Joan of the Sword Hand Part 27

Joan looked at her full in the eyes for the s.p.a.ce of a breath. Then suddenly she held out her hand and answered like her father's daughter.

"Nay," she said, "I only marvel that you did not strike me to the heart, because of your son's loss and my father's sin!"

CHAPTER XXV

BORNE ON THE GREAT WAVE

It chanced that in the chamber from which Werner von Orseln had come so swiftly at the cry of the Wordless Man, Boris and Jorian, after sleeping through the disturbances above them and the first burst of the storm, were waked by the blowing open of the lattice as the wind reached its height. Jorian lay still on his pallet and slily kicked Boris, hoping that he would rise and take upon him the task of shutting it.

Then to Boris, struggling upward to the surface of the ocean of sleep, came the same charitable thought with regard to Jorian. So, both kicking out at the same time, their feet encountered with clash of iron footgear, and then with surly snarls they hent them on their feet, abusing each other in voices which could be heard above the humming of the storm without.

It was tall Boris who, having cursed himself empty, first made his way to the window. The lattice hung by one leathern thong. The other had been torn away, and indeed it was a wonder that the whole framework had not been blown bodily into the room. For the tempest pressed against it straight from the north, and the sticky spray from the waves which broke on the shingle drove stingingly into the eyes of the man-at-arms.

Nevertheless he thrust his head out, looked a moment through half-closed eyelids, and then cried, "Jorian, we are surely lost! The sea is breaking in upon us. It has pa.s.sed the beach of shingle out there!"

And seizing Jorian by the arm Boris made his way to the door by which they had entered, and, undoing the bolts, they reached the walled courtyard, where, however, they found themselves in the open air, but sheltered from the utmost violence of the tempest. There was a momentary difficulty here, because neither could find the key of the heavy door in the boundary wall. But Boris, ever fertile in expedient, discovered a ladder under a kind of shed, and setting it against the northern wall he climbed to the top. While he remained under the shelter of the wall his body was comfortably warm; only an occasional veering flaw sent a purl downwards of what he was to meet. But the instant his head was above the copestone, and the ice-cold northerly blast met him like a wall, he fairly gasped, for the furious onslaught of the storm seemed to blow every particle of breath clean out of his body.

The spindrift flew smoking past, momentarily white in the constant lightning flashes, and before him, and apparently almost at the foot of the wall, Boris saw a wonderful sight. The sea appeared to be climbing, climbing, climbing upwards over a narrow belt of sand and shingle which separated the scarcely fretted Haff from the tumbling milk of the outer Baltic.

In another moment Jorian was beside him, crouching on the top of the wall to save himself from being carried away. And there, in the steamy smother of the sea, backed by the blue electric flame of the lightning, they saw the slant masts of a vessel labouring to beat against the wind.

"Poor souls, they are gone!" said Boris, trying to shield his eyes with his palm, as the black hull disappeared bodily, and the masts seemed to lurch forward into the milky turmoil. "We shall never see her again."

For one moment all was dark as pitch, and the next a dozen flashes of lightning burst every way, as many appearing to rise upwards as could be seen to fall downwards. A black speck poised itself on the crest of a wave. "It is a boat! It can never live!" cried the two men together, and dropping from the top of the wall they ran down to the sh.o.r.e, going as near as they dared to the surf which arched and fell with ponderous roar on the narrow strip of shingle.

Here Jorian and Boris ran this way and that, trying to pierce the blackness of the sky with their spray-blinded eyes, but nothing more, either of the ship or of the boat which had put out from it, did they see. The mountainous roll and ceaseless iterance of the oncoming breakers hid the surface of the sea from their sight, while the sky, changing with each pulse of the lightning from densest black to green shot with violet, told nothing of the men's lives which were being riven from their bodies beneath it.

"Back, Boris, back!" cried Jorian suddenly, as after a succession of smaller waves a gigantic and majestic roller arched along the whole seaward front, stood for a moment black and imminent above them, and then fell like a whole mountain-range in a snowy avalanche of troubled water which rushed savagely up the beach. The two soldiers, who would have faced unblanched any line of living enemies in the world, fled terror-stricken at that clutching onrush of that sea of milk. The wet sand seemed to catch and hold their feet as they ran, so that they felt in their hearts the terrible sensation of one who flees in dreams from some hideous imagined terror and who finds his powers fail him as his pursuer approaches.

Upward and still upward the wave swept with a soft universal hiss which drowned and dominated the rataplan of the thunder-peals above and the sonorous diapason of the surf around them. It rushed in a creaming smother about their ankles, plucked at their knees, but could rise no higher. Yet so fierce was the back draught, that when the water retreated, dragging the pebbles with it down the shingly sh.o.r.e with the rattle of a million castanets, the two stout captains of Pla.s.senburg were thrown on their faces and lay as dead on the wet and sticky stones, each clutching a double handful of broken sh.e.l.ls and oozy sand which streamed through his numbed fingers.

Boris was the first to rise, and finding Jorian still on his face he caught the collar of his doublet and pulled him with little ceremony up the sloping bank out of tide-reach, throwing him down on the shingly summit with as little tenderness or compunction as if he had been a bag of wet salt.

By this time the morning was advancing and the storm growing somewhat less continuous. Instead of the wind bearing a dead weight upon the face, it came now in furious gusts. Instead of one grand roar, mult.i.tudinous in voice yet uniform in tone, it hooted and piped overhead as if a whole brood of evil spirits were riding headlong down the tempest-track. Instead of coming on in one solid bank of blackness, the clouds were broken into a wrack of wild and fantastic fragments, the inters.p.a.ces of which showed alternately paly green and pearly grey. The thunder retreated growling behind the horizon. The violet lightning grew less continuous, and only occasionally rose and fell in vague distant flickerings towards the north, as if some one were lifting a lantern almost to the sea-line and dropping it again before reaching it.

Looking back from the summit of the mound, Boris saw something dark lying high up on the beach amid a wrack of seaweed and broken timber which marked where the great wave had stopped. Something odd about the shape took his eye.

A moment later he was leaping down again towards the sh.o.r.e, taking his longest strides, and sending the pebbles spraying out in front and on all sides of him. He stooped and found the body of a man, tall, well formed, and of manly figure. He was bareheaded and stripped to his breeches and underwear.

Boris stooped and laid his hand upon his heart. Yes, so much was certain. He was not dead. Whereupon the ex-man-at-arms lifted him as well as he could and dragged him by the elbows out of reach of the waves. Then he went back to Jorian and kicked him in the ribs. The rotund man sat up with an execration.

"Come!" cried Boris, "don't lie there like Reynard the Fox waiting for Kayward the Hare. We want no malingering here. There's a man at death's door down on the shingle. Come and help me to carry him to the house."

It was a heavy task, and Jorian's head spun with the shock of the wave and the weight of their burden long before they reached the point where the boundary wall approached nearest to the house.

"We can never hope to get him up that ladder and down the other side,"

said Boris, shaking his head.

"Even if we had the ladder!" answered Jorian, glad of a chance to grumble; "but, thanks to your stupidity, it is on the other side of the wall."

Without noticing his companion's words, Boris took a handful of small pebbles and threw them up at a lighted window. The head of Werner von Orseln immediately appeared, his grizzled hair blown out like a misty aureole about his temples.

"Come down!" shouted Boris, making a trumpet of his hands to fight the wind withal. "We have found a drowned man on the beach!"

And indeed it seemed literally so, as they carried their burden round the walls to the wicket door and waited. It seemed an interminable time before Werner von Orseln arrived with the dumb man's lantern in his hand.

They carried the body into the great hall, where the d.u.c.h.ess and the old servitor met them. There they laid him on a table. Joan herself lifted the lantern and held it to his face. His fair hair cl.u.s.tered about his head in wet knots and shining twists. The features of his face were white as death and carven like those of a statue. But at the sight the heart of the d.u.c.h.ess leaped wildly within her.

"Conrad!" she cried--that word and no more. And the lantern fell to the floor from her nerveless hand.

There was no doubt in her mind. She could make no mistake. The regular features, the pillar-like neck, the ma.s.sive shoulders, the strong clean-cut mouth, the broad white brow--and--yes, the slight tonsure of the priest. It was the White Knight of the Courtland lists, the n.o.ble Prince of the summer parlour, the red-robed prelate of her marriage-day, Conrad of Courtland, Prince and Cardinal, but to her--"_he_"--the only "he."

CHAPTER XXVI

THE GIRL BENEATH THE LAMP

When Conrad, Cardinal-designate of the Holy Roman Church and Archbishop of Courtland, opened his eyes, it seemed to him that he had pa.s.sed through warring waters into the serenity of the Life Beyond. His hand, on which still glittered his episcopal ring, lay on a counterpane of faded rose silk, soft as down. Did he dream that another hand had been holding it, that gentlest fingers had rested caressingly on his brow?

A girl, sweet and stately, sat by his bedside. By the door, to which alone he could raise his eyes, stood a tall gaunt man, clad in grey from head to foot, his hands clasped in front of him, and his chin sunk upon his breast.

The Prince-Bishop's eyes rested languidly on the girl's face, on which fell the light of a shaded silver lamp. There was a book in her lap, written upon sheets of thin parchment, bound in gold-embossed leather.

But she did not read it. Instead she breathed softly and regularly. She was asleep, with her hand on the coverlet of rosy silk.

Strange fancies pa.s.sed through the humming brain of the rescued man--as it had been, hunting each other across a stage--visions of perilous endeavour, of fights with wild beasts in shut-in places from which there was no escape, of brutal fisticuffs with savage men. All these again merged into the sense of falling from immense heights only to find that the air upheld him and that, instead of breaking himself to pieces at the bottom, he alighted soft as thistledown on couches of flowers.

Strange rich heady scents seemed to rise about him like something palpable. His brain wavered behind his brow like a summer landscape when the sun is hot after a shower. Perfumes, strange and haunting, dwelt in his nostrils. The scent, at once sour and sweet, of bee-hives at night, the richness of honey in the comb, the delicacy of wet banks of violets, full-odoured musk, and the luxury of sun-warmed afternoon beanfields dreamily sweet--these made his very soul swoon within him. Then followed odours of rose gardens, of cool walks drenched in shadow and random scents blown in at open windows. Yes, he knew now; surely he was again in his own chamber in the summer pavilion of the palace in Courtland. He could hear the cool wash of the Alla under its walls, and with the a.s.surance there came somehow a memory of a slim lad with clear-cut features who brought him a message from--was it his sister Margaret, or Louis his brother? He could not remember which.

Of what had he been dreaming? In the endeavour to recall something he harked back on the terrors of the night in which, of all on board the ship, his soul alone had remained serene. He remembered the fury of the storm, the helpless impotence and blank cowardice of the sailor folk, the desertion of the officers in the only seaworthy boat.

Slowly the drifting mists steadied themselves athwart his brain. The actual recomposed itself out of the shreds of dreams. Conrad found himself in a long low room such as he had seen many times in the houses of well-to-do ritters along the Baltic sh.o.r.es. The beams of the roof-tree above were carven and ancient. Arras went everywhere about the halls. Silver candlesticks, with princely crests graven upon them, stood by his bedhead. After each survey his eyes settled on the sleeping girl.

She was very young and very beautiful. It was--yet it could not be--the d.u.c.h.ess Joan, whom he himself had married to his brother Louis in the cathedral church of his own archiepiscopal city.

Conrad of Courtland had not been trained a priest, yet, as was common at that age, birth and circ.u.mstance had made him early a Prince of the Roman Church. He had been thrust into the hierarchy solely because of his name, for he had succeeded his uncle Adrian in his ecclesiastical posts and emoluments as a legal heir succeeds to an undisputed property.

In due time he received his red hat from a pontiff who distributed these among his favourites (or those whom he thought might aggrandise his temporal power) as freely as a groomsman distributes favours at a wedding.

Nevertheless, Conrad of Courtland had all the warm life and imperious impulses of a young man within his breast. Yet he was no Borgia or Della Rovere, cloaking scarlet sins with scarlet vestments. For with the high dignities of his position and the solemn work which lay to his hand in his northern province there had come the resolve to be not less, but more faithful than those martyrs and confessors of whom he read daily in his Breviary. And while, in Rome herself, vice-proud princes, consorting in the foulest alliance with pagan popes, blasphemed the sanctuary and openly scoffed at religion, this finest and most chivalrous of young northern knights had laid down the weapons of his warfare to take up the crucifix, and now had set out joyfully for Rome to receive his cardinal's hat on his knees as the last and greatest gift of the Vicar of Christ.

He had begun his pilgrimage by express command of the Holy Father, who desired to make the youthful Archbishop his Papal a.s.sessor among the Electors of the Empire. But scarcely was he clear of the Courtland sh.o.r.es when there had come the storm, the shipwreck, the wild struggle among the white and foaming breakers--and then, wondrously emergent, like heaven after purgatory, the quiet of this sheltered room and this sleeping girl, with her white hand lying lax and delicate on the rosy silk.

The book slipped suddenly from her fingers, falling on the polished wood of the floor with a startling sound. The eyes of the gaunt man by the door were lifted from the ground, glittered beadily for a moment, and again dropped as before.