The Sword Maker by Robert Barr (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

dismay. "The Archbishop of Cologne!"

The girl uttered a little frightened cry, and edged her horse nearer to that of her escort.

"My guardian! My guardian!" she breathed. "I shall be rearrested!"

Seeing them standing as if stricken to stone, two horsemen detached themselves from the cavalry and galloped forward.

"Make way there, you fools!" cried the leader. "Get ye to the side; into the river; where you like; out of the path of my Lord the Archbishop."

Nevertheless Roland stood his ground, and dared even to frown at the officers of his Lordship.

"Stand aside _you_," he commanded in a tone of mastery, "and do not venture to intrude between the Archbishop and me."

The rider knew that no man who valued his head would dare use such language in the very presence of the Archbishop, unless he were the highest in the land. His dignified Lordship looked up to see the cause of this interruption, and of these angry words.

First came into his face an expression of amazement, then a smile melted the stern lips as he looked on Roland and recognized him. The impetuous horsemen faded away to the background. There was no answering smile on Roland's face. He reached out and clasped the hand of the girl.

"Now, by the Three Kings!" he whispered, "I shall break my oath."

Hilda glanced up at him, frightened by his vehemence, wincing under his iron grasp.

An unexpected sound interrupted the tension. The Archbishop had come to a stand, and "Halt! Halt! Halt!" rang out the word along the line of men, whose feet ceased to stir the dust of the road. The unexpected sound was that of hearty laughter from the dignified and mighty Prince of the Church.

"Forgive me, your Highness!" he cried, "but I laugh to think of the countenances of my somber brothers, Treves and Mayence, when they learn how sturdily you have kept your word with them. By the true Cross, Prince Roland, although we wished you to marry her, we had no thought that you would break into the Castle of Pfalz to win her hand. Ah, dear, what a pity 'tis we grow old! The impetuousness of youth outweighs the calculated wisdom of the three greatest prelates outside Rome. Judging by your fair face (and I have always held it to be beautiful, remember), you, Hildegunde Lauretta Priscilla Agnes, Countess of Sayn, are not moving northward to Nonnenwerth. I always insisted that the Saalhof at Frankfort was a more cheerful edifice than any nunnery on the Rhine, yet you never turned upon me such a glance of confidence as I see you bestow on your future Emperor."

"I hope, my Lord and Guardian," cried the girl, "that I have met you in time to deflect your course to my Castle of Sayn."

"Sweet Countess, I thank you for the invitation. My men can go on to their camp in the stronghold of my brother of Mayence, Schloss Martinsburg, and I shall gladly return with you to the hospitable hearth of Sayn. Indeed," said the Archbishop, lowering his voice, "I shall feel safer there than in enjoying the hospitality I had intended to accept."

"Are you not surprised to meet me?" asked the lady, with a laugh, adjusting words and manner to the new situation, which she more quickly comprehended than did her companion, who glanced with bewilderment from Countess to prelate, and back again.

The Archbishop waved his hand.

"Nothing you could do would surprise me, since your interview with the Court of Archbishops. I am on my way to Frankfort." Then, more seriously, to Prince Roland: "You heard of your father's death?"

"I learned it only this morning, my Lord. I shall return to Frankfort when I am assured that this gentlewoman is in a place of safety."

"Ah, Countess, there will be no lack of safety now! But will you not ease an old man's conscience by admitting he was in the right?"

The Countess looked up at Roland with a smile.

"Yes, dear Guardian," she said. "You were in the right."


XVII


"FOR THE EMPRESS, AND NOT FOR THE EMPIRE"

While the long line of troops stood at salute in single file, the Archbishop turned his horse to the north and rode past his regiments, followed by the Countess and Roland. His Lordship was accompanied to the end of the ranks by his general, who received final instructions regarding the march.

"You will encamp for the night not at Schloss Martinsburg, as I had intended, but a league or two up the Lahn. To-morrow morning continue your march along the Lahn as far as Limburg, and there await my arrival. We will enter Frankfort by the north gate instead of from the west."

The Archbishop sat on his horse for some minutes, watching the departing force, then called Roland to his right hand, and Hildegunde to his left, and thus the three set out on the short journey to Sayn.

"Your Highness," began the Archbishop, "I find myself in a position of some embarrassment. I think explanations are due to me from you both. Here I ride between two escaped prisoners, and I travel away from, instead of towards, their respective dungeons. My plain duty, on encountering you, was to place you in custody of a sufficient guard, marching you separately the one to Pfalz and the other to Ehrenfels. Having accomplished this I should report the case to my two colleagues, yet here am I actually compounding a misdemeanor, and assisting prisoners to escape."

"My Lord," spoke up Roland, "I am quite satisfied that my own imprisonment has been illegal, therefore I make no apology for circumventing it. Before entering upon any explanation, I ask enlightenment regarding the detention of my lady of Sayn. Am I right in surmising that she, like myself, was placed under arrest by the three Archbishops?"

"Yes, your Highness."

"On what charge?"

"High treason."

"Against whom?"

There was a pause, during which the Archbishop did not reply.

"I need not have asked such a question," resumed the Prince, "for high treason can relate only to the monarch. In what measure has her ladyship encroached upon the prerogative of the Emperor?"

"Your Highness forgets that there is such a thing as treason against the State."

"Are not members of the nobility privileged in this matter?"

"They cannot be, for the State is greater than any individual."

"I shall make a note of that, my Lord of Cologne. I believe you are in the right, and I hope so. During my lonely incarceration," the Prince laughed a little, "I have studied the condition of the State, arriving at the conclusion that the greatest traitors in our land are the three Archbishops, who, arrogating to themselves power that should belong to the Crown, did not use that power for suppressing those other treason-mongers, the Barons of the Rhine."

"What would you have us do with them?"

"You should disarm them. You should exact restitution of their illegally-won wealth. You should open the Rhine to honest commerce."

"That is easy to enunciate, and difficult to perform. If the Castles were disarmed, especially those on the left bank, a great injustice would be done that might lead to the extinction of many noble families. Why, the forests of Germany are filled with desperate outlaws, who respect neither life nor property. I myself have suffered but recently from their depredations. In broad daylight an irresistible band of these ruffians descended upon and captured the supposed impregnable Castle of Rheinstein, shamefully maltreating Baron Hugo von Hohenfels, tying him motionless, and nearly strangling him with stout ropes, after which the scoundrels robbed him of every stiver he possessed. The following midnight but one they descended on Furstenberg, a fief of my own, and not contenting themselves with robbery, brought red ruin on the Margrave by burning his Castle to the ground."

"My Lord, red ruin and the Red Margrave were made for each other. It was the justice of God that they should meet." The young man raised aloft his swordarm, shaking his clenched fist at the sky. "That hand held the torch that fired Furstenberg. The Castle was taken and burned by three sword makers from Frankfort, who never saw the Hunsruck or the outlaws thereof."

The Archbishop reined in his horse, and looked at the excited young man with amazement.

"_You_ fired Furstenberg?"

"Yes; and effectively, my Lord. I shall rebuild it for you, but the Red Margrave I shall hang, as my predecessor Rudolph did his ancestor."

An expression of sternness hardened the Archbishop's face.

"Sir," he said, "I regret to hear you speak like this, and your safety lies in the fact that I do not believe a word of it. Even so, such wild words fill me with displeasure. I beg to remind you that the Election of an Emperor has not yet taken place, and I, for one, am likely to reconsider my decision. Still, as I said, I do not believe a word of your absurd tale."

"I believe every syllable of it!" cried the Countess with enthusiasm, "and glory that there is a mind brave enough, and a hand obedient to it, to smoke out a robber and a murderer."

The tension this astonishing revelation caused was relieved by a laugh from the Archbishop.

"My dear Hildegunde, you are forgetting your own ancestors. I venture that no woman of the House of Sayn talked thus when the Emperor Rudolph marched Count von Sayn to the scaffold. You would probably sing another song if asked to restore the millions amassed by Henry III. of Sayn and his successors; all accumulated by robbery as cruel as any that the Red Margrave has perpetrated."

"My Lord," said the Countess proudly, "you had no need to ask that question, for you knew the answer to it before you spoke. Every thaler I control shall be handed over to Prince Roland, to be used for the regeneration of his country."

Again the Archbishop laughed.

"Surely I knew that, my dear, and I should not have said what I did. I suppose you will not allow me to vote against his Highness at the coming Election."

"Indeed, you shall vote enthusiastically for him, because you know in your own heart he is the man Germany needs."

"Was there ever such a change of front?" cried the Archbishop. "Why, my dear, the charges you so hotly made against his Highness are as nothing to what he has himself confessed; yet now he is the savior of Germany, when previously--Ah, well, I must not play the tale-bearer."

"Prince Roland," cried the girl, "my kinsman, Father Ambrose, said he met you in Frankfort, although now I believe him to have been mistaken."

"Oh no; I encountered the good Father on the bridge."

"There now!" exclaimed the Archbishop, "what do you say to that, my lady?"

She seemed perplexed by the admission, but quickly replied to his Lordship:

"'Twas you said that could not be, as he was a close prisoner in Ehrenfels." She continued, addressing the Prince: "Father Ambrose asserted that you were a companion of drinkers and brawlers in a low wine cellar of Frankfort."

"Quite true; a score of them."

The girl became more and more perplexed.

"Did you imprison Father Ambrose?"

"Yes; in the lowest wine cellar, but only for a day or two. I am very sorry, Madam, but it was a stern necessity of war. He was meddling with affairs he knew nothing of, and there was no time