Joan of the Sword Hand

"Maurice of Hohenstein shall sit in his father's seat," said Joan firmly. "I have sworn it. If I live I will see him settled there with my captains about him. Werner von Orseln is an honest man. He will do him justice. Von Dessauer shall get him recognised, and Hugo of Plassenburg shall stand his sponsor before the Diet of the Empire."

"I would it could be so," said Theresa wistfully. "If my death could cause this thing righteously to come to pass, how gladly would I end life! But I am bound by an oath, and my son is bound because I am bound. The tribunal is not the Diet of Ratisbon, but the faithfulness of a woman's heart. Have I been loyal to my prince these many years, so that now shame itself sits on my brow as gladly as a crown of bay, that I should fail him now? Low he lies, and I may never stand beside his sepulchre. No son of mine shall sit in his high chair. But if in any sphere of sinful or imperfect spirits, be it hell or purgatory, he and I shall encounter, think you that for an empire I would meet him shamed. And when he says, 'Woman of my love, hast thou kept thy troth?' shall I be compelled to answer 'No?'"

"But," urged Joan, "this thing is your son's birthright. My father, for purposes of state, bound my happiness to a man I loathe. I have cast that band to the winds. The fathers cannot bind the children, no more can you disinherit your son."

Theresa von Lynar smiled a sad wise smile, infinitely patient, infinitely remote.

"Ah," she said, "you think so? You are young. You have never loved. You are his daughter, not his wife. One day you shall know, if God is good to you!"

At this Joan smiled in her turn. She knew what she knew.

"You may think you know," returned Theresa, her calm eyes on the girl's face, "but what I mean by loving is another matter. The band you broke you did not make. I keep the vow I made. With clear eye, undulled brain, willing hand I made it – because he willed it. Let my son Maurice break it, if he can, if he will – as you have broken yours. Only let him never more call Theresa von Lynar mother!"

Joan rose to depart. Her intent had not been shaken, though she was impressed by the noble heart of the woman who had been her father's wife. But she also had vowed a vow, and that vow she would keep. The Sparhawk should yet be the Eagle of Kernsberg, and she, Joan, a home-keeping housewife nested in quietness, a barn-door fowl about the orchards of Isle Rugen.

"Madam," she said, "your word is your word. But so is that of Joan of Kernsberg. It may be that out of the unseen there may leap a chance which shall bring all to pass, the things which we both desire – without breaking of vows or loosing of the bands of obligation. For me, being no more than a daughter, I will keep Duke Henry's will only in that which is just!"

"And I," said Theresa von Lynar, "will keep it, just or unjust!"

Yet Joan smiled as she went out. For she had been countered and checkmated in sacrifice. She had met a nature greater than her own, and that with the truly noble is the pleasure of pleasures. In such things only the small are small, only the worms of the earth delight to crawl upon the earth. The great and the wise look up and worship the sun above them. And if by chance their special sun prove after all to be but a star, they say, "Ah, if we had only been near enough it would have been a sun!"

All the while Conrad sat very still, listening with full heart to that which it did not concern him to interrupt. But within his heart he said, "Woman, when she is true woman, is greater, worthier, fuller than any man – aye, were it the Holy Father himself. Perhaps because they draw near Christ the Son through Mary the Mother!"

But Theresa von Lynar sat silent, and watched the girl as she went down the long path, the leafy branches spattering alternate light and shadow upon her slender figure. Then she turned sharply upon Conrad.

"And now, my Lord Cardinal," she said, "what have you been saying to my husband's daughter?"

"I have been telling her that I love her!" answered Conrad simply. He felt that what he had listened to gave this woman a right to be answered.

"And what, I pray you, have princes of Holy Church to do with love? They seek after heavenly things, do they not? Like the angels, they neither marry nor are given in marriage."

"I know," said Conrad humbly, and without taking the least offence. "I know it well. But I have put off the armour I had not proven. The burden is too great for me. I am a soldier – I was trained a soldier – yet because I was born after my brother Louis, I must perforce become both priest and cardinal. Rather a thousand times would I be a man-at-arms and carry a pike!"

"Then am I to understand that as a soldier you told the Duchess Joan that you loved her, and that as a priest you forbade the banns? Or did you wholly forget the little circumstance that once on a time you yourself married her to your brother?"

"I did indeed forget," said Conrad, with sincere penitence; "yet you must not blame me too sorely. I was carried out of myself – "

"The Duchess, then, rejected your suit with contumely?"

Conrad was silent.

"How should a great lady listen to her husband's brother – and he a priest?" Theresa went on remorseless. "What said the Lady Joan when you told her that you loved her?"

"The words she spoke I cannot repeat, but when she ended I set my lips to her garment's hem as reverently as ever to holy bread."

The slow smile came again over the face of Theresa von Lynar, the smile of a warworn veteran who watches the children at their drill.

"You do not need to tell me what she answered, my lord," she said, for the first time leaving out the ecclesiastic title. "I know!"

Conrad stared at the woman.

"She told you that she loved you from the first."

"How know you that?" he faltered. "None must hear that secret – none must guess it!"

Theresa von Lynar laughed a little mellow laugh, in which a keen ear might have detected how richly and pleasantly her laugh must once have sounded to her lover when all her pulses beat to the tune of gladness and the unbound heart.

"Do you think to deceive me, Theresa, whom Henry the Lion loved? Have I been these many weeks with you two in the house and not seen this? Prince Conrad, I knew it that night of the storm when she bent her over the couch on which you lay. 'I love,' you say boldly, and you think great things of your love. But she loved first as she will love most, and your boasted love will never overtake hers – no, not though you love her all your life… Well, what do you propose to do?"

Conrad stood a moment mutely wrestling with himself. He had never felt Joan's first instinctive aversion to this woman, a dislike even yet scarcely overcome – for women distrust women till they have proven themselves innocent, and often even then.

"My lady," he said, "the Duchess Joan has showed me the better way. Like a man, I knew not what I asked, nor dared to express all that I desired. But I have learned how souls can be united, though bodies are separated. I will not touch her hand; I will not kiss her lips. Once a year only will I see her in the flesh. I shall carry out my duty, made at least less unworthy by her example – "

"And think you," said Theresa, "that in the night watches you will keep this charge? Will not her face come between you and the altar? Will not her image float before you as you kneel at the shrine? Will it not blot out the lines as you read your daily office?"

"I know it – I know it too well!" said Conrad, sinking his head on his breast. "I am not worthy."

"What, then, will you do? Can you serve two masters?" persisted the inquisitor. "Your Scripture says not."

A larger self seemed to flame and dilate within the young man.

"One thing I can do," he said – "like you, I can obey. She bade me go back and do my duty. I cannot bind my thought; I cannot change my heart; I cannot cast my love out. I have heard that which I have heard, and I cannot forget; but at least with the body I can obey. I will perform my vow; I will keep my charge to the letter, every jot and tittle. And if God condemn me for a hypocrite – well, let Him! He, and not I, put this love into my heart. My body may be my priesthood's – I will strive to keep it clean – but my soul is my lady's. For that let Him cast both soul and body into hell-fire if He will!"

Theresa von Lynar did not smile any more. She held out her hand to Conrad of Courtland, priest and prince.

"Yes," she said, "you do know what love is. In so far as I can I will help you to your heart's desire."

And in her turn she rose and passed down through the leafy avenues of the orchard, over which the westering sun was already casting rood-long shadows.

CHAPTER XLII

THE WORDLESS MAN TAKES A PRISONER

It was the hour of the evening meal at Isle Rugen. The September day piped on to its melancholy close, and the wild geese overhead called down unseen from the upper air a warning that the storm followed hard upon their backs. At the table-head sat Theresa von Lynar, her largely moulded and beautiful face showing no sign of emotion. Only great quiet dwelt upon it, with knowledge and the sympathy of the proven for the untried. On either side of her were Joan and Prince Conrad – not sad, neither avoiding nor seeking the contingence of eye and eye, but yet, in spite of all, so strange a thing is love once declared, consciously happy within their heart of hearts.

Then, after a space dutifully left unoccupied, came Captains Boris and Jorian; while at the table-foot, opposite to their hostess, towered Werner von Orseln, whose grey beard had wagged at the more riotous board of Henry the Lion of Hohenstein.

Werner was telling an interminable story of the old wars, with many a "Thus said I" and "So did he," ending thus: "There lay I on my back, with thirty pagan Wends ready to slit my hals as soon as they could get their knives between my gorget and headpiece. Gott! but I said every prayer that I knew – they were not many in those days – all in two minutes' space, as I lay looking at the sky through my visor bars and waiting for the first prick of the Wendish knife-points.

"But even as I looked up, lo! some one bestrode me, and the voice I loved best in all the world – no, not a woman's, God send him rest" ("Amen!" interjected the Lady Joan) – "cried, 'To me, Hohenstein! To me, Kernsberg!' And though my head was ringing with the shock of falling, and my body weak from many wounds, I strove to answer that call, as I saw my master's sword flicker this way and that over my head. I rose half from the ground, my hilt still in my hand – I had no more left after the fight I had fought. But Henry the Lion gave me a stamp down with his foot. 'Lie still, man,' he said; 'do not interfere in a little business of this kind!' And with his one point he kept a score at bay, crying all the time, 'To me, Hohenstein! To me, Kernsbergers all!'

"And when the enemy fled, did he wait till the bearers came? Well I wot, hardly! Instead, he caught me over his shoulder like an empty sack when one goes a-foraging – me, Werner von Orseln, that am built like a donjon tower. And with his sword still red in his right hand he bore me in, only turning aside a little to threaten a Wendish archer who would have sent an arrow through me on the way. By the knights who sit round Karl's table, he was a man!"

And then to their feet sprang Boris and Jorian, who were judges of men.

"To Prince Henry the Lion —hoch!" they cried. "Drink it deep to his memory!"

And with tankard and wreathed wine-cup they quaffed to the great dead. Standing up, they drank – his daughter also – all save Theresa von Lynar. She sat unmoved, as if the toast had been her own and in a moment more she must rise to give them thanks. For the look on her face said, "After all, what is there so strange in that? Was he not Henry the Lion – and mine?"

For there is no joy like that which you may see on a woman's face when a great deed is told of the man she loves.

The Kernsberg soldiers who had been trained to serve at table, had stopped and stood fixed, their duties in complete oblivion during the tale, but now they resumed them and the simple feast continued. Meanwhile it had been growing wilder and wilder without, and the shrill lament of the wind was distinctly heard in the wide chimney-top. Now and then in a lull, broad splashes of rain fell solidly into the red embers with a sound like musket balls "spatting" on a wall.

Then Theresa von Lynar looked up.

"Where is Max Ulrich?" she said; "why does he delay?"

"My lady," one of the men of Kernsberg answered, saluting; "he is gone across the Haff in the boat, and has not yet returned."

"I will go and look for him – nay, do not rise, my lord. I would go forth alone!"

So, snatching a cloak from the prong of an antler in the hall, Theresa went out into the irregular hooting of the storm. It was not yet the deepest gloaming, but dull grey clouds like hunted cattle scoured across the sky, and the rising thunder of the waves on the shingle prophesied a night of storm. Theresa stood a long time bare-headed, enjoying the thresh of the broad drops as they struck against her face and cooled her throbbing eyes. Then she pulled the hood of the cloak over her head.

The dead was conquering the quick within her.

"I have known a man!" she said; "what need I more with life now? The man I loved is dead. I thank God that I served him – aye, as his dog served him. And shall I grow disobedient now? No, not that my son might sit on the throne of the Kaiser!"

Theresa stood upon the inner curve of the Haff at the place where Max Ulrich was wont to pull his boat ashore. The wind was behind her, and though the waves increased as the distance widened from the pebbly bank on which she stood, the water at her feet was only ruffled and pitted with little dimples under the shocks of the wind. Theresa looked long southward under her hand, but for the moment could see nothing.

Then she settled herself to keep watch, with the storm riding slack-rein overhead. Towards the mainland the whoop and roar with which it assaulted the pine forests deafened her ears. But her face was younger than we have ever seen it, for Werner's story had moved her strongly. Once more she was by a great man's side. She moved her hand swiftly, first out of the shelter of the cloak as if seeking furtively to nestle it in another's, and then, as the raindrops plashed cold upon it, she drew it slowly back to her again.

And though Theresa von Lynar was yet in the prime of her glorious beauty, one could see what she must have been in the days of her girlhood. And as memory caused her eyes to grow misty, and the smile of love and trust eternal came upon her lips, twenty years were shorn away; and the woman's face which had looked anxiously across the darkening Haff changed to that of the girl who from the gate of Castle Lynar had watched for the coming of Duke Henry.

She was gazing steadfastly southward, but it was not for Max the Wordless that she waited. Towards Kernsberg, where he whose sleep she had so often watched, rested all alone, she looked and kissed a hand.

"Dear," she murmured, "you have not forgotten Theresa! You know she keeps troth! Aye, and will keep it till God grows kind, and your true wife can follow – to tell you how well she hath kept her charge!"

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.

"Why?" said Theresa the mother, with assurance. "Because he loved her doubtless. How? Because he was his father's son!"

And Theresa being calm and stilling the others, Alt Pikker got time to tell his tale. There was silence in the grange of Isle Rugen while it was being told, and even when it was ended for a space none spoke. But Theresa smiled well pleased and said in her heart, "I thank God! My son also shall meet Henry the Lion face to face and not be ashamed."