“To trouble her?” exclaimed Friedel.
“To trouble her,” repeated Ebbo. “Long since hath passed the pang of his loss, and there is reason in what old Sorel says, that he must have been a rugged, untaught savage, with little in common with the gentle one, and that tender memory hath decked him out as he never could have been. Nay, Friedel, it is but sense. What could a man have been under the granddame’s breeding?”
“It becomes not thee to say so!” returned Friedel. “Nay, he could learn to love our mother.”
“One sign of grace, but doubtless she loved him the better for their having been so little together. Her heart is at peace, believing him in his grave; but let her imagine him in Schlangenwald’s dungeon, or some Moorish galley, if thou likest it better, and how will her mild spirit be rent!”
“It might be so,” said Friedel, thoughtfully. “It may be best to keep this secret from her till we have fuller certainty.”
“Agreed then,” said Ebbo, “unless the Wildschloss fellow should again molest us, when his answer is ready.”
“Is this just towards my mother?” said Friedel.
“Just! What mean’st thou? Is it not our office and our dearest right to shield our mother from care? And is not her chief wish to be rid of the Wildschloss suit?”
Nevertheless Ebbo was moody all the way home, but when there he devoted himself in his most eager and winning way to his mother, telling her of Master Gottfried’s woodcuts, and Hausfrau Johanna’s rheumatism, and of all the news of the country, in especial that the Kaisar was at Lintz, very ill with a gangrene in his leg, said to have been caused by his habit of always kicking doors open, and that his doctors thought of amputation, a horrible idea in the fifteenth century. The young baron was evidently bent on proving that no one could make his mother so happy as he could; and he was not far wrong there.
Friedel, however, could not rest till he had followed Heinz to the stable, and speaking over the back of the old white mare, the only other survivor of the massacre, had asked him once more for the particulars, a tale he was never loth to tell; but when Friedel further demanded whether he was certain of having seen the death of his younger lord, he replied, as if hurt: “What, think you I would have quitted him while life was yet in him?”