“Thou heardst! and didst not cast his insolence in his teeth?” cried Ebbo.
“How could I,” laughed Friedel, “when the echo was casting back in my teeth my own shout to thee? I could only laugh with Rudiger.”
“The chief delight I could have, next to getting home, would be to lay that fellow Rudiger on his back in the tilt-yard,” said Ebbo.
But, as Rudiger was by four years his senior, and very expert, the upshot of these encounters was quite otherwise, and the young gentlemen were disabused of the notion that fighting came by nature, and found that, if they desired success in a serious conflict, they must practise diligently in the city tilt-yard, where young men were trained to arms. The crossbow was the only weapon with which they excelled; and, as shooting was a favourite exercise of the burghers, their proficiency was not as exclusive as had seemed to Ebbo a baronial privilege. Harquebuses were novelties to them, and they despised them as burgher weapons, in spite of Sir Kasimir’s assurance that firearms were a great subject of study and interest to the King of the Romans. The name of this personage was, it may be feared, highly distasteful to the Freiherr von Adlerstein, both as Wildschloss’s model of knightly perfection, and as one who claimed submission from his haughty spirit. When Sir Kasimir spoke to him on the subject of giving his allegiance, he stiffly replied, “Sir, that is a question for ripe consideration.”
“It is the question,” said Wildschloss, rather more lightly than agreed with the Baron’s dignity, “whether you like to have your castle pulled down about your ears.”
“That has never happened yet to Adlerstein!” said Ebbo, proudly.
“No, because since the days of the Hohenstaufen there has been neither rule nor union in the empire. But times are changing fast, my Junker, and within the last ten years forty castles such as yours have been consumed by the Swabian League, as though they were so many walnuts.”
“The shell of Adlerstein was too hard for them, though. They never tried.”
“And wherefore, friend Eberhard? It was because I represented to the Kaiser and the Graf von Wurtemberg that little profit and no glory would accrue from attacking a crag full of women and babes, and that I, having the honour to be your next heir, should prefer having the castle untouched, and under the peace of the empire, so long as that peace was kept. When you should come to years of discretion, then it would be for you to carry out the intention wherewith your father and grandfather left home.”
“Then we have been protected by the peace of the empire all this time?” said Friedel, while Ebbo looked as if the notion were hard of digestion.