The Red Axe

by S. R. Crockett

CHAPTER XXIX

LOVES ME—LOVES ME NOT

Now how this plan of my Lord Prince's worked in the Palace of Plassenburg I find it difficult to tell without writing myself down a "painted flittermouse," as the Prince expressed it. I was in high favor with my master; well liked also by most of the hard-driving, rough-riding young soldiers whom the miller's son had made out of the sons of dead and damned Ritterdom. I got my share of honor and good service, too, in going to different courts and bringing back all that Prince Karl needed. To exercise myself in the art of war, I hunted the border thieves and gave them short enough shrift. In a year I had made such an assault as that of the inn at Erdberg an impossibility all along the marches of our provinces.

The crusty old councillor, Leopold Dessauer, who had held office under the last Prince of the legitimate line, was ever ready to assist me with the kindest of deeds and the bitterest and saltest of words.

"What did I tell you about being Field-Marshal?" said he one day—"in Karl's kingdom the shorter the service, the higher the distinction. If you and the Prince live long enough, I shall see you carry a musketoon yet, and not one of the latest pattern, either. You will be promoted down, like a booby who has been raised by chance to the top of the class!"

"Well," said I, humbly, for I always reverenced age, "then I hope, High-Chancellor Dessauer, that I shall carry my musketoon as becomes a brave man!"

"I do not doubt it!" said he. "And that is the most hopeful thing I have seen about you yet. It is just possible, on the other hand, that you may yet rule and the Prince carry the piece."

"God forbid!" said I, heartily. For next to my own father, of all men I loved the Prince.

"The Princess hath a pretty hand," remarked Dessauer casually, as if he had said, "It will rain to-morrow!"

"I' faith, yes!" said I; "what have you been at to find out that?"

"Weak—weak!" he said, shaking his head. "I fear you will wreck on that rock. It is your blind peril!"

"My blind peril!" cried I. "What may that be, High Councillor?"

"Ah, lad," he said, smiling with that wise, all-patient smile which the aged affect when they mean to be impressive, yet know how useless is their wisdom, "it was never intended by the Almighty that any man should have eyes all round his head. That is why He fixed two in front, and made them look straight forward. That is also why He made us a little lower (generally a good deal lower) than the angels!"

I heard him as if I heard him not.

"You do me the honor to follow me?" he said, looking at me. He was, I think, conscious that my eyes wandered to the door, for indeed I was expecting the Little Playmate to come down every minute.

"Ah! yes, you follow indeed," he said, bitterly, "but it is the trip of feet, the flirt of farthingales down the turret steps. No matter! As I was saying, every man has his blind peril. He can see the thousand. He provides laboriously against them. He blocks every avenue of risk, he locks every dangerous door, and lo! there is the thousand-and-first right before him, yawning wide open, which he does not see—his Blind Peril!"

"And what, High-Councillor Dessauer, is my blind peril?"

"I will tell you, Hugo," he said; "not that you will believe or alter a hair. A man may do many things in this world, but one thing he cannot do. He cannot kiss the fingers of a Princess—dainty fingers, too, separating finger from finger—and kiss also the Princess's maid of honor on the mouth. The combination is certainly entertaining, but like the Friar's powder it is somewhat explosive."

"And how," asked I, "may you know all that ?"

The old man nodded his head sagely.

"Neither by ink-pool nor yet by scrying! All the same, I know. Moreover, your peril is not a blind peril only, but a blind man's peril. Ye must choose, and that quickly, little son—fingers or lips."

I heard the rustle of a skirt down the stair. It was the light, springing tread of the one I loved first and best, last and only.

"By the twelve gods, lips!" cried I, and made for the door.

And I heard the chuckling laughter of High-Chancellor Dessauer behind me as I followed Helene down the stairs. It sounded like the decanting of mellow wine, long hidden in darksome cellars, and now, in the flower of its age, bringing to the light the smiling of ancient vineyards and the shining of forgotten suns.

I found Helene arrived before me in the rose-garden. She did not turn round as I came, though she heard me well enough. Instead she walked on, plucking at a marguerite.

"Loves me—loves me not!" she said, bearing upon the last word with triumphant accent, as she continued to dismantle the poor flower.

And flashing round upon me with the solitary petal in her hand, she presented it with a low bow, in elfish mockery of the manner of the court exquisite.

"Ah, true flower!" she said, apostrophizing the bare stalk, "a flower cannot lie. It has not a glozing tongue. It cannot change back and forth. The sun shines. It turns towards the sun. The sun leaves the skies. It shuts itself up and waits his return. Ah,-true flower, dear flower, how unlike a man you are!"

"Helene," said I, "you have learned conceits from the catch-books. You quarrel by rote. Were I as eager to answer me, I might say: 'Ah, false flower, you grow out of the foulness underneath. You give your fragrance to all without discretion—a common lover, prodigal of favors, fit only to be torn to shreds by pretty, spiteful fingers, and to die at last with a lie in your mouth. Again I say—false flower!'"

"You can turn the corners, Sir Juggler, with the cup and ball of words," answered Helene. "So much they have already taught you in a court. But there is one thing that your fine-feathered tutors have not taught you—to make love to two women in one house and hide it from both of them. Hot and cold may not come too near each other. They will mix and make lukewarm of both."

A wise observation, and one that I wished I had made myself.

"May the devil take all princes and princesses!" I began, as I had done to the Prince himself.

Helene shook her head.

"Hugo," she said, "I was but a simpleton when I came hither, and knew nothing. Now I am wise, and I know!"

She touched her forehead with her finger, just where the curls were softest and prettiest.

"Oh, you have learned to be thrice more beautiful than ever you were!" I said, impetuously.

"So I am often told," answered she, calmly.

"Who dared tell you ?" cried I, quick as fire, laying my hand on my sword.

"The false common flowers by the wayside tell me!" said Helene, pertly.

"Let them beware, or I will take their heads off for rank weeds!"
I answered.

For at that time, in the Court of Plassenburg, we talked in figures and romance words. We had indeed become so familiar with the mode that we could use no other, even in times of earnestness. So that a man would go to be hanged or married with a quipsome conceit on his lips.

"I think, Sir Janus Double-tongue," she said, "that you would not be the worse of a little medicine of your own concocting."

And with that she swept her skirts daintily about and tripped down in to the pleasaunce of flowers, to make which the Prince Karl had brought a skilled gardener all the way from France.

I prowled about the higher terrace, moodily watching the sky and thinking on the morrow's weather. And by-and-by I saw one come forth from among the cropped Dutch hedges, and stride across to where Helene walked with something white in her hand. I could see her again picking a flower to pieces, and methought I could hear the words. My jealous fancy conjured up the ending, "Loves me not—loves me! Loves me not!"

She turned even as she had done to me. The newcomer was that sneering Court fop, the Count von Reuss, Duke Casimir's nephew—still in hiding from the wrath of his uncle. For at that time hardly any court in Germany was without one or two of these hangers-on, and a bad, reckless, ill-contriving breed they were at Plassenburg, as doubtless elsewhere.

Then grew my heart hard and bitter, and yet, in a moment afterwards, was again only wistful and sad.

"She had been safer," thought I, "in the old Red Tower than playing flower fancies with such a man!"

For I had seen the very devil look out of his eye—which indeed it did as often as he cast it on a fair woman. In especial, I longed to throttle him each time he turned to watch Helene as she went by. And here she was walking with him, and talking pleasantly too, in the rose garden of the palace.

"Ah, devil take all princes and princesses!" said I. This one, it is true, was only a count, and disinherited. But I felt that the thing was the Prince's doing, and that it was for the sake of the covenant he had made with me that I was compelled to put up with such a toad as Von Reuss crawling and besliming the fair garden of my love.

It was an evening without clouds—everything shining clear after rain, the scent of the flowers rising like incense so full and sweet that you could almost see it. The unnumbered birds were every one awake, responsive and emulous. The deep silence of midsummer was broken up. It was like another spring.

The Princess Ysolinde came out to take the air. She was wrapped in her gown of sea-green silk, with sparkles of dull copper upon it. The dress fitted her like a snake's skin, and glittered like it too as she swayed her lithe body in walking.

"Ha, Hugo," she said, "I thought I should find you here!"

I did not say that if another had been kinder she might have found me elsewhere and otherwise employed. I had at least the discretion to leave things as they were. For the time to speak plainly was not yet.

She took my arm, and we paced up and down.

"Princess—" I began.

"Ysolinde!" corrected she, softly.

It was an old and unsettled contention between us.

"Well then, Ysolinde, to-morrow must I ride to fight the men of mine own country of the Wolfmark. I like not the duty. But since it must be, for the sake of the brave Prince, it shall be well done."

"You do not say 'For your sake, Ysolinde'?" she answered, pensively.

"No," I said, bluntly, "'for the Prince's sake.'"

"You would do all things for the Prince's sake—nothing for mine!" said the Princess, withdrawing her hand.

"On the contrary, Lady Ysolinde," I made answer, "I do all things for your sake. Save for the sake of your good-will, I should now be elsewhere."

Which was true enough. I should have been in the garden pleasaunce beneath, and probably with my sword out, arguing the case with Von Reuss.

But she pressed my arm, for she understood that I had delayed a day from my duty for her sake. So touched at heart was Ysolinde that she slipped her hand down from my arm and took my hand instead, flirting a corner of her shawl cleverly over both, to hide the fact from the men-at-arms—as Helene could not have done to save her life. But every maid of honor who passed noted and knew, lifting eyebrows at one another, I doubt not, as soon as we passed, which thing made me feel like a fool and blush hotly. For I knew that ere they were couched that night every maid of them would tell Helene, and with pleasure in the telling too.

"Devil take—" I began and stopped.

"What did you say?" asked Ysolinde, almost tenderly.

"That if I come not back again from the Wolfmark it will be the better for all of us!" I made answer, which was indeed the sense if not the exact text of my remark.

"Nay," she said, shuddering, "not better for me that am companionless!"

"Why so?" said I, boldly. "You do not love me. Deep at the bottom of your heart you love your husband, Karl the Prince. You know there is no man like him. Me you do not love at all."

"You will not let me," she said, softly, almost like a shy country maiden.

"Ah, if I had, you would have slain me long ere this," said I, "for I read you like a child's horn-book that he plays battledore with. 'Have not—love! Have—hate.' There you are, all in brief, my Lady Ysolinde."

"It is false," laughed she; "but nevertheless I love greatly to hear you call me Ysolinde."

She netted her fingers in mine beneath the shawl. Well might the High Councillor say that she had a beautiful hand. Though, God wot, much he knew about it. For Ysolinde of Plassenburg could speak with her hand, love with it, be angry with it, hate with it—and kill with it.

"I am an experiment," said I; "one indeed that has lasted you a little longer than the others, my Lady Ysolinde, only because you have not come to the end of me so soon."

"Pshaw!" she said, pushing me from her, for we were at the turning of a path, "you love another. That is the amulet against infection that you carry. Yet sometimes I think that that other is only your hateful, plain-favored, vainly conceited self!"

I saw the Prince sit alone, according to his custom, in an arbor behind us at that very moment—and judge if I blushed or no. But the Princess saw him not, being eager upon her flouting of me.

"I tell you," she cried, scornfully and disdainfully, "there is nothing interesting about you but the blueness of your eyes, and that any monk can make upon parchment, aye, and deeper and bluer, with his lapis-lazuli. An experiment!—Why should I, Ysolinde of Plassenburg, experiment with you, the son of the Red Axe of the Wolfsberg ?"

"Nay, that I know not," I answered; "but yet I am indeed no more than your arrow-butts, your target of practice, your whipping-boy, to be slung at and arrow-drilled and bullet-pitted at your pleasure!"

"I dare say," she said, bitterly; "and all the time you go scathless—no more heart-stricken than if summer flies lighted on thee. Away with such a man; he is the ghost of a man—a simulacrum—no true lover!"

"At your will, Princess. I shall indeed go away. I will to-morrow seek the spears. But, after all, you will not send me forth in anger?" I said, with a strong conviction that I knew the answer.

"And why not?" said she.

"Because," I replied, looking at her, "I am, after all, the one man who believes thoroughly in your heart's deep inward goodness. I believe in you even when you do not believe in yourself. I can affirm, for I know better than you know yourself. You cover the beauty of your heart from others. You flout and jeer. Above all, you experiment dangerously with words and actions. But, after all, I am necessary to you. You will not send me away in anger. For you need some one to believe in the soundness of your heart. And I, Hugo Gottfried, am that man!"

"Hence, flatterer!" cried the lady, smiling, but well pleased. "It is known to all that I am the Old Serpent—the deceiver—the ill fruit of the Knowledge of Evil. And now you say of Good also! And what is more and worse, you expect me to believe you. Wherein you also experiment! I pray you, do not so. That is to you the forbidden fruit. Good-night. Go, now, and pray for a more truthful tongue!"

And with that she went in, the copper spangles glancing at her waist red as the light on ripe wheat, and all her tall figure lissome as the bending corn.