Joan of the Sword Hand

Awhile she was silent, and then she went on in the low even voice of self-communing.

"What to me is it to become a princess? Did not he, for whose words alone I cared, call me his queen? And I was his queen. In the black blank day of my uttermost need he made me his wife. And I am his wife. What want I more with dignities?"

Theresa von Lynar was silent awhile and then she added —

"Yet the young Duchess, his daughter, means well. She has her father's spirit. And my son – why should my vow bind him? Let him be Duke, if so the Fates direct and Providence allow. But for me, I will not stir finger or utter word to help him. There shall be neither anger nor sadness in my husband's eyes when I tell him how I have observed the bond!"

Again she kissed a hand towards the dead man who lay so deep under the ponderous marble at Kernsberg. Then with a gracious gesture, lingeringly and with the misty eyes of loving womanhood, she said her lonely farewells.

"To you, beloved," she murmured, and her voice was low and very rich, "to you, beloved, where far off you lie! Sleep sound, nor think the time long till Theresa comes to you!"

She turned and walked back facing the storm. Her hood had long ago been blown from her head by the furious gusts of wind. But she heeded not. She had forgotten poor Max Ulrich and Joan, and even herself. She had forgotten her son. Her hand was out in the storm now. She did not draw it back, though the water ran from her fingertips. For it was clasped in an unseen grasp and in an ear that surely heard she was whispering her heart's troth. "God give it to me to do one deed – one only before I die – that, worthy and unashamed, I may meet my King."

When Theresa re-entered the hall of the grange the company still sat as she had left them. Only at the lower end of the board the three captains conferred together in low voices, while at the upper Joan and Prince Conrad sat gazing full at each other as if souls could be drunk in through the eyes.

With a certain reluctance which yet had no shame in it, they plucked glance from glance as she entered, as it were with difficulty detaching spirits which had been joined. At which Theresa, recalled to herself, smiled.

"In all that touches not my vow I will help you two!" she thought, as she looked at them. For true love came closer to her than anything else in the world.

"There is no sign of Max," she said aloud, to break the first silence of constraint; "perhaps he has waited at the landing-place on the mainland till the storm should abate – though that were scarce like him, either."

She sat down, with one large movement of her arm casting her wet cloak over the back of a wooden settle, which fronted a fireplace where green pine knots crackled and explosive jets of steam rushed spitefully outwards into the hall with a hissing sound.

"You have been down at the landing-place – on such a night?" said Joan, with some remains of that curious awkwardness which marks the interruption of a more interesting conversation.

"Yes," said Theresa, smiling indulgently (for she had been in like case – such a great while ago, when her brothers used to intrude). "Yes, I have been at the landing-place. But as yet the storm is nothing, though the waves will be fierce enough if Max Ulrich is coming home with a laden boat to pull in the wind's eye."

It mattered little what she said. She had helped them to pass the bar, and the conversation could now proceed over smooth waters.

Yet there is no need to report it. Joan and Conrad remained and spoke they scarce knew what, all for the pleasure of eye answering eye, and the subtle flattery of voices that altered by the millionth of a tone each time they answered each other. Theresa spoke vaguely but sufficiently, and allowed herself to dream, till to her yearning gaze honest, sturdy Werner grew misty and his bluff figure resolved itself into that one nobler and more kingly which for years had fronted her at the table's end where now the chief captain sat.

Meanwhile Jorian and Boris exchanged meaning and covert glances, asking each other when this dull dinner parade would be over, so that they might loosen leathern points, undo buttons, and stretch legs on benches with a tankard of ale at each right elbow, according to the wont of stout war-captains not quite so young as they once were.

Thus they were sitting when there came a clamour at the outer door, the noise of voices, then a soldier's challenge, and, on the back of that, Max Ulrich's weird answer – a sound almost like the howl of a wolf cut off short in his throat by the hand that strangles him.

"There he is at last!" cried all in the dining-hall of the grange.

"Thank God!" murmured Theresa. For the man wanting words had known Henry the Lion.

They waited a long moment of suspense till the door behind Werner was thrust open and the dumb man came in, drenched and dripping. He was holding one by the arm, a man as tall as himself, grey and gaunt, who fronted the company with eyes bandaged and hands tied behind his back. Max Ulrich had a sharp knife in his hand with a thin and slightly curved blade, and as he thrust the pinioned man before him into the full light of the candles, he made signs that, if his lady wished it, he was prepared to despatch his prisoner on the spot. His lips moved rapidly and he seemed to be forming words and sentences. His mistress followed these movements with the closest attention.

"He says," she began to translate, "that he met this man on the further side. He said that he had a message for Isle Rugen, and refused to turn back on any condition. So Max blindfolded, bound, and gagged him, he being willing to be bound. And now he waits our pleasure."

"Let him be unloosed," said Joan, gazing eagerly at the prisoner, and Theresa made the sign.

Stolidly Ulrich unbound the broad bandage from the man's eyes, and a grey badger's brush of upright stubble rose slowly erect above a high narrow brow, like laid corn that dries in the sun.

"Alt Pikker!" said Joan of the Sword Hand, starting to her feet.

"Alt Pikker!" cried in varied tones of wonderment Werner von Orseln and the two captains of Plassenburg, Jorian and Boris.

And Alt Pikker it surely was.

CHAPTER XLIII

TO THE RESCUE

But the late prisoner did not speak at once, though his captor stood back as though to permit him to explain himself. He was still bound and gagged. Discovering which, Max in a very philosophical and leisurely manner assisted him to relieve himself of a rolled kerchief which had been placed in his mouth.

Even then his throat refused its office till Werner von Orseln handed him a great cup of wine from which he drank deeply.

"Speak!" said Joan. "What disaster has brought you here? Is Kernsberg taken?"

"The Eagle's Nest is harried, my lady, but that is not what hath brought me hither!"

"Have they found out this my – prison? Are they coming to capture me?"

"Neither," returned Alt Pikker. "Maurice von Lynar is in the hands of his cruel enemies, and on the day after to-morrow, at sunrise, he is to be torn to pieces by wild horses."

"Why?" "Wherefore?" "In what place?" "Who would dare?" came from all about the table; but the mother of the young man sat silent as if she had not heard.

"To save Kernsberg from sack by the Muscovites, Maurice von Lynar went to Courtland in the guise of the Lady Joan. At the fords of the Alla we delivered him up!"

"You delivered him up?" cried Theresa suddenly. "Then you shall die! Max Ulrich, your knife!"

The dumb man gave the knife in a moment, but Theresa had not time to approach.

"I went with him," said Alt Pikker calmly.

"You went with him," repeated his mother after a moment, not understanding.

"Could I let the young man go alone into the midst of his enemies?"

"He went for my sake!" moaned Joan. "He is to die for me!"

"Nay," corrected Alt Pikker, "he is to die for wedding the Princess Margaret of Courtland!"

Again they cried out upon him in utmost astonishment – that is, all the men.

"Maurice von Lynar has married the Princess Margaret of Courtland? Impossible!"

"And why should he not?" his mother cried out.

"I expected it from the first!" quoth Joan of the Sword Hand, disdainful of their masculine ignorance.

"Well," put in Alt Pikker, "at all events, he hath married the Princess. Or she has married him, which is the same thing!"

"But why? We knew nothing of this! He told us nothing. We thought he went for our lady's sake to Courtland! Why did he marry her?" cried severally Von Orseln and the Plassenburg captains.