Читать книгу The Red Axe - S. R. Crockett - Страница 24

At five of the clock I lifted the great wolf's-head knocker of shining brass which frowned above the door of Master Gerard von Sturm in the port of the Weiss Thor. Hardly had I let it fall again when a small wicket, apparently about two feet above my head, opened, and a huge round head with enormous ears at either side peeped out. So vast was the head and so small the aperture that one of the lateral wings of the chubby face caught on the sill, and the owner brought it away successfully with a jerk and a perfectly good-humored and audible "flip."

"Who are you, and what do you want?" said a wide-gashed mouth, which, with a squat, flattened-out nose and two merry little twinkling eyes, completed this wonderful apparition.

The words were in themselves somewhat rude. On paper I observe that they have an appearance almost truculent. But spoken as the thing framed in the window-sill said them, they were equal to a song of Brudershaft and an episcopal benediction rolled in one.

"I am Hugo Gottfried of the Red Tower, come to see Master Gerard," I replied. "Who may you be that asks so boldly?"

"I'll give you a stalk of rhubarb to suck if you can guess," was the unexpected answer.

As I had never in my life seen anything in the least like the prodigy, it was clearly impossible for me to earn the tart succulence of the summer vegetable on such easy terms.

"I should say," I replied, "if the guess savor not of insolence, that one might be forgiven for mistaking you for the Fool of the Family!"

The grin expanded till it wellnigh circumnavigated the vast head. It seemed first of all to make straight for the ears on either side. Then, quite suddenly, finding these obstacles insurmountable, it dodged underneath them, and the scared observer could almost imagine its two ends meeting with a click somewhere in the wilderness at the back of that unseen hemisphere of hairy thatch.

"Pinked in the white, first time—no trial shot!" cried the object in the doorway, cheerily. "I am the Fool of the Family. But not the only one!"

At this moment something happened behind—what, I could not make out for some time. The head abruptly disappeared. There was a noise as of floor-rugs being vigorously beaten, the door opened, and the most extraordinary figure was shot out into the street. The head which I had seen certainly came first, but so lengthy a body followed that it seemed a vain thing to expect legs in addition. Yet, finally, two appeared, each of which would have made a decent body of itself, and went whirling across the street till the whole monstrosity came violently into collision with the walls of the house opposite, which seemed to rock to its very foundations under the assault.

A decent serving-man, in a semi-doctorial livery of black cloth, with a large white collar laid far over his shoulders, and cuffs of the same upon his wrists, stood in the open doorway and smiled apologetically at the visitor. He was rather red in the face and panted with his exertions.

"I ask your pardon, young sir," he said. "That fool, Jan Lubber Fiend, will ever be at his tricks. 'Tis my young mistress that encourages him, more is the pity! For poor serving-men are held responsible for his knavish on-goings. Why, I had just set him cross-legged in the yard with a basket of pease to shell, seeing how he grows as much as a foot in the night—or near by. But so soon as my back is turned he will be forever answering the door and peeping out into the street to gather the mongrel boys about him. 'Tis a most foul Lubber Fiend to keep about an honest house, plaguing decent folks withal!"

By this time the great oaf had come back to the door of the house, and now stood alternately rubbing his elbow and rear, with an expression ludicrously penitent, at once puzzled and kindly.

"Ah, come in with you, will you?" said the man. "Certes, were it not for Mistress Ysolinde, I would set on the little imps of the street to nip you to pieces and eat you raw."

The angry serving-man held the door as wide as possible and stood aside, whereat the Lubber Fiend tucked his head so far down that it seemed to disappear into the cavity of his chest, and scurried along the passage bent almost double. As he passed the door he drew all the latter part of his body together, exactly like a dog that fears a kick in the by-going. The respectable man-servant stirred not a muscle, but the gesture told a tale of the discipline of the house by the White Gate at times when visitors were not being admitted by the main door, and when Mistress Ysolinde, favorer of the Fool Lubber Fiend, was not so closely at hand.

It was a grand house, too, the finest I had ever seen, with hangings of arras everywhere, many and parti-colored—red hunters who hunted, green foresters who shot, puff-cheeked boys blowing on hunting-horns; a house with mysterious vistas, glimpses into dim-lit rooms, wafts of perfume, lamps that were not extinguished even in the daytime, burning far within. All in mighty striking contrast to the bare stark strength of our Red Tower on the Wolfsberg with its walls fourteen feet thick.

As I followed the serving-man through the halls and stairways my feet fell without noise on carpets never woven in our bare-floored Germany, nor yet in England, where they still strew rushes, even (so they say) in the very dining-rooms of the great—surely a most barbarous and unwholesome country. Nevertheless, carpets of wondrous hue were here in the house of Master Gerard, scarlet and blue, and so thick of ply that the foot sank into them as if reluctant ever to rise again.

As I came to the landing place at the head of the stairway, one passed hastily before me and above me, with a sough and a rustle like the wind among tall poplar trees on the canal edges.

I looked up, and lo! a girl, not beautiful, but, as it were, rather strange and fascinating. She was lithe like a serpent and undulated in her walk. Her dress was sea-green silk of a rare loom, and clung closely about her. It had scales upon it of dull gold, which gave back a lustrous under-gleam of coppery red as she moved. She had a pale, eager face, lined with precision enough, but filled more with passion than womanly charm. Her eyes were emerald and beautiful, as the sea is when you look down upon it from a height and the white sand shines up through the clear depths.

Such was Ysolinde, daughter of Gerard von Sturm, favorer of Lubber Fiends and creator of this strange paradise through which she glided like a spangled Orient serpent.

As I made my way humbly enough across to Master Gerard's room his daughter did not speak to me, only followed me boldly, and yet, as it seemed to me, somewhat wistfully too, with her sea-green eyes. And as the door was closing upon me I saw her beckon the serving-man.

But I, on the inner side of the door, and with Master Gerard von Sturm before me, had enough to do to tell my tale and answer his questions without troubling my head about green-eyed girls.

Master Gerard was as remarkable looking to the full as his daughter, with the same luminously green eyes. But the orbs which in the maid shone as steadily clear as the depths of the sea, in the father glittered opalescent where he sat in the dusk, like the eyes of Grimalkin cornered by dogs in some gloomy angle of the Wolfsberg wall.

As soon as I had set eyes on him I knew that I had to do with a man—not with a walking show like my Lord Duke Casimir. It struck me that for good or evil Master Gerard could carry through his intent to the bitter end, and that in council he would smile when he saw my father change his black vesture of trial for the red of beheading.

The Doctor Gerard was little seen in the streets of Thorn. Many citizens had never so much as set eyes on him. Nevertheless his hand was in everything. Some said he was a Jew, chiefly because none knew rightly what he was or whence he had come. Thirty years had gone by since he had suddenly appeared one day in the noble old house by the Weiss Thor, from which Grätz the wizard and his wife had been burned out by the fury of the populace. Twenty years of artistic labor had made this place what it now was. And the little impish maid who used to break unexpectedly upon the workmen of Thorn from behind doors, or who clapped hands upon their shoulders in dusky recesses, scaring them out of their wits with suggestions of witch-masters long dead and damned, had grown into this maid of the sea-green eyes and silken draperies.

"A good-day to you, Hugo Gottfried!" said Master Gerard, quietly, looking at me keenly across the table. He wore a skull-cap on his closely cropped head. One or two betraying locks of gray appeared under it in front, but did not conceal a flat forehead, which ran back at such an angle that, with the luminous eyes beneath it, it gave him the look of a serpent rearing his yellow head a little back in act to strike. This was a look his daughter had also. But in her the gesture was tempered by the free-playing curves of a beautiful throat and the forward thrust of a rounded chin—advantages not possessed by the angular anatomy and bony jaw of the famous doctor of law.

Master Gerard, clad in a long robe of black velvet from head to heel, sat bending his fingers gracefully together and looking at me. His head was thrown back, I have said, and the lights of the colored windows striking on his gray hair and black skull-cap, caused him to look much more like some lean ascetic ecclesiastic and prince of the church than the chief lawyer of the ancient capital of the Wolfmark.

"You were present at this child's play yester-eve in the hostel of the White Swan?" he asked, boring into me with his uncomfortable, triangular eyes.

"Aye, truly," said I, "and much they made of me!"

For since my father said that I was accounted a hero in this house, I had determined not to hide away my deeds in my leathern scrip. I had had enough practice in playing at modesty in the Tower of the Red Axe.

Master Gerard shook his shoulders as though he would have made me believe that he laughed.

"You were over many for thorn, I hear great silly fellows—children playing with fire yet afraid to burn themselves. Why, since ten this morning I have had them all here—stout burgomeister's sons, slim scions of the Burghershaft, moist-eyed corporation children, each more anxious than another to prove that he had nothing to do with any treason. He had but called in at the White Swan for a draught of Frederika's famous stone ale, and so—well, he found himself somehow in the rear, and, all against his will, was dragged into the Lair of the White Wolf!"

He looked at me quietly, without speaking, for a while.

"And you, Master Hugo, did you go thither to distinguish yourself by breaking up their child's folly, or, like the others, to taste the stone ale?"

It was a question I had not expected. But it was best to be very plain with Master Gerard.

"I went," I replied, "along with Michael Texel, because he asked me. I knew not in the least what I was to see, but I was ready for anything."

"And you acquitted yourself on the whole extremely well," he nodded; "so at least they are all very ready to say, hoping, I doubt not, for your good offices with the Duke when it comes to their turn. You flouted them right manfully and defied their mystery, they told me."

At this moment I became conscious that a door opposite me was open and the curtain drawn a little way back. There, in the half-light, I saw Mistress Ysolinde listening. She leaned her head aside as though it had been heavy with its weight of locks of burned gold. She pillowed her cheek against the door-post, and let her dreamy sea-green eyes rest upon me. And the look that was in them gave me a sense of pleasure strange and acute, as well as a restless uneasiness and vague desire to escape out under the blue sky, and mingle with the throng of every-day men on the streets of the city.

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