“If thou’rt looking for thy cutthroats,” Wulf said, “they’re back at the forge, and likely to stay there an hour or so yet. Meantime, my pretty fellow,” he asked wrathfully, “what shall I do to thee?”
A look of sullen despair crept over the hunchback’s face.
“Thou’lt do what is in thee,” he snarled at last—“as I did with thee.”
Wulf raised his sword; but looking down upon the fellow who would have slain him, he saw his ill-shapen body and distorted face, and noted the lurking fear in his restless eyes, and because it was in him to be pitiful and generous, his heart stirred with compassion, and he could not smite the creature lying there. Slowly his hands fell until the point of his sword rested upon the ground; then he spurned the figure lightly with his toe.
“Get thee up and be off,” he said. “An thou bidest long here, it may not go so well with thee, after all.”
Rolling over upon his face, Conradt sprang to his feet and slunk away, curlike, into the forest. His life had been spared, but the beast that dwelt within his bad heart was not tamed. He had been given another chance, such as the strong may give the weak, whether the weakness be of body or of soul, so the strong yet ward his own strength; but this he was too base to know, but deemed that fear had held Wulf’s hand; so that he was not helped at all by the mercy that had spared him.
As for Wulf, he gave the meeting scant thought as he went on his way. The weightier matters that pressed upon his brain kept mind and heart engaged while he journeyed; but his duty seemed no clearer to him when he had reached the castle than it had done at the forge with Karl.
CHAPTER IX
OF THE ILL NEWS THAT THE BARON BROKE TO HIS MAIDEN WARD, AND OF HOW SHE TOOK THAT SAME
Baron Everhardt sat beside a table in the great hall of the castle, scowling blackly at a pile of weighty-seeming papers that lay before him. The baron could himself neither read nor write, but Father Franz, his confessor and penman, had been with him all forenoon, and together they had gone over the parchments, one by one, and the warrior noble had, to all seeming, found enough to keep his mind busy with them since; for he still sat as Father Franz had left him, fingering the huge sheets and staring at the big black-letter text that told him naught.
The parchments were none other than the deeds in the matters of the estate of the baron’s ward, Fräulein Elise von Hofenhoer, regarding which estate the emperor had sent word that he should demand accounting after he had wrought order at the Swartzburg. The baron’s face was not good to see when he recalled the words of the emperor’s message.