Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy Part 14

I afterward learned that there was but one entrance to the castle from the town. It was known as the Postern, though it had a portcullis and a drawbridge spanning the moat. To the Postern the duke took his way, as we could see at intervals by looking down cross streets. Yolanda did not follow him. She held her course down a narrow street flanked by overhanging eaves. Looking down this street, I could see that it terminated abruptly at the castle wall, which rose dark and unbroken sixty feet above the ground.

At the end of this street a stone footbridge spanned the moat, leading to a strip of ground perhaps one hundred yards broad and two hundred long that lay between the moat and the castle wall. At either end of this strip the moat again turned to the castle. The Cologne River joined the moat at the north end of this tract of ground and flowed on by the castle wall to the Somme. In a grove of trees stood a large two-story house of time-darkened stone, built against the castle wall. One could not leave the strip of ground save by the stone footbridge, unless by swimming the moat or scaling the walls.

When we reached the footbridge, Yolanda and Twonette, without a word of farewell, urged their horses across, and, springing from their saddles, hurriedly entered the house. Max and I turned our horses' heads, and, as we were leaving the footbridge, saw the duke's cavalcade enter the Postern, which was perhaps three hundred yards back and north of the strip on which stood the House under the Wall.

To reach the Postern in the castle wall from the footbridge one must go well up into the town and cross the great bridge that spans the Cologne; then back along the north bank of the river by the street that leads to the Postern. From the House under the Wall to the Postern, by way of the Cologne bridge, is a half-hour's walk, though in a direct line, as the crow flies, it may be less than three hundred yards. Neither Max nor I knew whether our journey had been a success or a failure.

We rode leisurely back to the centre of the town, and asked a carter to direct us to Marcus Grote's inn, The Mitre. We soon found it, and gave mine host the letter that we bore from Castleman. Although the hour of nine in the morning had not yet struck, Max and I eagerly sought our beds, and did not rise till late in the afternoon. The next morning we dismissed our squires, fearing they might talk. We paid the men, gave them each a horse, and saw them well on their road back to Switzerland.

They were Swiss lads, and could not take themselves out of Burgundy fast enough to keep pace with their desires.

Notwithstanding Castleman's admonition, Max determined to remain in Peronne; not for the sake of Mary the princess, but for the smile of Yolanda the burgher girl. I well knew that opposition would avail nothing, and was quite willing to be led by the unseen hand of fate.

The evening of the second day after our arrival I walked out at dusk and by accident met my friend, the Sieur d'Hymbercourt. He it was to whom my letters concerning Max had been written, and who had been responsible for the offer of Mary's hand. He recognized me before I could avoid him, so I offered my hand and he gave me kindly welcome.

"By what good fortune are you here, Sir Karl?" he asked.

"I cannot tell," I answered, "whether it be good or evil fortune that brings me. I deem it right to tell you that I am here with my young pupil, the Count of Hapsburg."

Hymbercourt whistled his astonishment.

"We are out to see a little of the world, and I need not tell you how important it is that we remain unknown while in Burgundy. I bear my own name; the young count has a.s.sumed the name of his mother's family and wishes to be known as Sir Maximilian du Guelph."

"I shall not mention your presence even to my wife," he replied. "I advise you not to remain in Burgundy. The duke takes it for granted that Styria will aid the Swiss, or at least will sympathize with them in this brewing war, and I should fear for your safety were he to discover you."

"I understand the duke recently arrived in Peronne?" I asked.

"Yes," answered Hymbercourt, "we all came yesterday morning."

"How is the fair princess? Did she come with you?" I asked, fearing to hear his reply.

"She is well, and more beautiful than ever before," he answered. "She did not come with us from Ghent; she has been here at the castle with her stepmother, the d.u.c.h.ess Margaret. They have lived here during the last two or three years. The princess met her father just inside the Postern, lovely and fresh as a dew-dipped rose."

"She met her father just inside the Postern?" I asked, slowly dropping my words in astonishment. "She was in the castle yard when her father entered,--and at the Postern?"

"Yes, she took his hand and sprang to a seat behind him," answered Hymbercourt.

"She met him inside the Postern, say you?" I repeated musingly.

"What is there amazing about so small an act?" asked Hymbercourt. "Is it not natural that she should greet her father whom she has not seen for a year?"

"Indeed, yes," I replied stumblingly, "but the weather is very hot, and--and I was thinking how much I should have enjoyed witnessing the meeting. She doubtless was dressed in gala attire for so rare an occasion?" I asked, wis.h.i.+ng to talk upon the subject that touched me so nearly. Yolanda was in short skirts, stained and travel-worn, when she left us.

"Indeed she was," answered Hymbercourt. "I can easily describe her dress. She loves woman's finery, and I must confess that I too love it.

She wore a hawking costume; a cap of crimson--I think it was velvet--with little knots on it and gems scattered here and there. A heron's plume clasped with a diamond brooch adorned the cap. Her hair hung over her shoulders. It is very dark and falls in a great bush of fluffy curls. When her headgear is off, her hair looks like a black corona. She is wonderfully beautiful, wonderfully beautiful. Her gown was of red stuff. Perhaps it was of velvet like the cap. It was. .h.i.tched up with a cord and girdle, with ta.s.sels of gold lace and--and--Sir Karl, you are not listening."

"I am listening," I replied. "I am greatly interested. Her gown--she wore a gown--she wore a gown--"

"Yes, of course she wore a gown," laughingly retorted Hymbercourt. "Your lagging attention is what I deserve, Sir Karl, for trying in my lame fas.h.i.+on to describe a woman's gear to a man who is half priest, half warrior. I do not wonder that you did not follow me."

I had heard him, but there was another question dinning in my ears so loudly that it drowned all other sounds--"Who is Yolanda?"

Yolanda was entering the door of the House under the Wall less than five minutes before I saw the duke pa.s.s through the Postern. Marcus Grote had told me there were but two openings to the castle, the Postern and the great gate on the other side of the castle by the donjon keep. To reach the great gate one must pa.s.s out by Cambrai or the Somme Gate and go around the city walls--an hour's journey.

With an air of carelessness I asked Hymbercourt concerning the various entrances to the castle. He confirmed what Grote had said. Considering all the facts, I was forced to this conclusion: If the Princess Mary had met the duke at the Postern, Yolanda was not the Princess Mary.

The next day I reconnoitred the premises, and again reached the conclusion that Yolanda could not have met the duke inside the Postern unless she were a witch with wings that could fly thither over the castle walls; ergo, she was not the princess. With equal certainty she was not a burgher girl.

In seeking an ident.i.ty that would fit her I groped among many absurd propositions. Yolanda might be the duke's ward, or she might be his daughter, though not bearing his name. My brain was in a whirl. If she were the princess, I wished to remain in Peronne to pursue the small advantage Max had a.s.suredly gained in winning her favor. The French marriage might miscarry. But if she were not the princess, I could not get my Prince Max away from her dangerous neighborhood too quickly. I could not, of course, say to Max, "You shall remain in Peronne," or "You shall leave Peronne at once;" but my influence over him was great, and he trusted my fidelity, my love, and my ability to advise him rightly. I had always given my advice carefully, but, above all, I had given him the only pleasurable moments he had ever known. That, by the way, may have been the greatest good I could have offered him.

When Max was a child, the pleasure of his amus.e.m.e.nts was smothered by officialism. My old Lord Aurbach, though gouty and stiff of joint, was eager to "run" his b.a.l.l.s or his arrows, and old Sir Giles Butch could be caught so easily at tag or blind man's buff that there was no sport for Max in doing it. Everything the boy did was done by the heir of Styria, except on rare occasions when he and I stole away from the castle. Then we were boys together, and then it was I earned his love and confidence.

At such times we used to leave the Hapsburg ancestry to care for itself and dumped Hapsburg dignity into the moat. But the crowning good I had brought to him was this journey into the world. The boy loathed the clinging dignities that made of him, at home, a royal automaton, tricked out in tarnished gold lace, faded velvets, and pompous airs. He often spoke of the pleasures I had given him. One evening at Grote's inn I answered:--

"Nonsense, Max, nonsense," though I was so pleased with his grat.i.tude I could have wept.

"It is not nonsense. You have saved me from becoming a mummy. I see it all, Karl, and shudder to think of the life that might have been mine. I take no pleasure in seeing gouty old dependents bowing, kneeling, and smirking before me. Of course, these things are my prerogative, and a man born to them may not forego what is due to his birth even though it irks him. But such an existence--I will not call it living--saps the juice of life. Even dear old mother is compelled to suppress her love for me. Often she has pressed me to her breast only to thrust me away at the approach of footsteps. By the way, Karl," continued Max, while preparing for bed, "Yolanda one day at Basel jestingly called me 'Little Max.'"

"The devil she did," I exclaimed, unable to restrain my words.

"Yes," answered Max, "and when in surprise I told her that it was my mother's love-name for me, she laughed saucily, 'Yes, I know it is.'"

"The dev-- Max, you can't mean what you say?" I cried, in an ecstasy of delight over the news he was telling me.

"Indeed I do," he returned. "I told her I loved the name as a sweet reminder of my mother."

"What did she say?" I asked.

"She seemed pleased and flashed her eyes on me--you know the way she has--and said: 'I, too, like the name. It fits you so well--by contraries.' Where could she have learned it, and how could she have known it was my mother's love-name for me?"

"I cannot tell," I answered.

So! here was a small fact suddenly grown big, since, despite all evidence to the contrary, it brought me back to my old belief that this fair, laughing Yolanda was none other than the great Princess of Burgundy. I was sure that she had gained all her information concerning Max from my letters to Hymbercourt.

It racks a man's brain to play shuttlec.o.c.k with it in that fas.h.i.+on.

While I lay in bed trying to sleep, I thought of the meeting between the duke and the princess at the Postern, and back again flew my mind to the conviction that Yolanda was not, and could not possibly be, the Princess Mary. For days I had been able to think on no other subject. One moment she was Yolanda; the next she was the princess; and the next I did not know who she was. Surely the riddle would drive me mad. The fate of nations--but, infinitely more important to me, the fate of Max--depended upon its solution.

Castleman had told us to remain at the inn until his return, and had exacted from Max, as you will remember, a promise not to visit the House under the Wall, which we had learned was the home of our burgher friend.

We therefore spent our days and evenings in Grote's garden near the banks of the river Cologne.

One afternoon, while we were sitting at a table sipping wine under the shade of a tree near the river bank, Max said:--

"I have enjoyed every day of our journey, Karl. I have learned the great lesson of life, and am now ready to go back to Styria and take up my burden. We must see our friends and say farewell to them. Then--"

"You forget the object of our journey to Burgundy," I answered.

"No, I have not forgotten it," he replied. "I had abandoned it even before I heard of the impending French marriage."

"Not with my consent, Max," I answered almost fiercely. "The princess is not yet married, and no one can foresee the outcome of these present complications into which the duke is plunging. We could not have reached Burgundy at a more auspicious time. G.o.d's hand seems to have been in our venture. If evil befall the duke, there will be an open gate for you, Max,--a gate opened by fate."