Red Axe | Page 3

beneath the ramparts. Lights shone in windows athwart the
city. Red nightcaps were thrust out of hastily opened casements. The
Duke's standing guard clamored with their spear-butts on the uneven
pavements, crying up and down the streets: "To your kennels, devil's
brats, Duke Casimir comes riding home!"
Then I tell you my small heart beat furiously. For I knew that if I only
kept quiet I should see that which I had never yet seen--the
home-coming of our famous foraying Duke. I had, indeed, seen Duke
Casimir often enough in the castle, or striding across the court-yard to
speak to my father, for whom he had ever a remarkable affection. He
was a tall, swart, black-a-vised man, with a huge hairy mole on his
cheek, and long dog-teeth which showed at the sides of his mouth when
he smiled, almost as pleasantly as those of a she-wolf looking out of
her den at the hunters.
But I had never seen the Duke of all the Wolfmark come riding home
ere daybreak, laden with the plunder of captured castles and the rout of
deforced cities. For at such times my father would carefully lock the
door on me, and confine me to my little sleeping-chamber--from
whence I could see nothing but the square of smooth pavement on
which the children chalked their games, and from which they cried
naughtily up at me, the poor hermit of the Red Tower. But this night
my father would be with the Duke, and I should see all. For high or low
there was none in the empty Red Tower to hinder or forbid.
As I waited, thrilling with expectation, I heard beneath me the
quickening pulse-beat of the town. The watch hurried here and there,
hectoring, threatening, and commanding. But, in spite of all, men
gathered as soon as their backs were turned in the alleys and street
openings. Clusters of heads showed black for a moment in some
darksome entry, cried "U-g-g-hh!" with a hateful sound, and vanished
ere the steel-clad veterans of the Duke's guard could come upon them.

It was like the hide-and-seek which I used to play with Boldo, my
blood-hound puppy, among the dusty waste of the lumber-room over
the Hall of Judgment, before my father took him back to the kennels for
biting Christian's Elsa, a child who lived in the lower Guard opposite to
the Red Tower.
But this was a stranger hide-and-seek than mine and Boldo's had been.
For I saw one of the men who cried hatefully to the guard stumble on
the slippery ice; and lo! or ever he had time to cry out or gather himself
up, the men-at-arms were upon him. I saw the glitter of stabbing steel
and heard the sickening sound of blows stricken silently in anger. Then
the soldiers took the man up by head and heels carelessly, jesting as
they went. And I shuddered, for I knew that they were bringing him to
the horrible long sheds by the Red Tower through which the wind
whistled. But in the moonlight the patch which was left on the snow
was black, not red.
After this the crooked alleys were kept clearer, and I could see down
the long High Street of Thorn right to the Weiss Thor and the
snow-whitened pinnacles of the Palace, out of which Duke Casimir had
for the time being frightened Bishop Peter. Black stood the Gate Port
against the moonlight and the snow when I first looked at it. A moment
after it had opened, and a hundred lights came crowding through, like
sheep through an entry on their way to the shambles--which doubtless
is their Hall of Judgment, where there waits for them the Red Axe of a
lowlier degree.
The lights, I say, came thronging through the gate. For though it was
moonlight, the Duke Casimir loved to come home amid the red flame
of torches, the trail of bituminous reek, and with a dashing train of
riders clattering up to the Wolfsberg behind him, through the streets of
Thorn, lying black and cowed under the shadows of its thousand
gables.
So the procession undulated towards me, turbid and tumultuous. First a
reckless pour of riders urging wearied horses, their sides white-flecked
above with blown foam, and dark beneath with rowelled blood. Many
of the horsemen carried marks upon them which showed that all had

not been plunder and pleasuring upon their foray. For there were white
napkins, and napkins that had once been white, tied across many brows.
Helmets swung clanking like iron pipkins from saddle-bows, and men
rode wearily with their arms in slings, drooping haggard faces upon
their chests. But all passed rapidly enough up the steep street, and
tumbled with noise and shouting, helter-skelter into the great court-yard
beneath me