Joan of the Sword Hand

THE TRUTH-SPEAKING OF BORIS AND JORIAN

This is the report verbal of Captains Boris and Jorian, which they gave in face of their sovereigns in the garden pleasaunce of the palace of Plassenburg. Hugo and Helene sat at opposite ends of a seat of twisted branches. Hugo crossed his legs and whistled low with his thumbs in the slashing of his doublet, a habit of which Helene had long striven in vain to cure him. The Princess was busy broidering the coronated double eagle of a new banner, but occasionally she raised her eyes to where on the green slope beneath, under the wing of a sage woman of experience, the youthful hope of Plassenburg led his mimic armies to battle against the lilies by the orchard wall, or laid lance in rest to storm the too easy fortress of his nurse's lap.

"Boris," whispered Jorian, "remember! Do not lie, Boris. 'Tis too dangerous. You remember the last time?"

"Aye," growled Boris. "I have good cause to remember! What a liar our Hugo must have been in his time, so readily to suspect two honest soldiers!"

"Speak out your minds, good lads!" said Hugo, leaning a little further back.

"Aye, tell us all," assented Helene, pausing to shake her head at the antics of the young Prince Karl; "tell us how you delivered the Sparhawk, as you call him, the officer of the Duchess Joan!"

So Boris saluted and began.

"The tale is a long one, Prince and Princess," he said. "Of our many and difficult endeavours to keep the peace and prevent quarrelling I will say nothing – "

"Better so!" interjected Hugo, with a gleam in his eye. Jorian coughed and growled to himself, "That long fool will make a mess of it!"

"I will pass on to our entry into Courtland. It was like the home-coming of a long-lost true prince. There was no fighting – alack, not so much as a stroke after all that pother of shouting!"

"Boris!" said the Princess warningly.

"Give him rope!" muttered Prince Hugo. "He will tangle himself rarely or all be done!"

"I mean by the blessing of Heaven there was no bloodshed," Boris corrected himself. "There was, as I say, no fighting. There was none to fight with. Prince Louis had not a friend in his own capital city, saving the Muscovite. And at that moment Prince Ivan the Wasp was glad enough to win clear off to the frontier with his Cossacks at his tail. It was a God's pity we could not ride them down. But though Jorian and I did all that men could – "

"Ahem!" said Jorian, as if a fly had flown into his mouth and tickled his throat.

"I mean, your Highnesses, we did whatever men could to keep the populace within bounds. But they broke through and leaped upon us, throwing their arms about our horses' necks, crying out, 'Our saviours!' 'Our deliverers!' God wot, we might as well have tried to charge through the billows of the Baltic when it blows a norther right from the Gulf of Bothnia! But it almost broke my heart to see them ride off with never so much as a spear thrust through one single Muscovite belly-band!"

Here Jorian had a fit of coughing which caused the Princess to look severely upon him. Boris, recalled to himself, proceeded more carefully.

"It was all we could do to open up a way to where the young man Maurice lay stretched on the Cross of Death. They had loosed the wild horses before we arrived, and these had galloped off after their companions. A pity! Oh, a great pity!

"Then came the young man's mother near, she who was our hostess at Isle Rugen – "

"Why did you not abide at Kernsberg as you were instructed?" put in Hugo at this point.

"Never mind – go on – tell the tale!" cried Helene, who was listening breathlessly.

"We thought it our duty to accompany the Duchess Joan," said Boris, deftly enough; "where the king is, there is the court!"

And at this point the two captains saluted very dutifully and respectfully, like machines moved by one spring.

"Well said for once, thou overly long one," growled Jorian under his breath.

"Go on!" commanded Helene.

"The young man's mother came near and threw a cloak across his naked body. Then Jorian and I unbound him and chafed his limbs, first removing the gag from his mouth; but so tightly had the cords been bound about him that for long he could not stand upright. Then, from the royal pavilion, where she had been brought for cruel sport to see the death, the Princess Margaret came running – "

"Oh, wickedness!" cried Helene, "to make her look on at her lover's death!"

"She came furiously, though a dainty princess, thrusting strong men aside. 'Way there!' she cried, 'on your lives make way! I will go to him. I am the Princess Margaret. Give me a dagger and I will prick me a way.'"

"And, by Saint Stephen the holy martyr – if she did not snatch a bodkin from the belt of a tailor in the High Street and with it open up her way as featly as though she were handling a Cossack lance."

"And what happened when she got to him – when she found her husband?" cried Helene, her eyes sparkling. And she put out a hand to touch her own, just to be sure that he was there.

"Truth, a very wondrous thing happened!" said Jorian, whose fingers also had been twitching, "a mightily wondrous thing. Thus it was – "

"Hold your tongue, sausage-bag!" growled Boris, very low; "who tells this tale, you or I?"

"Get on, then," answered in like fashion Captain Jorian, "you are as long-winded and wheezy as a smith's bellows!"

"Yes, a strange thing it was. I was standing by Maurice von Lynar, undoing the cord from his neck. His mother was chafing an arm. The Lady Joan was bending to speak softly to him, for she had dismounted from her horse, when, all in the snapping of a twig, the Princess Margaret came bursting through the ring which Jorian and the Kernsbergers were keeping with their lance-butts. She thrust us all aside. By my faith, me she sent spinning like the young Prince's top there!"

"God save his Excellency!" quoth Jorian, not to be left out entirely.

"Silence!" cried Helene, with an imperious stamp of her little foot; "and do you, Boris, tell the tale without comparisons. What happened then?"

"Only the boy's mother kept her ground! She went on chafing his arm without so much as raising her eyes."

"Did the Princess serve Joan of the Sword Hand as she served you?" interposed Hugo.

"Marry, worse!" cried Boris, growing excited for the first time. "She thrust her aside like a kitchen wench, and our lady took it as meekly as – as – "

"Go on! Did I not tell you to spare us your comparatives?" cried Helene the Princess, letting her broidery slip to the ground in her consuming interest.

"Well," said Boris, quickly sobered, "it was in truth a mighty quaint thing to see. The Princess Margaret took the young man in her arms and caught him to her. The Lady Theresa kept hold of his wrist. They looked at each other a moment without speech, eye countering eye like knights at a – "

"Go on!" the Princess thundered, if indeed a silvern voice can be said to thunder.

"'Give him up to me! He is mine!' cried the Princess.

"'He is mine!' answered very haughtily the lady of the Isle Rugen – 'Who are you?' 'And you?' cried both at once, flinging their heads back, but never for a moment letting go with their hands. The youth, being dazed, said nothing, nor so much as moved.

"'I am his mother!' said the Lady Theresa, speaking first.

"'I am his wife!' said the Princess.

"Then the woman who had borne the young man gave him into his wife's arms without a word, and the Princess gathered him to her bosom and crooned over him, that being her right. But his mother stepped back among the crowd and drew the hood of her cloak over her head that no man might look upon her face."

"Bravo!" cried Helene, clapping her hands, "it was her right!"

"Little one," said her husband, pointing to the boy on the terrace beneath, who was lashing a toy horse of wood with all his baby might, "I wonder if you will think so when another woman takes him from you!"

The Princess Helene caught her breath sharply.

"That would be different!" she said, "yes, very different!"