"Oh, oh! Art thou mad, Morten!" cried Niels the horseman.
"Have done with thy chatter, I know what I am about," continued Morten, still laying about him. "I am neither mad nor drunk; but the devil take me if I stay longer here!--must you, clod-pates, have your say too, and fancy yourselves wiser than the cook? Would you make me believe I have horsemen in the pot?"
While Morten thus shouted and talked, as though intoxicated to an excess he overturned the lamp, reeled in the dark out of the chamber, and rolled himself down the stairs. When the keepers, on the following morning, had recovered the full use of their senses the cook had disappeared, and was nowhere to be found in the castle.
CHAP. II.
At sunrise next morning, the brisk broad-shouldered cook, with a large club in his hand, took his way through the wood skirting Esrom Lake[[7]], accompanied by two other wanderers. It was a foggy morning; large flocks of wild geese flew with shrill cries over the lake, and the fallen leaves of the forest were swept along the path by the sharp morning breeze. The cook and his companions proceeded in silence and with hasty steps; and it was not until the sun began to disperse the cold mists of morning, that Morten cleared his throat, and sang a merry ballad. His companions were two strong broad-shouldered fellows, with red wadmal cloaks, over dirty leathern breeches, and with broad swords and daggers in their thickly padded belts, which also appeared to serve them as purses. They had the appearance of deserters or dismissed men-at-arms; they both wore beards in the fashion of king's horsemen, but seemed to have long neglected all attention to cleanliness and personal neatness. Their unwashed faces betokened want of sleep and fitting rest. The heads of a couple of flails served them as walking staves. They bore on their backs large bundles of rich attire, from which pieces of smoked meat and other provisions protruded. Their long uncombed hair hung about their shoulders; the skin and hair of both were so dark, and their countenances had so little of a Danish cast, that they would have passed for foreigners, had not their dialect proclaimed them to be peasants from Lolland; who, at any rate, could not prove their evidently Vandal extraction in the first generation. The taller of the two had lost an eye, and the other had a huge scar between his nose and mouth, which looked like a hare lip, and his sharp projecting teeth gave him a ferocious appearance, resembling that of a wild boar.
The three wanderers occasionally looked behind them, as if they apprehended a pursuit; but they only beheld the white gable ends of Esrom monastery, which they had passed a short time before.
"Now, thanks for good companionship," said Morten, as he halted at a cross road in the forest. "It were best we part company for the present; ye understand what I said to you--ye are to hide yourselves at Gilleleié, and watch every night, until ye see the skiff with the black pennant, then push off with Jeppé's boat, and set me on shore: meanwhile watch narrowly all that goes on here, and who goes in and out of the castle. What Niels Brock and the archbishop have promised, you may make sure of. But then ye must not be self-willed; ye will never be able to get him out by force, and if the king and Marsk Oluffsen come hither to-day or to-morrow, ye might lightly get hanged and ruin every thing."
"Leave that to us, sly Morten," said the man with the one eye. "Johan Kysté well knows what he is about. I committed but one folly in my life; 'twas on that Easter eve I deserted from the Marsk, and took the palfrey from the pious clerk; I did but knock a little hole in his skull, but it was large enough for his bit of a soul to slink out of: one should let holy men go their way in peace; for this, I am now forced to put up with one eye. I vowed, therefore, to our Lady and St. Joseph, to become pious and God-fearing from that very hour, and never more to lay my hand on other than laymen."
"A pious resolve," said Morten: "wert thou not such a bloodhound and cut-throat, I could almost believe thy soul might be saved as yet, even shouldst thou steal and rob in a small way at times."
"It bids fair to be so," answered the one-eyed. "I have a letter of absolution from the archbishop, within my woollen jerkin, that will stand me in good stead when all the world besides marches to hell. Truly I served the learned Master Grand faithfully by night and day these many years, therefore hath the pious archbishop given me freedom from fasting, and absolution for sins for ten whole years: he hath not spared his silver pieces either; and shall I now suffer them to shut up such a man, and thereby rob so many honest fellows of a living? What sayest thou, Olé Ark? Shall we suffer it any longer? hath Master Grand deserved it of us?"