The gates of the Monastery stood wide open, the world lay beyond, and
all was ready for departure. Baron Conrad and his men-at-arms sat foot
in stirrup, the milk-white horse that had been brought for Otto stood
waiting for him beside his father’s great charger.
“Farewell, Otto,” said the good old Abbot, as he stooped and kissed the
boy’s cheek.
“Farewell,” answered Otto, in his simple, quiet way, and it brought
a pang to the old man’s heart that the child should seem to grieve so
little at the leave-taking.
“Farewell, Otto,” said the brethren that stood about, “farewell,
farewell.”
Then poor brother John came forward and took the boy’s hand, and looked
up into his face as he sat upon his horse. “We will meet again,” said
he, with his strange, vacant smile, “but maybe it will be in Paradise,
and there perhaps they will let us lie in the father’s belfry, and look
down upon the angels in the court-yard below.”
“Aye,” answered Otto, with an answering smile.
“Forward,” cried the Baron, in a deep voice, and with a clash of hoofs
and jingle of armor they were gone, and the great wooden gates were shut
to behind them.
Down the steep winding pathway they rode, and out into the great wide
world beyond, upon which Otto and brother John had gazed so often from
the wooden belfry of the White Cross on the hill.
“Hast been taught to ride a horse by the priests up yonder on
Michaelsburg?” asked the Baron, when they had reached the level road.
“Nay,” said Otto; “we had no horse to ride, but only to bring in the
harvest or the grapes from the further vineyards to the vintage.”
“Prut,” said the Baron, “methought the abbot would have had enough of
the blood of old days in his veins to have taught thee what is fitting
for a knight to know; art not afeared?”
“Nay,” said Otto, with a smile, “I am not afeared.”
“There at least thou showest thyself a Vuelph,” said the grim Baron. But
perhaps Otto’s thought of fear and Baron Conrad’s thought of fear were
two very different matters.
The afternoon had passed by the time they had reached the end of their
journey. Up the steep, stony path they rode to the drawbridge and
the great gaping gateway of Drachenhausen, where wall and tower and
battlement looked darker and more forbidding than ever in the gray
twilight of the coming night. Little Otto looked up with great,
wondering, awe-struck eyes at this grim new home of his.
The next moment they clattered over the drawbridge that spanned the
narrow black gulph between the roadway and the wall, and the next were
past the echoing arch of the great gateway and in the gray gloaming of
the paved court-yard within.
Otto looked around upon the many faces gathered there to catch the
first sight of the little baron; hard, rugged faces, seamed and
weather-beaten; very different from those of the gentle brethren among
whom he had lived, and it seemed strange to him that there was none
there whom he should know.
As he climbed the steep, stony steps to the door of the Baron’s house,
old Ursela came running down to meet him. She flung her withered arms
around him and hugged him close to her. “My little child,” she cried,
and then fell to sobbing as though her heart would break.
“Here is someone knoweth me,” thought the little boy.
His new home was all very strange and wonderful to Otto; the armors, the
trophies, the flags, the long galleries with their ranges of rooms,
the great hall below with its vaulted roof and its great fireplace of
grotesquely carved stone, and all the strange people with their lives
and thoughts so different from what he had been used to know.
And it was a wonderful thing to explore all the strange places in the
dark old castle; places where it seemed to Otto no one could have ever
been before.
Once he wandered down a long, dark passageway below the hall, pushed
open a narrow, iron-bound oaken door, and found himself all at once in
a strange new land; the gray light, coming in through a range of tall,
narrow windows, fell upon a row of silent, motionless figures carven in
stone, knights and ladies in strange armor and dress; each lying upon
his or her stony couch with clasped hands, and gazing with fixed,
motionless, stony eyeballs up into the gloomy, vaulted arch above them.
There lay, in a cold, silent row, all of the Vuelphs who had died since
the ancient castle had been built.
It was the chapel into which Otto had made his way, now long since
fallen out of use excepting as a burial place of the race.
At another time he clambered up into the loft under the high peaked
roof, where lay numberless forgotten things covered with the dim dust
of years. There a flock of pigeons had made their roost, and flapped
noisily out into the sunlight when he pushed open the door from below.
Here he hunted among the mouldering things of the past until, oh, joy
of joys! in an ancient oaken chest he found a great lot of worm-eaten
books, that had belonged to some old chaplain of the castle in days gone
by. They were not precious and beautiful volumes, such as the Father
Abbot had showed him, but all the same they had their quaint painted
pictures of the blessed saints and angels.
Again, at another time, going into the court-yard, Otto had found
the door of Melchior’s tower standing invitingly open, for old Hilda,
Schwartz Carl’s wife, had come down below upon some business or other.
Then upon the shaky wooden steps Otto ran without waiting for a second
thought, for he had often gazed at those curious buildings hanging so
far up in the air, and had wondered what they were like. Round and round
and up and up Otto climbed, until his head spun. At last he reached
a landing-stage, and gazing over the edge and down, beheld the stone
pavement far, far below, lit by a faint glimmer of light that entered
through the arched doorway. Otto clutched tight hold of the wooden rail,
he had no thought that he had climbed so far.
Upon the other side of the landing was a window that pierced the thick
stone walls of the tower; out of the window he looked, and then drew
suddenly back again with a gasp, for it was through the outer wall he
peered, and down, down below in the dizzy depths he saw the hard
gray rocks, where the black swine, looking no larger than ants in the
distance, fed upon the refuse thrown out over the walls of the castle.
There lay the moving tree-tops like a billowy green sea, and the coarse
thatched roofs of the peasant cottages, round which crawled the little
children like tiny human specks.
Then Otto turned and crept down the stairs, frightened at the height to
which he had climbed.
At the doorway he met Mother Hilda. “Bless us,” she cried, starting back
and crossing herself, and then, seeing who it was, ducked him a courtesy
with as pleasant a smile as her forbidding face, with its little
deep-set eyes, was able to put upon itself.
Old Ursela seemed nearer to the boy than anyone else about the castle,
excepting it was his father, and it was a newfound delight to Otto to
sit beside her and listen to her quaint stories, so different from the
monkish tales that he had heard and read at the monastery.
But one day it was a tale of a different sort that she told him, and one
that opened his eyes to what he had never dreamed of before.
The mellow sunlight fell through the window upon old Ursela, as she sat
in the warmth with her distaff in her hands while Otto lay close to her
feet upon a bear skin, silently thinking over the strange story of a
brave knight and a fiery dragon that she had just told him. Suddenly
Ursela broke the silence.
“Little one,” said she, “thou art wondrously like thy own dear mother;
didst ever hear how she died?”
“Nay,” said Otto, “but tell me, Ursela, how it was.”
“Tis strange,” said the old woman, “that no one should have told thee
in all this time.” And then, in her own fashion she related to him the
story of how his father had set forth upon that expedition in spite of
all that Otto’s mother had said, beseeching him to abide at home; how he
had been foully wounded, and how the poor lady had died from her fright
and grief.
Otto listened with eyes that grew wider and wider, though not all with
wonder; he no longer lay upon the bear skin, but sat up with his hands
clasped. For a moment or two after the old woman had ended her story, he
sat staring silently at her. Then he cried out, in a sharp voice, “And
is this truth that you tell me, Ursela? and did my father seek to rob
the towns people of their goods?”
Old Ursela laughed. “Aye,” said she, “that he did and many times. Ah!
me, those days are all gone now.” And she fetched a deep sigh. “Then we
lived in plenty and had both silks and linens and velvets besides in the
store closets and were able to buy good wines and live in plenty upon
the best. Now we dress in frieze and live upon what we can get, and
sometimes that is little enough, with nothing better than sour beer to
drink. But there is one comfort in it all, and that is that our good
Baron paid back the score he owed the Trutz-Drachen people not only for
that, but for all that they had done from the very first.”
Thereupon she went on to tell Otto how Baron Conrad had fulfilled the
pledge of revenge that he had made Abbot Otto, how he had watched day
after day until one time he had caught the Trutz-Drachen folk,
with Baron Frederick at their head, in a narrow defile back of the
Kaiserburg; of the fierce fight that was there fought; of how the
Roderburgs at last fled, leaving Baron Frederick behind them wounded; of
how he had kneeled before the Baron Conrad, asking for mercy, and of
how Baron Conrad had answered, “Aye, thou shalt have such mercy as thou
deservest,” and had therewith raised his great two-handed sword and laid
his kneeling enemy dead at one blow.
Poor little Otto had never dreamed that such cruelty and wickedness
could be. He listened to the old woman’s story with gaping horror, and
when the last came and she told him, with a smack of her lips, how his
father had killed his enemy with his own hand, he gave a gasping cry and
sprang to his feet. Just then the door at the other end of the chamber
was noisily opened, and Baron Conrad himself strode into the room.
Otto turned his head, and seeing who it was, gave another cry, loud and
quavering, and ran to his father and caught him by the hand.
“Oh, father!” he cried, “oh, father! Is it true that thou hast killed a
man with thy own hand?”
“Aye,” said the Baron, grimly, “it is true enough, and I think me I have
killed many more than one. But what of that, Otto? Thou must get out of
those foolish notions that the old monks have taught thee. Here in the
world it is different from what it is at St. Michaelsburg; here a man
must either slay or be slain.”
But poor little Otto, with his face hidden in his father’s robe, cried
as though his heart would break. “Oh, father!” he said, again and again,
“it cannot be--it cannot be that thou who art so kind to me should have
killed a man with thine own hands.” Then: “I wish that I were back
in the monastery again; I am afraid out here in the great wide world;
perhaps somebody may kill me, for I am only a weak little boy and could
not save my own life if they chose to take it from me.”
Baron Conrad looked down upon Otto all this while, drawing his bushy
eyebrows together. Once he reached out his hand as though to stroke the
boy’s hair, but drew it back again.
Turning angrily upon the old woman, “Ursela,” said he, “thou must tell
the child no more such stories as these; he knowest not at all of such
things as yet. Keep thy tongue busy with the old woman’s tales that he
loves to hear thee tell, and leave it with me to teach him what becometh
a true knight and a Vuelph.”
That night the father and son sat together beside the roaring fire in
the great ball. “Tell me, Otto,” said the Baron, “dost thou hate me for
having done what Ursela told thee today that I did?”
Otto looked for a while into his father’s face. “I know not,” said he at
last, in his quaint, quiet voice, “but methinks that I do not hate thee
for it.”
The Baron drew his bushy brows together until his eyes twinkled out of
the depths beneath them, then of a sudden he broke into a great loud
laugh, smiting his horny palm with a smack upon his thigh.