"Let them beware, or I will take their heads off for rank weeds!"
I answered.
For at that time, in the Court of Plassenburg, we talked in figures and romance words. We had indeed become so familiar with the mode that we could use no other, even in times of earnestness. So that a man would go to be hanged or married with a quipsome conceit on his lips.
"I think, Sir Janus Double-tongue," she said, "that you would not be the worse of a little medicine of your own concocting."
And with that she swept her skirts daintily about and tripped down in to the pleasaunce of flowers, to make which the Prince Karl had brought a skilled gardener all the way from France.
I prowled about the higher terrace, moodily watching the sky and thinking on the morrow's weather. And by-and-by I saw one come forth from among the cropped Dutch hedges, and stride across to where Helene walked with something white in her hand. I could see her again picking a flower to pieces, and methought I could hear the words. My jealous fancy conjured up the ending, "Loves me not—loves me! Loves me not!"
She turned even as she had done to me. The newcomer was that sneering Court fop, the Count von Reuss, Duke Casimir's nephew—still in hiding from the wrath of his uncle. For at that time hardly any court in Germany was without one or two of these hangers-on, and a bad, reckless, ill-contriving breed they were at Plassenburg, as doubtless elsewhere.
Then grew my heart hard and bitter, and yet, in a moment afterwards, was again only wistful and sad.
"She had been safer," thought I, "in the old Red Tower than playing flower fancies with such a man!"
For I had seen the very devil look out of his eye—which indeed it did as often as he cast it on a fair woman. In especial, I longed to throttle him each time he turned to watch Helene as she went by. And here she was walking with him, and talking pleasantly too, in the rose garden of the palace.
"Ah, devil take all princes and princesses!" said I. This one, it is true, was only a count, and disinherited. But I felt that the thing was the Prince's doing, and that it was for the sake of the covenant he had made with me that I was compelled to put up with such a toad as Von Reuss crawling and besliming the fair garden of my love.