, hoping that he would rise and take upon him the task of shutting it.

Then to Boris, struggling upward to the surface of the ocean of sleep, came the same charitable thought with regard to Jorian. So, both kicking out at the same time, their feet encountered with clash of iron footgear, and then with surly snarls they hent them on their feet, abusing each other in voices which could be heard above the humming of the storm without.

It was tall Boris who, having cursed himself empty, first made his way to the window. The lattice hung by one leathern thong. The other had been torn away, and indeed it was a wonder that the whole framework had not been blown bodily into the room. For the tempest pressed against it straight from the north, and the sticky spray from the waves which broke on the shingle drove stingingly into the eyes of the man-at-arms.

Nevertheless he thrust his head out, looked a moment through half-closed eyelids, and then cried, "Jorian, we are surely lost! The sea is breaking in upon us. It has passed the beach of shingle out there!"

And seizing Jorian by the arm Boris made his way to the door by which they had entered, and, undoing the bolts, they reached the walled courtyard, where, however, they found themselves in the open air, but sheltered from the utmost violence of the tempest. There was a momentary difficulty here, because neither could find the key of the heavy door in the boundary wall. But Boris, ever fertile in expedient, discovered a ladder under a kind of shed, and setting it against the northern wall he climbed to the top. While he remained under the shelter of the wall his body was comfortably warm; only an occasional veering flaw sent a purl downwards of what he was to meet. But the instant his head was above the copestone, and the ice-cold northerly blast met him like a wall, he fairly gasped, for the furious onslaught of the storm seemed to blow every particle of breath clean out of his body.

The spindrift flew smoking past, momentarily white in the constant lightning flashes, and before him, and apparently almost at the foot of the wall, Boris saw a wonderful sight. The sea appeared to be climbing, climbing, climbing upwards over a narrow belt of sand and shingle which separated the scarcely fretted Haff from the tumbling milk of the outer Baltic.

In another moment Jorian was beside him, crouching on the top of the wall to save himself from being carried away. And there, in the steamy smother of the sea, backed by the blue electric flame of the lightning, they saw the slant masts of a vessel labouring to beat against the wind.

"Poor souls, they are gone!" said Boris, trying to shield his eyes with his palm, as the black hull disappeared bodily, and the masts seemed to lurch forward into the milky turmoil. "We shall never see her again."

For one moment all was dark as pitch, and the next a dozen flashes of lightning burst every way, as many appearing to rise upwards as could be seen to fall downwards. A black speck poised itself on the crest of a wave. "It is a boat! It can never live!" cried the two men together, and dropping from the top of the wall they ran down to the shore, going as near as they dared to the surf which arched and fell with ponderous roar on the narrow strip of shingle.

Here Jorian and Boris ran this way and that, trying to pierce the blackness of the sky with their spray-blinded eyes, but nothing more, either of the ship or of the boat which had put out from it, did they see. The mountainous roll and ceaseless iterance of the oncoming breakers hid the surface of the sea from their sight, while the sky, changing with each pulse of the lightning from densest black to green shot with violet, told nothing of the men's lives which were being riven from their bodies beneath it.

"Back, Boris, back!" cried Jorian suddenly, as after a succession of smaller waves a gigantic and majestic roller arched along the whole seaward front, stood for a moment black and imminent above them, and then fell like a whole mountain-range in a snowy avalanche of troubled water which rushed savagely up the beach. The two soldiers, who would have faced unblanched any line of living enemies in the world, fled terror-stricken at that clutching onrush of that sea of milk. The wet sand seemed to catch and hold their feet as they ran, so that they felt in their hearts the terrible sensation of one who flees in dreams from some hideous imagined terror and who finds his powers fail him as his pursuer approaches.

Upward and still upward the wave swept with a soft universal hiss which drowned and dominated the rataplan of the thunder-peals above and the sonorous diapason of the surf around them. It rushed in a creaming smother about their ankles, plucked at their knees, but could rise no higher. Yet so fierce was the back draught, that when the water retreated, dragging the pebbles with it down the shingly shore with the rattle of a million castanets, the two stout captains of Plassenburg were thrown on their faces and lay as dead on the wet and sticky stones, each clutching a double handful of broken shells and oozy sand which streamed through his numbed fingers.

Boris was the first to rise, and finding Jorian still on his face he caught the collar of his doublet and pulled him with little ceremony up the sloping bank out of tide-reach, throwing him down on the shingly summit with as little tenderness or compunction as if he had been a bag of wet salt.

By this time the morning was advancing and the storm growing somewhat less continuous. Instead of the wind bearing a dead weight upon the face, it came now in furious gusts. Instead of one grand roar, multitudinous in voice yet uniform in tone, it hooted and piped overhead as if a whole brood of evil spirits were riding headlong down the tempest-track. Instead of coming on in one solid bank of blackness, the clouds were broken into a wrack of wild and fantastic fragments, the interspaces of which showed alternately paly green and pearly grey. The thunder retreated growling behind the horizon. The violet lightning grew less continuous, and only occasionally rose and fell in vague distant flickerings towards the north, as if some one were lifting a lantern almost to the sea-line and dropping it again before reaching it.

Looking back from the summit of the mound, Boris saw something dark lying high up on the beach amid a wrack of seaweed and broken timber which marked where the great wave had stopped. Something odd about the shape took his eye.

A moment later he was leaping down again towards the shore, taking his longest strides, and sending the pebbles spraying out in front and on all sides of him. He stooped and found the body of a man, tall, well formed, and of manly figure. He was bareheaded and stripped to his breeches and underwear.

Boris stooped and laid his hand upon his heart. Yes, so much was certain. He was not dead. Whereupon the ex-man-at-arms lifted him as well as he could and dragged him by the elbows out of reach of the waves. Then he went back to Jorian and kicked him in the ribs. The rotund man sat up with an execration.