Well, as I lay awake and waited for the chance to slip down a rope from my bedroom window, whose foot should I hear on the turret stairs but that of my Lord Duke Casimir! My very heart quailed within me. For the fear of him sat heavy on every man and woman in the land. And as for the children—why, as far as the Baltic shore and the land of the last Ritters, mothers frightened their bairns with the Black Duke of the Wolfsberg and his Red Axe.
So now the Duke and the Red Axe were to be in conference—as indeed had happened nearly every day and night since I could remember. So that people called my father the Duke's Private Devil, his Familiar Spirit, his Evil Genius. But I knew other of it—and this night, of all nights in the year, I was to know better still.
It was a summer midnight—not like the one I told of when the story began, white with snow and glittering with the keen polish of frost. But a soft, still night, drowsy yet sleepless, with an itch of thunder tingling in the air—and, indeed, already the pulsing, uncertain glow of sheet-lightning coming and going at long intervals along the south.
I crouched and nestled in the hole in the wall where I had long ago hidden the hated red cloak, pulling my knees up uncomfortably to my chin. And great lumps of bone they were, knotted as if a smith had made them in the rough with a welding hammer and had forgotten to reduce them with the file afterwards. At that time I was thoroughly ashamed of my knees.
But no matter for them now. Duke Casimir passed in and shut the door.
"Gottfried," I heard him say, "I am a dead man!"
These words from the great Duke Casimir startled me, and though I knew well enough that Michael Texel, the Burgomeister's son, was waiting for me by the corner of the Jew's Port, I decided that, as I might never hear Duke Casimir declare his secretest soul again, I should even bide where I was; and that was in the crevice of the wall among the old clothes, which gave off such a faint, musty, sleepy smell I could scarcely keep awake.
But the Duke's next words effectually roused me.
"A dead man!" repeated Casimir. "I have not a friend in all the realm of the Mark besides yourself. And there is none of all that take my bounty or eat my bread that is sorry for me. See here," he said, querulously, "twice have I been stricken at to-day—once a tile fell from a roof and dinted the crown of my helmet, and the second time a young man struck at my breast with a dagger."
"Did he wound you, Duke Casimir?" asked my father, speaking for the first time, but in a strangely easy and equal voice, not with the distance and deference which he showed to his lord in public.