Red Axe | Page 8

leaves in the morning. At last I bethought
me of my father's room, where even I, his son, had never been at night,
and indeed but seldom in the day. For it was the Hereditary Justicer's
fancy to lodge himself in the high garret which ran right across the top
of the Red Tower, and was entered only by a little ladder from the first
turning of the same staircase by which I had run out upon the leads.
I went to the bottom of the garret turnpike. The little barred door stood
open, and I heard--I was sure that I heard--light, irregularly pattering
footsteps moving about above.
It gave me strange shakings of my heart only to listen. For, though I
was noways afraid of my father myself, yet since I had never seen any
man, woman, or child (save the Duke only) who did not quail at his
approach, it was a curious feeling to think of the lonely little child
skipping about up there, where abode the axe and the block--the axe
which had done, I knew so well what, to her father only the night

before.
So I mustered all my courage--not from any fear of Gottfried Gottfried,
but rather from the uncertainty of what I should see, and quickly
mounted the stair.
I shall never forget what I saw as I stood with my feet on the rickety
hand-rail of the ladder. The long dim garret was already half-lighted by
the coming day. Red cloaks swung and flapped like vast, deadly,
winged bats from the rafters, and reached almost to the ground. There
was no glass in any of the windows of the garret, for my father minded
neither heat nor cold. He was a man of iron. Summer's heat nor winter's
cold neither vexed nor pleasured him. So it was no marvel that at the
chamber's upper end, and quite near to my father's bed, lay a wreath of
snow, with a fine, clean-cut, untrampled edge, just as it had blown in at
the gable window when the storm burst from the east.
My father lay stretched out on his bed, his head thrown back, his neck
bare--almost as if he had done justice on himself, or at least as if he
waited the stroke of another Red Axe through the eastern skylight
which the morning was already crimsoning. His scarlet sheathings of
garmentry lay upon a black oaken stool, trailing across the floor lank
and hideous, one of the cuffs which had been but recently dyed a darker
hue making a wet sop upon the boards.
All this I had seen many a time before. But that which made me
tremble from head to foot with more and worse than cold, was the little
white figure that danced about his bed--for all the world like a crisped
leaf in late autumn which whirls and turns, skipping this way and
spinning that in the wanton breezes. It was the Little Playmate. But I
could not form a word wherewith to call her. My tongue seemed dried
to the roots.
She had taken the red eye-mask which came across my father's face
when he did his greater duties and tied it about her head. Her great,
innocent, childish eyes looked elfishly through the black socket holes,
sparkling with a fairy merriment, and her tangled floss of sunny hair
escaped from the string at the back and fell tumultuously upon her

shoulders.
And even as I looked, standing silent and trembling, with a little
balancing step she danced up to the Red Axe itself where it stood
angled against the block, and seizing it by the handle high up near the
head she staggered towards the bed with it.
Then came my words back to my mouth with a rush.
"For the Holy Virgin's sake, little maid, put the Red Axe down!" I cried,
whisperingly. "You know not what you do!"
Then even as I spoke I saw that my father had drawn himself up in bed,
and that he too was staring at the strange, elfish figure. Gottfried
Gottfried, as I remember him in these days, was a tall, dark, heavily
browed man, with a shock of bushy blue-black hair, of late silvering at
the temples--grave, sombre, quiet in all his actions.
But what was my surprise as the little maid came nearer to the bed with
her pretty dancing movement, carrying the axe much as if it had been
an over-heavy babe, to see the Duke's Justicer suddenly skip over the
far side of the bedstead and stand with his red cloak about him,
watching her.
CHAPTER IV
THE PRINCESS HELENE
"What devil's work is this?" he said, frowning at her severely.
And I confess that I trembled, but not so the little maid.
"Do not