“It was horrid, horrid, horrid,” muttered the lad with a shiver; and he tried to divert his mind by thinking of how he should relate just a sufficiency of the encounter to his mother, and no more.
“Yes,” he said to himself. “I’ll just tell her that they fought, that father was scratched by the baron’s sword, and then the baron was badly wounded in return.
“That will do,” he said, feeling perfectly satisfied; “I’ll tell her just in this way.”
But as he came to this determination, doubt began to creep in and ask him whether he could relate the trouble so coolly and easily when his mother’s clear eyes were watching him closely and searching for every scrap of truth; and then he began to think it possible that he might fail, and stand before her feeling guilty of keeping a great deal back.
“I know I shall grow confused, and that she will not believe that poor father’s arm was only scratched, and she’ll think at once that it is a serious wound, and that the baron is dead.”
He turned so hot at this that he rose quickly, and walked along all four sides of the quadrangle to cool himself before going to the door once more and giving a sharp ring.
“Are the servants going to lie in bed all day?” he said peevishly. “They ought to be down before this.”
But the ring meeting with no response, he sat down again to try and think out what the consequences of the events of the morning would be. Here, however, he found himself confronted by a thick, black veil, which shut out the future. It was easy enough to read the past, but to imagine what was to come was beyond him.
At last, when quite an hour had passed, he grew impatient, and rang sharply this time, to hear a window opened somewhere at the top of the house; and when he looked up, it was to see a head thrust forth and rapidly withdrawn.
Five minutes or so afterward he heard the shooting of bolts and the rattling down of a chain, the door was opened, and a pretty-looking maidservant, with sleep still in her eyes, confronted him ill-humouredly.