But the Lady Ysolinde saw not—heard not. For they had carried her out white and still from the place where she had fallen fainting at the foot of the scaffold.
CHAPTER LIII
THE LUBBER FIEND'S RETURN
Al these things had overpast so quickly that when Helene and I found ourselves alone in the Red Tower it seemed to both of us that we dreamed.
We sat in a kind of buzzing hush, on the low window-seat of the old room, hand in hand. The shouts of the people came up to us from the square beneath. We heard the tramp of the soldiers, who cheered us as they passed to and fro. Being at last alone, we looked into each other's eyes, and we could not believe in our own happiness.
"My wife!" I said, but in another fashion than I had said it on the scaffold.
"My husband!" answered Helene, looking up at me.
But I think, for all that we realized of the truth, we might as well have called each other King and Queen of Sheba.
We had been conducted with honor to the Red Tower. For since it was in virtue of my hereditary office that I had obtained the great deliverance, I dared for the present seek no other dwelling-place. For Helene's sake, indeed, I should have felt safer elsewhere. Besides, desperate and full of baffled hatred as I knew Duke Otho to be, I did not believe that he would dare to molest us—for some time at least. The rage of the people, their unbounded jubilation at the deliverance of their Saint Helena from the jaws of death on the very scaffold, were too recent to be trifled with by a prince sitting so insecure in his ducal seat as Otho of the Wolfmark.
So here in the ancient Red Tower, I thought, we might at least be safe enough till my good fellows of Plassenburg, with the Prince at their head, should swarm hammering at the gates of Thorn.