“So must it be?” said Ebbo, between his teeth, as he leant moodily against the wall, while his mother was gone to attend to the fare to be set before the messengers.
“What! art not glad to take wing at last?” exclaimed Friedel, cut short in an exclamation of delight.
“Take wing, forsooth! To be guest of a greasy burgher, and call cousin with him! Fear not, Friedel; I’ll not vex the motherling. Heaven knows she has had pain, grief, and subjection enough in her lifetime, and I would not hinder her visit to her home; but I would she could go alone, nor make us show our poverty to the swollen city folk, and listen to their endearments. I charge thee, Friedel, do as I do; be not too familiar with them. Could we but sprain an ankle over the crag—”
“Nay, she would stay to nurse us,” said Friedel, laughing; “besides, thou art needed for the matter of homage.”
“Look, Friedel,” said Ebbo, sinking his voice, “I shall not lightly yield my freedom to king or Kaiser. Maybe, there is no help for it; but it irks me to think that I should be the last Lord of Adlerstein to whom the title of Freiherr is not a mockery. Why dost bend thy brow, brother? What art thinking of?”
“Only a saying in my mother’s book, that well-ordered service is true freedom,” said Friedel. “And methinks there will be freedom in rushing at last into the great far-off!”—the boy’s eye expanded and glistened with eagerness. “Here are we prisoners—to ourselves, if you like—but prisoners still, pent up in the rocks, seeing no one, hearing scarce an echo from the knightly or the poet world, nor from all the wonders that pass. And the world has a history going on still, like the Chronicle. Oh, Ebbo, think of being in the midst of life, with lance and sword, and seeing the Kaiser—the Kaiser of the holy Roman Empire!”
“With lance and sword, well and good; but would it were not at the cost of liberty!”
However Ebbo forbore to damp his mother’s joy, save by the one warning—“Understand, mother, that I will not be pledged to anything. I will not bend to the yoke ere I have seen and judged for myself.”
The manly sound of the words gave a sweet sense of exultation to the mother, even while she dreaded the proud spirit, and whispered, “God direct thee, my son.”
Certainly Ebbo, hitherto the most impetuous and least thoughtful of the two lads, had a gravity and seriousness about him, that, but for his naturally sweet temper, would have seemed sullen. His aspirations for adventure had hitherto been more vehement than Friedel’s; but, when the time seemed at hand, his regrets at what he might have to yield overpowered his hopes of the future. The fierce haughtiness of the old Adlersteins could not brook the descent from the crag, even while the keen, clear burgher wit that Ebbo inherited from the other side of the house taught him that the position was untenable, and that his isolated glory was but a poor mean thing after all. And the struggle made him sad and moody.