MINE HOST RUNS HIS LAST RACE
Hearty were the greetings when the soldiers found us all safe and sound.
They shook us again and again by the hand. They clapped us on the back.
They examined professionally the dead who lay strewn about.
"A good stroke! Well smitten!" they cried, as they turned them over, like
spectators who applaud at a game they can all understand. Specially did
they compliment me on my axe-work. Never had anything like it been seen
in Plassenburg. The head of the yearling calf was duly exhibited, when
the neatness of the blow and the exactness of the aim at the weakest
jointing were prodigiously admired.
The good fellows, mellow with the Burgomeister's sinall-ale, were growing
friendly beyond all telling, when, in the light of the offertory taper,
now growing beguttered and burning low, there appeared the Lady Ysolinde.
You never saw so quick a change in any men. The heartiest reveller
forthwith became silent and slunk behind his neighbor. Knees shook
beneath stalwart frames, and there seemed a very general tendency to get
down upon marrow-bones.
The Lady Ysolinde stood before them, strangely different from the
slim, willowy maiden I had seen her. She looked almost imperial in
her demeanor.
"You shall be rewarded for your ready obedience," she said; "the Prince
will not forget your service. Take away that offal!"
She pointed to the dead rascals on the floor.
And the men, muttering something that sounded to me like "Yes, your
Highness !" hastened to obey.
"Did you say 'Yes, your Highness' ?" I asked one of them, who seemed, by
his air of command, to be the superior among the archers.
"Aye," answered he, dryly, "it is a term usually applied to the Lady
Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg."
I was never more smitten dazed and dumb in my life. Ysolinde, the
daughter of Master Gerard, the maid who had read my fate in the ink-pool,
whom I had "made suffer," according to her own telling--she the Princess
of Plassenburg '.
Ah, I had it now. Here at last was the explanation of the threadbare and
inexplicable jest of Jorian and Boris, "The Prince hath a Princess, and
she is oft upon her travels !"
But, after all, what a Wendish barking about so small an egg. I have
heard an emperor proclaimed with less cackle.
Ysolinde, Princess of Plassenburg--yes, that made a difference. And I
had taken her hand--I, the son of the Red Axe--I, the Hereditary
Justicer of the Wolfmark. Well, after all, she had sought me, not I
her. And then, the little Helene--what would she make of it? I longed
greatly to find an opportunity to tell her. It might teach her in what
manner to cut her cloth.
The archers of the Prince camped with us the rest of the night in the
place of the outcast crew. They behaved well (though their forbearance
was perhaps as much owing to the near presence of the Princess as to any
inherent virtue in the good men of the bow) to the women and children who
remained huddled in the corners.
Then came the dawn, swift-foot from the east. A fair dawn it was, the
sun rising, not through barred clouds, with the lightest at the
horizon (which is the foul-weather dawn), but through streamers and
bannerets that fluttered upward and fired to ever fleecier crimson and
gold as he rose.
We rode among a subdued people, and ere we went the Princess called for
the Burgomeister and bade him send to Plassenburg the landlord, so soon
as he should be found, and also the heads of the half-dozen houses on
either side of the inn.
Then, indeed, there was a turmoil and a wailing to speak about. Women
folk crowded out of the huts and kissed the white feet of the palfrey
that bore the Lady Ysolinde.
"Have mercy!" they wailed; "show kindness, great Princess! Here are our
men, unwounded and unhurt, that have lain by our sides all the night.
They are innocent of all intent of evil--of every dark deed. Ah, lady,
send them not to your prisons. We shall never see them more, and they
are all we have or our children. 'Tis they bring in the bread to this
drear spot!"
"Produce me your husbands, then!" said the Lady Ysolinde.
Whereat the women ran and brought a number of frowsy and bleared men, all
unwounded, save one that had a broken head.
Then Ysolinde called to the Burgomeister. "Come hither, chief of a
thievish municipality, tell me if these be indeed these women's
husbands."
The Burgomeister, a pallid, pouch-mouthed man, tremulous, and
brick-dusty, like everything else in the village of Erdberg, came forward
and peeringly examined the men.
"Every man to his woman!" he ordered, brusquely, and the women went and
stood each by her own property--the men shamefaced and hand-dog, the
women anxious and pale. Some of the last threw a, protecting arm about
their husbands, which they for the most part appeared to resent. In
every case the woman looked the more capable and intelligent, the men
being apparently mere boors.
"They are all their true husbands, at least so far as one can know!"
answered the Burgomeister, cautiously.
"Then," said the lady, "bid them catch the innkeeper and send him to
Plassenburg, and these others can abide where they are. But if they find
him not, they must all come instead of him."
The men started at her words, their faces brightening wonderfully, and
they were out of the door before one could count ten. We mounted our
horses, and under the very humble guidance of the Burgomeister, who led
the Princess's palfrey, we were soon again upon the high table-land. Here
we enjoyed to the full the breezes which swept with morning freshness
across the scrubby undergrowths of oak and broom, and above all the sight
of misty wisps of cloud scudding and whisking about the distant
peaks-behind which lay the city of Plassenburg.
We had not properly won clear of the ravines when we heard a great
shouting and turmoil behind us--so that I hastened to look to my weapons.
For I saw the archers instinctively draw their quarrels and bolt-pouches
off their backs, to be in readiness upon their left hips.
But it was only the rabble of men and women who had been threatened, the
dwellers in those twelve houses next the inn, who came dragging our
brick-faced knave of a host, with that hard-polished countenance of his
slack and clammy--slate-gray in color too, all the red tan clean gone
out of it.
"Mercy--mercy, great lady!" he cried; "I pray you, do execution on me
here and now. Carry me not to the extreme tortures. Death clears all.
And I own that for my crimes I well deserve to die. But save me from
the strappado, from the torment of the rack. I am an old man and could
not endure."
The Lady Ysolinde looked at him, and her emerald eyes held a steely
glitter in their depths.
"I am neither judge nor"--I think she was going to say "executioner," but
she remembered in time and for my sake was silent, which I thought was
both gracious and charming of her. She resumed in a softer tone: "What
sentence, then, would you desire, thus confessing your guilt?"
"That I might end myself over the cliff there!" said the innkeeper,
pointing to the wall of rock along the edge of which we were riding.
"See, then, that he is well ended!" said the Princess, briefly, to
Jorian.
"Good!" said Jorian, saluting.
And very coolly betook himself to the edge of the cliff, where he primed
his piece anew, and blew up his match.
"Loose the man and stand back!" cried the Princess.
A moment the innkeeper stood nerving himself. A moment he hung on the
thin edge of his resolve. The slack gray face worked convulsively, the
white lips moved, the hands were gripped close to his sides as though
to run a race. His whole body seemed suddenly to shrink and fall in
upon itself.
"The torture! The terrible torture!" he shrieked aloud, and ran swiftly
from the clutches of the men who had held him. Between the path and the
verge of the cliff from which he was suffered to cast himself there
stretched some thirty or forty yards of fine green turf. The old man ran
as though at a village fair for some wager of slippery pig's tail, but
all the time the face of him was like Death and Hell following after.
At the cliff's edge he leaped high into the air, and went headlong down,
to our watching eyes as slowly as if he had sunk through water. None of
us who were on the path saw more of him. But Jorian craned over,
regarding the man's end calmly and even critically. And when he had
satisfied himself that that which was done was properly done, as coolly
as before he stowed away his match in his cover-fire, mounted his horse,
and rode towards us.
He nodded to the Princess. "Good, my Lady!" quoth he, for all comment.
"I saved a charge that time!" said he to his companion.
"Good!" quoth Boris, in his turn.
We had now a safe and noble escort, and the way to Plassenburg was easy.
The face of the country gradually changed. No more was it the gray,
wistful plain of the Wolfmark, upon which our Red Tower looked down. No
more did we ride through the marly, dusty, parched lands, in which were
the ravines with their uncanny cavern villages, of which this Erdberg was
the chief. But green, well-watered valleys and mountains wooded to the
top lay all about us--a pleasant land, a fertile province, and, as the
Princess had said, a land in which the strong hand of Karl the Prince had
long made "the broom-bush keep the cow."
I had all along been possessed with great desire to meet the Prince of so
noble and well-cared-for a land, and perhaps also to see what manner of
man could be the husband of so extraordinary a Princess.