In the Fire of the Forge | Page 4

officials, menservants, squires, pages, and chaplains.
Montfort horses and hounds crowd our good steeds out of their stalls.
Besides the twenty stabled here, eighteen were put in the brewery in the
Hundsgasse, and eight belong to Countess Cordula. Then the constant
turmoil all day long and until late at night! It is fortunate that they do
not lodge with us in the front of the house! It would be very bad for my
mother!"
"Then you can rejoice over the departure all the more cordially,"
observed Wolff.
"It will hardly cause us much sorrow," Els admitted. "Yet the young
countess brings much merriment into our quiet house. She is certainly a
tireless madcap, and it will vex your proud sister Isabella to know that
your brother-in-law Siebenburg is one of her admirers. Did she not go
to the Town Hall?"

"No," Wolff answered; "the twins have changed her wonderfully. You
saw the dress my mother pressed upon her for the ball--Genoese velvet
and Venetian lace! Its cost would have bought a handsome house. She
was inclined, too, to appear as a young mother at the festival, and I
assure you that she looked fairly regal in the magnificent attire. But this
morning, after she had bathed the little boys, she changed her mind.
Though my mother, and even my grandmother, urged her to go, she
insisted that she belonged to the twins, and that some evil would befall
the little ones if she left them."
"That is noble!" cried Els in delight, "and if I should ever---. Yet no,
Isabella and I cannot be compared. My husband will never be
numbered among the admirers of another woman, like your detestable
brother-in-law. Besides, he is wasting time with Cordula. Her
worldliness repels Eva, it is true, but I have heard many pleasant things
about her. Alas! she is a motherless girl, and her father is an old
reveller and huntsman, who rejoices whenever she does any audacious
act. But he keeps his purse open to her, and she is kind-hearted and
obliging to a degree----"
"Equalled by few," interrupted Wolff, with a sneer. "The men know
how to praise her for it. No paternoster would be imposed upon her in
the confessional on account of cruel harshness."
"Nor for a sinful or a spiteful deed," replied Els positively. "Don't say
anything against her to me, Wolff, in spite of your dissolute
brother-in-law. I have enough to do to intercede for her with Eva and
Aunt Kunigunde since she singed and oiled the locks of a Swiss knight
belonging to the Emperor's court. Our Katterle brought the coals. But
many other girls do that, since courtesy permits it. Her train to the
Town Hall certainly made a very brave show; the fifty freight waggons
you are expecting will scarcely form a longer line."
The young merchant started. The comparison roused his forgotten
anxiety afresh, and after a few brief, tender words of farewell he left the
object of his love. Els gazed thoughtfully after him; the moonlight
revealed his tall, powerful figure for a long time. Her heart throbbed
faster, and she felt more deeply than ever how warmly she loved him.

He moved as though some heavy burden of care bowed his strong
shoulders. She would fain have hastened after him, clung to him, and
asked what troubled him, what he was concealing from her who was
ready to share everything with him, but the Frauenthor, through which
he entered the city, already hid him from her gaze.
She turned back into the room with a faint sigh. It could scarcely be
solely anxiety about his expected goods that burdened her lover's mind.
True, his weak, arrogant mother, and still more his grandmother, the
daughter of a count, who lived with them in the Eysvogel house and
still ruled her daughter as if she were a child, had opposed her
engagement to Wolff, but their resistance had ceased since the betrothal.
On the other hand, she had often heard that Fran Eysvogel, the haughty
mother, dowerless herself, had many poor and extravagant relations
besides her daughter and her debt-laden, pleasure-loving husband, Sir
Seitz Siebenburg, who, it could not be denied, all drew heavily upon
the coffers of the ancient mercantile house. Yet it was one of the richest
in Nuremberg. Yes, something of which she was still ignorant must be
oppressing Wolff, and, with the firm resolve to give him no peace until
he confessed everything to her, she returned to the couch of her invalid
mother.
CHAPTER II.
Wolff had scarcely vanished from the street, and Els from the window,
when a man's slender figure appeared, as if it had risen from the earth,
beside the spurge-laurel tree at the left of the house. Directly after some
one rapped lightly on the