“By the rood!” he muttered, bringing a clenched fist down on the table. “The poor Swiss count were wiser to busy himself with setting his own soul in order against coming to the Swartzburg.”
He sprang from his chair and paced the floor wrathfully, when there entered to him his ward, whom he had sent to summon.
A stately slip of maidenhood was Elise: tall and fair, with fearless eyes of dark blue. She seemed older than her few years, and as she stood within the hall even the dark visage of the baron lightened at sight of her, and the growl of his deep voice softened in answering her greeting.
“Sit ye down yonder,” he said, nodding toward a great Flemish chair of oak over beyond the table.
Obediently Elise sank into its carven depths; but the baron paced the floor yet a while longer, while she waited for him to speak.
At last he came back to the table, and seated himself before it.
“There be many gruesome things in these hard days, Fräulein,” he said, “and things that may easily work ill for a maid.”
A startled look came into Elise’s eyes, but naught said she, though the dread in her heart warned her what the baron’s words might portend.
“Thou knowest,” her guardian went on, “that thy father left thee in my care. Our good Hofenhoer! May he be at greater peace than we are like to know for many a long year!”
There was an oily smoothness in the baron’s tone that did not ease the fear in Elise’s heart. Never had she known him to speak of her father, whom she could not remember, and, indeed, never before had he spoken to her at such length; for the baron was more at home in the saddle, or at tilt and foray, than with the women of his household. But he grew bland as any lawyer as he went on, with a gesture toward the parchments: