Picking up a billet of oak from where it lay on the floor, he hurled it among the group, who scattered, dodging this way and that, as every boy went to his own neglected task.
As for Wulf, he lay upon the barn floor and watched Hansei care for Siegfried, who was quiet enough now that the armorer’s lad was with him. The lad Hansei was the same who had played with the others on the plateau on that day when the shining knight rode up the pass. Well was it for our boy that the honest young peasant took a liking to him, and was minded to stand his friend, for he had else scarce found comfort at the castle.
It was Hansei who at supper-time took him into the great hall where the household and its hangers-on gathered for meals, and got for him a trencher and food; though little cared Wulf for eating on that first night when all was new and strange to him.
The hall was very large, and Wulf, looking up toward its lofty roof, could not see its timbers for the deep shadows there. At either end was a great fireplace, but the one at the upper end was the larger and finer. Near it, on a platform raised above the earthen floor, Baron Everhardt sat at board, with the knights of his train. Below them were the men-at-arms and lower officers of the castle; and seated upon benches about the walls were the fighting-men and general hangers-on of the place.
These sat not at board, but helped themselves to the food that was passed about among them after the tables were served, and ate, some from their hands, others from wooden trenchers which they had secured. Wulf and Hansei were among the lowliest of the lot, and the stable-boys did not sit down at all, but took their supper standing, leaning against the wall just inside the door and farthest from the hearth, and they were among the last served.
But, as we have seen, Wulf cared little, that night, for food or drink, though his new friend pressed him to eat. He was sore-hearted and weary, what with the strangeness and the hardness of it all. Soon the great tankards began to pass from hand to hand; and the men drank long and deep, while jests and mighty laughter filled all the place, until only Wulf’s sturdy boy’s pride kept him from stealing out, through the darkness, back to Karl at the forge.
Presently, however, he began to notice faces among the company at the upper end of the hall. Two or three ladies were present, having come in by another door when the meal was well over, and these were sitting with the baron and Herr Banf. One of the ladies, Hansei told him, was the baron’s lady, and with her, Wulf noticed, was the little girl whom he had seen at the time of his first visit to the castle.
“Who is she?” he asked.
“A ward of our baron’s,” Hansei answered, “and she is the Fräulein Elise von Hofenhoer. They say she is to be married, in good time, to young Conradt; and that be a sorry weird for any maiden.”
“Conradt?”