"Alas, alas! let, then, the chancellor come, and prepare me for death!" groaned Sir Lavé, as he wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "I must now put my hope in God, for in man there is no mercy! Alas! could my Ingé see how hardhearted you are, Drost Peter, she would never love the man who can treat so cruelly her unfortunate father."
"Heaven is my witness," sorrowfully exclaimed Drost Peter, laying his hand upon his breast, "that it cuts me to the soul that I cannot trust you better. You would win the duke with false witness, and me with a false hope; and would, if you could, make my affection traitor to my loyalty. Nay, Sir Lavé Little, you are not thus to be saved. Truth only can save you, the country, and us all. God give your unstable mind constancy and strength to resolve earnestly on that to which you now only pretend for the purpose of saving yourself before a human tribunal!"
With these words he left the dungeon, and Sir Lavé sank with a groan upon the stone floor, where the fear of death wrung a sincere prayer from his bosom.
Half an hour afterwards, Chancellor Martinus, in his Dominican habit, with his breviary and a candle in his hand, was admitted to the anxious captive, whom he found in a state of such bewilderment and mental conflict, that the philosophical chancellor found it impossible to understand his incoherent and contradictory expressions.
"Is it you who are to prepare me for death?" asked the prisoner, starting up with a wild stare. "Ha! it is time. The wheel and stile are ready. Drost Peter will not intercede for me; and my child, my poor child, she will die of shame for her miserable father. But my punishment is just," he continued, sinking his voice to a whisper: "I nodded--see, I nodded thus--in that horrible council. That nod cost me perhaps my salvation, and King Erik Christopherson his life. Was I not among the twelve in Finnerup barn? Nay, nay, that was but a dream!" he exclaimed, vehemently--"that night I only betrayed my master's castle--his blood is not upon my hand, and will not be visited upon my head. But I heard the woe-cry from his coffin: from the grave it came--nay, from hell itself! It yet rings in my ears. To be doomed an outlaw by men is nothing--but outlawed, eternally outlawed from heaven, I became at that hour. I am an unfortunate man!" He paused and sighed. "Ha! but misfortune shall not strike me down," he continued, strutting boldly across the dungeon--"I am of noble birth, and die not as a traitor, but as a patriot and the foe of tyrants. What wilt thou with me, clerk? Thou art no confessor of mine--thou art not the bold dean who bids defiance to kings and kaisers. I know thee well: thou art the book-worm from Antvorskov, the learned chancellor--thou wert the tyrants' friend, and now wouldst outlaw and put under the ban every free-minded Dane. Comest thou hither to shrive me to-night, ere thou doomest me to the wheel to-morrow? Nay, nay--that thou mayst spare thyself, my very learned sir. A wise statesman can hold his tongue, and die like a heathen, without shrift or penitence."
He continued for some time raving in this wild manner, now accusing himself as the greatest criminal, and now boasting his high birth and political sagacity, but at length recovered himself, and burst into tears.
The learned Master Martinus had several times vainly attempted to stop him, to point out the rules in logica against which he was offending; but the zealous carer for souls now triumphed over the philosopher, and he seized this favourable opportunity of exhorting to repentance the despairing sinner before him; and, in the supposition that he had been among the regicides, he became stern and vehement, and thundered forth the most fearful threatenings of the law against traitors and man-slayers.
"Nay, nay!" exclaimed Sir Lavé, "I am no regicide; but still I must surely perish, unless there dwells pity with Heaven and the Holy Church. Listen, and I will shrive!"
He then threw himself at the feet of the chancellor, and confessed every step he had taken, relating how he had been inveigled into the conspiracy, and protesting that he had, however, taken no share in his kinsman's sanguinary revenge.
"Drost Peter was right," he exclaimed: "the truth alone can save me and all of us. Even at that hour I would have deceived him, and he cannot trust--he cannot sue for mercy for me. Let justice, then, overtake me. Here I must be condemned; but save, oh save my soul from the eternal death!"