Joan of the Sword Hand Part 45

There was a long and solemn pause between these two on the old watchtower. Never was declaration of love so given and so taken. Conrad remained still as a statue, only his eyes growing great and full of light. Joan stood looking at him, unashamed and fearless. Yet neither moved an inch toward either. A brave woman's will, to do right greatly, stood between them.

She went on.

"Now you know all, my Conrad," she said. "Isle Rugen can never more be the isle of peace to us. You and I have s.h.i.+vered the cup of our happiness. We must part. We can never be merely friends. I must abide because I am a prisoner. You will keep my counsel, promising me to be silent, and together we will contrive a way of escape."

When Conrad answered her again his voice was hoa.r.s.e and broken, almost like one rheumed with sleeping out on a winter's night. His words whistled in his windpipe, flying from treble to ba.s.s and back again.

"Joan, Joan!" he said, and the third time "Joan!" And for the moment he could say no more.

"True love," she said, and her voice was almost caressing, "you and I are barriered from each other. Yet we belong--you to me--I to you! I will not touch your hand, nor you mine. Not even as we have hitherto done. Let ours be the higher, perhaps deadlier sin--the sin of soul and soul. Do you go back to your office, your electorate, while I stay here to do my duty."

"And why not you to your duchy?" said Conrad, who had begun to recover himself.

"Because," she answered, "if I refuse to abide by one of my father's bargains, I have no right to hold by the other. He would have made me your brother's wife. That I have refused. He disinherited his lawful son that I might take the dukedom with me as my dowry. Can I keep that which was only given me in trust for another? Maurice von Lynar shall be Duke Maurice, and Theresa von Lynar shall have her true place as the widow of Henry the Lion!"

And she stood up tall and straight, like a princess indeed.

"And you?" he said very low. "What will you do, Joan?"

"For me, I will abide on Isle Rugen. Nunneries are not for me. There are doubtless one or two who will abide with me for the sake of old days--Werner von Orseln for one, Peter Balta for another. I shall not be lonely."

She smiled upon him with a peculiar trustful sweetness and continued--

"And once a year, in the autumn, you will come from your high office.

You will lay aside the princely scarlet, and don the curt hose and blue jerkin, even as now you stand. You will gather blackberries and help me to preserve them. You will split wood and carry water. Then, when the day is well spent, you and I shall walk hither in the high afternoon and tell each other how we stand and all the things that have filled our hearts in the year's inters.p.a.ce. Thus will we keep tryst, you and I--not priest and wedded wife, but man and woman speaking the truth eye to eye without fear and without stain. Do you promise?"

And for all answer the Prince-Cardinal kneeled down, and taking the hem of her dress he kissed it humbly and reverently.

CHAPTER XLI

THERESA KEEPS TROTH

But they had reckoned without Theresa von Lynar.

Conrad and Joan came back from the ruined fortification, silent mostly, but thrilled with the thoughts of that which their eyes had seen, their ears heard. Each had listened to the beating of the other's heart. Both knew they were beloved. Nothing could alter _that_ any more for ever. As they had gone out with Theresa watching them from the dusk of the garden arcades, their hands had drawn together. Eyes had sought answering eyes at each dip of the path. They had listened for the finest shades of meaning in one another's voices, and taken courage or lost hope from the droop of an eyelid or the quiver of a syllable.

Now all was changed. They knew that which they knew.

The orchard of the lonely grange on Isle Rugen was curiously out of keeping with its barren surroundings. Enclosed within the same wall as the dwelling-house, it was the special care of the Wordless Man, whose many years of pruning and digging and watering, undertaken each at its proper season, had resulted in a golden harvest of September fruit. When Joan and Conrad came to the portal which gave entrance from without, lo!

it stood open. The sun had been s.h.i.+ning in their eyes, and the place looked very slumberous in the white hazy glory of a northern day. The path which led out of the orchard was splashed with cool shade. Green leaves shrined fair globes of fruitage fast ripening in the blowing airs and steadfast sun. Up the path towards them as they stood together came Theresa von Lynar. There was a smile on her face, a large and kindly graciousness in her splendid eyes. Her hair was piled and circled about her head, and drawn back in ruddy golden ma.s.ses from the broad white forehead. Autumn was Theresa's season, and in such surroundings she might well have stood for Ceres or Pomona, with ap.r.o.n full enough of fruit for many a horn of plenty.

Such large-limbed simple-natured women as Theresa von Lynar appear to greatest advantage in autumn. It is their time when the day of apple-blossom and spring-flourish is overpast, and when that which these foreshadowed is at length fulfilled. Then to see such an one emerge from an orchard close, and approach softly smiling out of the shadow of fruit trees, is to catch a glimpse of the elder G.o.ds. Spring, on the other hand, is for merry maidens, slips of unripe grace, buds from the schools. Summer is the season of languorous dryads at rest in the green gloom of forests, fanning sunburnt cheeks with leafy boughs, their dark eyes full of the height of living. Winter is the time of swift lithe-limbed girls with heads proudly set, who through the white weather carry them like Dian the Huntress, their dainty chins dimpling out of softening furs. To each is her time and supremacy, though a certain favoured few are the mistresses of all. They move like a part of the spring when cherry blossoms are set against a sky of changeful April blue. They rejoice when dark-eyed summer wears scarlet flowers in her hair, shaded by green leaves and fanned by soft airs. Well-bosomed Ceres herself, smiling luxuriant with ripe lips, is not fairer than they at the time of apple-gathering, nor yet dainty Winter, footing it lightly over the frozen snow.

Joan, an it liked her, could have triumphed in all these, but her nature was too simple to care about the impression she made, while Conrad was too deep in love to notice any difference in her perfections.

And now Theresa von Lynar, the woman who had given her beauty and her life like a little Saint Valentine's gift into the hand of the man she loved, content that he should take or throw away as pleased him best--Theresa von Lynar met these two, who in their new glory of renunciation thought that they had plumbed the abysses of love, when as yet they had taken no more than a single sounding in the narrow seas.

She stood looking at them as they came towards her, with a sympathy that was deeper far than mere tolerance.

"Our Joan of the Sword Hand is growing into a woman," she murmured; and something she had thought buried deep heaved in her breast, shaking her as Enceladus the Giant shakes Etna when he turns in his sleep. For she saw in the girl her father's likeness more strongly than she had ever seen it in her own son.

"You have faced the suns.h.i.+ne!" Thus she greeted them as they came. "Sit awhile with me in the shade. I have here a bower where Maurice loved to play--before he left me. None save I hath entered it since that day."

So saying, she led the way along an alley of pleached green, at the far end of which they could see the solitary figure of Max Ulrich, in the full sun, bending his back to his gardening tasks, yet at the same time, as was his custom, keeping so near his mistress that a fluttering kerchief or a lifted hand would bring him instantly to her side.

It was a small rustic eight-sided lodge, thatched with heather, its latticed windows wide open and creeper-grown, to which Theresa led them.

It had been well kept; and when Joan found herself within, a sudden access of tenderness for this lonely mother, who for love's sake had offered herself like a sacrifice upon an altar, took possession of her.

For about the walls was fastened a child's pitiful armoury. Home-made swords of lath, arrows winged with the cast feathers of the woodland, crooked bows, the broken crockery of a hundred imagined banquets--these, and many more, were carefully kept in place with immediate and loving care. Maurice would be back again presently, they seemed to say, and would take up his play just where he left it.

No cobwebs hung from the roof; the bows were duly unstrung; and though wooden platters and rough kitchen equipage were mingled with warlike accoutrements upon the floor, there was not a particle of dust to be seen anywhere. As they sat down at the mother's bidding, it was hard to persuade themselves that Maurice von Lynar was far off, enduring the hards.h.i.+ps of war or in deadly peril for his mistress. He might have been even then in hiding in the brushwood, ready to cry bo-peep at them through the open door.

There was silence in the arbour for a s.p.a.ce, a silence which no one of the three was anxious to break. For Joan thought of her promise, Conrad of Joan, and Theresa of her son. It was the last who spoke.

"Somehow to-day it is borne in upon me that Kernsberg has fallen, and that my son is in his enemy's hands!"

Joan started to her feet and thrust her hands a little out in front of her as if to ward off a blow.

"How can you know that?" she cried. "Who----No; it cannot be. Kernsberg was victualled for a year. It was filled with brave men. My captains are staunch. The thing is impossible."

Theresa von Lynar, with her eyes on the waving foliage which alternately revealed and eclipsed the ruddy globes of the apples on the orchard trees, slowly shook her head.

"I cannot tell you how I know," she said; "nevertheless I know. Here is something which tells me." She laid her hand upon her heart. "Those who are long alone beside the sea hear voices and see visions."

"But it is impossible," urged Joan; "or, if it be true, why am I kept here? I will go and die with my people!"

"It is my son's will," said Theresa--"the will of the son of Henry the Lion. He is like his father--therefore women do his will!"

The words were not spoken bitterly, but as a simple statement of fact.

Joan looked at this woman and understood for the first time that she was the strongest spirit of all--greater than her father, better than herself. And perhaps because of this, n.o.bility and sacrifice stirred emulously in her own breast.

"Madam," she said, looking directly at Theresa von Lynar, "it is time that you and I understood each other. I hold myself no true d.u.c.h.ess of Hohenstein so long as your son lives. My father's compact and condition are of no effect. The Diet of the Empire would cancel them in a moment.

I will therefore take no rest till this thing is made clear. I swear that your son shall be Duke Maurice and sit in his father's place, as is right and fitting. For me, I ask nothing but the daughter's portion--a grange such as this, as solitary and as peaceful, a garden to delve and a beach to wander upon at eve!"

As she spoke, Theresa's eyes suddenly brightened. A proud high look sat on the fulness of her lips, which gradually faded as some other thought a.s.serted its supremacy. She rose, and going straight to Joan, for the first time she kissed her on the brow.

"Now do I know," she said, "that you are Henry the Lion's daughter. That is spoken as he would have spoken it. It is greatly thought. Yet it cannot be."

"It shall be!" cried Joan imperiously.

"Nay," returned Theresa von Lynar. "Once on a time I would have given my right hand that for half a day, for one hour, men might have said of me that I was Henry the Lion's wife, and my son his son! It would have been right sweet. Ah G.o.d, how sweet it would have been!" She paused a moment as if consulting some unseen presence. "No, I have vowed my vow. Here was I bidden to stay and here will I abide. For me there was no sorrow in any hard condition, so long as _he_ laid it upon me. For have I not tasted with him the glory of life, and with him plucked out the heart of the mystery? That for which I paid, I received. My lips have tasted both of the Tree of Knowledge and of the Tree of Life--for these two grow very close together, the one to the other, upon the banks of the River of Death. But for my son, this thing is harder to give up. For on him lies the stain, though the joy and the sin were mine alone."

"Maurice of Hohenstein shall sit in his father's seat," said Joan firmly. "I have sworn it. If I live I will see him settled there with my captains about him. Werner von Orseln is an honest man. He will do him justice. Von Dessauer shall get him recognised, and Hugo of Pla.s.senburg shall stand his sponsor before the Diet of the Empire."