The Dove in the Eagle's Nest Part 18

"The Kaisar," said Wildschloss, "is not the man to let a knight's fee slip between his fingers. The king would have kept off their grip, and reserved you for knighthood from his own sword under the banner of the empire; but there is no help for it now, and you must make your va.s.sals send in their dues."

"My va.s.sals?" said Ebbo; "what could they send?"

"The aid customary on the knighthood of the heir."

"But there is-there is nothing!" said Friedel. "They can scarce pay meal and poultry enough for our daily fare; and if we were to flay them alive, we should not get sixty groschen from the whole."

"True enough! Knighthood must wait till we win it," said Ebbo, gloomily.

"Nay, it is accepted," said Wildschloss. "The Kaisar loves his iron chest too well to let you go back. You must be ready with your round sum to the chancellor, and your spur-money and your fee to the heralds, and largess to the crowd."

"Mother, the dowry," said Ebbo.

"At your service, my son," said Christina, anxious to chase the cloud from his brow.

But it was a deep haul, for the avaricious Friedrich IV. made exorbitant charges for the knighting his young n.o.bles; and Ebbo soon saw that the improvements at home must suffer for the honours that would have been so much better won than bought.

"If your va.s.sals cannot aid, yet may not your kinsman-?" began Wildschloss.

"No!" interrupted Ebbo, lashed up to hot indignation. "No, sir! Rather will my mother, brother, and I ride back this very night to unfettered liberty on our mountain, without obligation to any living man."

"Less hotly, Sir Baron," said Master Gottfried, gravely. "You broke in on your n.o.ble G.o.dfather, and you had not heard me speak. You and your brother are the old man's only heirs, nor do ye incur any obligation that need fret you by forestalling what would be your just right. I will see my nephews as well equipped as any young baron of them."

The mother looked anxiously at Ebbo. He bent his head with rising colour, and said, "Thanks, kind uncle. From YOU I have learnt to look on goodness as fatherly."

"Only," added Friedel, "if the Baron's station renders knighthood fitting for him, surely I might remain his esquire."

"Never, Friedel!" cried his brother. "Without thee, nothing."

"Well said, Freiherr," said Master Sorel; "what becomes the one becomes the other. I would not have thee left out, my Friedel, since I cannot leave thee the mysteries of my craft."

"To-morrow!" said Friedel, gravely. "Then must the vigil be kept to- night."

"The boy thinks these are the days of Roland and Karl the Great," said Wildschloss. "He would fain watch his arms in the moonlight in the Dome Kirk! Alas! no, my Friedel! Knighthood in these days smacks more of bezants than of deeds of prowess."

"Unbearable fellow!" cried Ebbo, when he had latched the door of the room he shared with his brother. "First, holding up my inexperience to scorn! As though the Kaisar knew not better than he what befits me! Then trying to buy my silence and my mother's grat.i.tude with his hateful advance of gold. As if I did not loathe him enough without! If I pay my homage, and sign the League to-morrow, it will be purely that he may not plume himself on our holding our own by sufferance, in deference to him."

"You will sign it-you will do homage!" exclaimed Friedel. "How rejoiced the mother will be."

"I had rather depend at once-if depend I must-on yonder dignified Kaisar and that n.o.ble king than on our meddling kinsman," said Ebbo. "I shall be his equal now! Ay, and no more cla.s.sed with the court Junkern I was with to-day. The dullards! No one reasonable thing know they but the chase. One had been at Florence; and when I asked him of the Baptistery and rare Giotto of whom my uncle told us, he asked if he were a knight of the Medici. All he knew was that there were ortolans at Ser Lorenzo's table; and he and the rest of them talked over wines as many and as hard to call as the roll of AEneas's comrades; and when each one must drink to her he loved best, and I said I loved none like my sweet mother, they gibed me for a simple dutiful mountaineer. Yea, and when the servants brought a bowl, I thought it was a wholesome draught of spring water after all their hot wines and fripperies. Pah!"

"The rose-water, Ebbo! No wonder they laughed! Why, the bowls for our fingers came round at the banquet here."

"Ah! thou hast eyes for their finikin manners! Yet what know they of what we used to long for in polished life! Not one but vowed he abhorred books, and cursed Dr. Faustus for multiplying them. I may not know the taste of a stew, nor the fit of a glove, as they do, but I trust I bear a less empty brain. And the young Netherlanders that came with the Archduke were worst of all. They got together and gabbled French, and treated the German Junkern with the very same sauce with which they had served me. The Archduke laughed with them, and when the Provost addressed him, made as if he understood not, till his father heard, and thundered out, 'How now, Philip! Deaf on thy German ear? I tell thee, Herr Probst, he knows his own tongue as well as thou or I, and thou shalt hear him speak as becomes the son of an Austrian hunter.' That Romish king is a knight of knights, Friedel. I could follow him to the world's end. I wonder whether he will ever come to climb the Red Eyrie."

"It does not seem the world's end when one is there," said Friedel, with strange yearnings in his breast.

"Even the Dom steeple never rose to its full height," he added, standing in the window, and gazing pensively into the summer sky. "Oh, Ebbo! this knighthood has come very suddenly after our many dreams; and, even though its outward tokens be lowered, it is still a holy, awful thing."

Nurtured in mountain solitude, on romance transmitted through the pure medium of his mother's mind, and his spirit untainted by contact with the world, Friedmund von Adlerstein looked on chivalry with the temper of a Percival or Galahad, and regarded it with a sacred awe. Eberhard, though treating it more as a matter of business, was like enough to his brother to enter into the force of the vows they were about to make; and if the young Barons of Adlerstein did not perform the night-watch over their armour, yet they kept a vigil that impressed their own minds as deeply, and in early morn they went to confession and ma.s.s ere the gay parts of the city were astir.

"Sweet niece," said Master Sorel, as he saw the brothers' grave, earnest looks, "thou hast done well by these youths; yet I doubt me at times whether they be not too much lifted out of this veritable world of ours."

"Ah, fair uncle, were they not above it, how could they face its temptations?"

"True, my child; but how will it be when they find how lightly others treat what to them is so solemn?"

"There must be temptations for them, above all for Ebbo," said Christina, "but still, when I remember how my heart sank when their grandmother tried to bring them up to love crime as sport and glory, I cannot but trust that the good work will be wrought out, and my dream fulfilled, that they may be lights on earth and stars in heaven. Even this matter of homage, that seemed so hard to my Ebbo, has now been made easy to him by his veneration for the Emperor."

It was even so. If the sense that he was the last veritable FREE lord of Adlerstein rushed over Ebbo, he was, on the other hand, overmastered by the kingliness of Friedrich and Maximilian, and was aware that this submission, while depriving him of little or no actual power, brought him into relations with the civilized world, and opened to him paths of true honour. So the ceremonies were gone through, his oath of allegiance was made, invest.i.ture was granted to him by the delivery of a sword, and both he and Friedel were dubbed knights. Then they shared another banquet, where, as away from the Junkern and among elder men, Ebbo was happier than the day before. Some of the knights seemed to him as rude and ignorant as the Schneiderlein, but no one talked to him nor observed his manners, and he could listen to conversation on war and policy such as interested him far more than the subjects affected by youths a little older than himself. Their lonely life and training had rendered the minds of the brothers as much in advance of their fellows as they were behind them in knowledge of the world.

The cra.s.s obtuseness of most of the n.o.bility made it a relief to return to the usual habits of the Sorel household when the court had left Ulm. Friedmund, anxious to prove that his new honours were not to alter his home demeanour, was drawing on a block of wood from a tinted pen-and-ink sketch; Ebbo was deeply engaged with a newly- acquired copy of Virgil; and their mother was embroidering some draperies for the long-neglected castle chapel,-all sitting, as Master Gottfried loved to have them, in his studio, whence he had a few moments before been called away, when, as the door slowly opened, a voice was heard that made both lads start and rise.

"Yea, truly, Herr Guildmaster, I would see these masterpieces. Ha! What have you here for masterpieces? Our two new double-ganger knights?" And Maximilian entered in a simple riding-dress, attended by Master Gottfried, and by Sir Kasimir of Adlerstein Wildschloss.

Christina would fain have slipped out unperceived, but the king was already removing his cap from his fair curling locks, and bending his head as he said, "The Frau Freiherrinn von Adlerstein? Fair lady, I greet you well, and thank you in the Kaisar's name and mine for having bred up for us two true and loyal subjects."

"May they so prove themselves, my liege!" said Christina, bending low.

"And not only loyal-hearted," added Maximilian, smiling, "but ready- brained, which is less frequent among our youth. What is thy book, young knight? Virgilius Maro? Dost thou read the Latin?" he added, in that tongue.

"Not as well as we wish, your kingly highness," readily answered Ebbo, in Latin, "having learnt solely of our mother till we came hither."

"Never fear for that, my young blade," laughed the king. "Knowst not that the wiseacres thought me too dull for teaching till I was past ten years? And what is thy double about? Drawing on wood? How now! An able draughtsman, my young knight?"

"My nephew Sir Friedmund is good to the old man," said Gottfried, himself almost regretting the lad's avocation. "My eyes are failing me, and he is aiding me with the graving of this border. He has the knack that no teaching will impart to any of my present journeymen."

"Born, not made," quoth Maximilian. "Nay," as Friedel coloured deeper at the sense that Ebbo was ashamed of him, "no blushes, my boy; it is a rare gift. I can make a hundred knights any day, but the Almighty alone can make a genius. It was this very matter of graving that led me hither."

For Maximilian had a pa.s.sion for composition, and chiefly for autobiography, and his head was full of that curious performance, Der Weisse Konig, which occupied many of the leisure moments of his life, being dictated to his former writing-master, Marcus Sauerwein. He had already designed the portrayal of his father as the old white king, and himself as the young white king, in a series of woodcuts ill.u.s.trating the narrative which culminated in the one romance of his life, his brief happy marriage with Mary of Burgundy; and he continued eagerly to talk to Master Gottfried about the mystery of graving, and the various scenes in which he wished to depict himself learning languages from native speakers-Czech from a peasant with a basket of eggs, English from the exiles at the Burgundian court, who had also taught him the use of the longbow, building from architects and masons, painting from artists, and, more imaginatively, astrology from a wonderful flaming sphere in the sky, and the black art from a witch inspired by a long-tailed demon perched on her shoulder. No doubt "the young white king" made an exceedingly prominent figure in the discourse, but it was so quaint and so brilliant that it did not need the charm of royal condescension to entrance the young knights, who stood silent auditors. Ebbo at least was convinced that no species of knowledge or skill was viewed by his kaisarly kingship as beneath his dignity; but still he feared Friedel's being seized upon to be as prime ill.u.s.trator to the royal autobiography-a lot to which, with all his devotion to Maximilian, he could hardly have consigned his brother, in the certainty that the jeers of the ruder n.o.bles would pursue the craftsman baron.

However, for the present, Maximilian was keen enough to see that the boy's mechanical skill was not as yet equal to his genius; so he only encouraged him to practise, adding that he heard there was a rare lad, one Durer, at Nuremburg, whose productions were already wonderful. "And what is this?" he asked; "what is the daintily- carved group I see yonder?"

"Your highness means, 'The Dove in the Eagle's Nest,'" said Kasimir.

"It is the work of my young kinsmen, and their appropriate device."

"As well chosen as carved," said Maximilian, examining it. "Well is it that a city dove should now and then find her way to the eyrie. Some of my n.o.bles would cut my throat for the heresy, but I am safe here, eh, Sir Kasimir? Fare ye well, ye dove-trained eaglets. We will know one another better when we bear the cross against the infidel."

The brothers kissed his hand, and he descended the steps from the hall door. Ere he had gone far, he turned round upon Sir Kasimir with a merry smile

"A very white and tender dove indeed, and one who might easily nestle in another eyrie, methinks."

"Deems your kingly highness that consent could be won?" asked Wildschloss "From the Kaisar? Pfui, man, thou knowst as well as I do the golden key to his consent. So thou wouldst risk thy luck again! Thou hast no male heir."

"And I would fain give my child a mother who would deal well with her. Nay, to say sooth, that gentle, innocent face has dwelt with me for many years. But for my pre-contract, I had striven long ago to win her, and had been a happier man, mayhap. And, now I have seen what she has made of her sons, I feel I could scarce find her match among our n.o.bility."

"Nor elsewhere," said the king; "and I honour thee for not being so besotted in our German haughtiness as not to see that it is our free cities that make refined and discreet dames. I give you good speed, Adlerstein; but, if I read aright the brow of one at least of these young fellows, thou wilt scarce have a willing or obedient stepson.'