“May I keep the ribbon?” asked Axel, imploringly. She at length raised her beautiful eyes, and a ray of love flashed powerfully from them. Enraptured he stretched out his arms to embrace her; deeply blushing, she sank into them, and he pressed the first pure kiss of ardent love on her lips. At this moment the baron suddenly appeared from behind the hedge, contemplating the group with a truly noble horror. “Begone to the castle!” he cried to his daughter; “to the stable!” he cried, in a voice of thunder, to Axel. Like a finger-post, he pointed to the places mentioned, and the frightened couple obeyed in silence.
In anxious expectation of what would follow, Tugendreich had been standing for some time in the window of the baronial hall, from which she had in the morning admired Axel’s horsemanship, when her father came up to her with a wrathful countenance, seized her hand, and led her to the gigantic portrait of the ancestors of the Starschedels, which gloomily and menacingly looked down, as it were, from the gold frame upon the delinquent. “Who is that?” asked the baron, with suppressed wrath.
“Magnus von Starschedel, the founder of our family,” repeated Tugendreich, words which had been impressed on her memory from infancy. “In the war against the emperor, Henry IV., Duke Rodolph of Swabia dubbed him knight, A.D. 1078, at Stronow, near Mellenstädt; and he fell in the battle fought against the same emperor, near Würzburg, A.D. 1086, after his valour had contributed to gain the victory.”
“What think you this glorious knight would have done, if he had, like myself, seen you from behind the hedge?” asked her father, while Tugendreich cast her eyes down on the squares of the inlaid floors. “He would have cleft the head of the unfaithful servant,” continued the baron, raising his voice, “and thrown the degenerate girl into the dungeon, until he should have placed her and her passion for ever in a cloister.”
The Fräulein gave a silent assent to the justice of this sentence.
“Tugendreich! Tugendreich!” continued her father, reproaching her; “why did I give you this lovely name?[[2]] I ought to have christened you Philippe, for Talander has interpreted this name to me, to mean a lover of horses, and it would therefore be some excuse for your predilection for the stable.”
Now a feeling of pride rose within her, and she cried, “I deserve blame, but do not merit your contempt. My feelings are pure, and I need not be ashamed of him.”
The furious impetuosity of noble wrath would now have broken through the last barrier of paternal love, when fortunately for the poor Fräulein a loud shriek of terror resounded from the court-yard, and Talander entered the hall with a countenance as pale as death. “May God and his holy gospel protect us,” exclaimed the old man. “A swarm of Croats is storming through the country, and may probably come this very night.”
“Well,” replied the baron, with affected composure, “Saxony has nothing to fear from the troops of his Imperial Majesty.”