So all the deep war horns are braying.”
The last lines were blared as a chorus out of forty throats, the rafters shook, the torches quivered. Silence then, an unwonted step, varlets with long faces rushing, Baron Ulrich twisting in his chair, Priest Clement turning red, the door tapestry parting, and strange eyes looking in upon that wanton crew. The raiders were face to face with Jerome of the Dragon’s Dale.
Well for Jerome that he had mastered the Demon of Spiritual Pride! Ulrich of the Wartburg, ruler of one hundred of the wildest spirits in Thuringia, had cowered behind his silver-lace doublet and tried to look fierce, but vainly. Michael the Breaker remembered a prayer his mother had taught him. Priest Clement’s wriggling tongue was still as a fire-dog. When Jerome stood before the dais and bade Ulrich deliver up the prisoner then and there, My Lord Baron turned all ashen under his bronzed skin and asked what would be the consequences if he did not, only to understand that obstinacy now would advance him farther yet into Heaven’s ill graces. It had all ended before an onlooker could have counted an hundred.
“‘Give him the maid, Franz, and all the fiends go with her!’”
See page 33.
“Give him the maid, Franz, and all the fiends go with her!”
So ordered Ulrich, and Franz complied whilst his great knees beat together and his ill-deeds stared large at him. Some cried “Blessing!” “Absolution!” others. One of the wicked women knelt and kissed the skirt of the sheepskin as Jerome swept out with never a word to them all. That the feast flickered out in silence and trembling sobriety, there is small need to tell.
But Jerome led the little maid through the wide courts, where other revellers cast timorous eyes on them, under the spiked portcullis (where the warder was crossing himself on his corselet) out into the black span of the night, with only the stars and the moon and the wind to bear them company.