“Listen, and I will counsel you, Duke Casimir!  Care you not though the east wind brought Bishop Peters whirling over the Mark, as many as the January snowflakes that come to us from Muscovy.  I, Gottfried Gottfried, tell you what to do.  In every parish of the Mark there is a parson.  Every clerk of them hath a Presbytery, in which he dwells with those that are abiding with him.  Bid you the soldiers that are obedient to you to carry all the corpses of the dead to the Presbytery, and leave them there under guard.  Then let us see whether or no the parsons will give them burial.  What think you of the counsel, Duke Casimir?”

I could hear the Duke rise and pace across the floor to where my father sat on his bed.  And by the silence I knew that the two men were shaking hands.

“Red Axe,” said the Duke, much moved, “of a truth you are a great man—­none like you in the Dukedom.  These beard-wagging, chain-jingling gentry I have small notion of.  And would you but accept it, I would give you to-morrow the collar of gold which befits the Chancellor of the Mark.  None deserves to wear it so well as thou.”

My father laughed a low scornful laugh.

“Because I bid you teach the parsons their own religion, am I to be made Chancellor of the Mark?  A great gray wolf out of the forest were as suitable a Chancellor of the Mark as Gottfried Gottfried, the fourteenth hereditary Red Axe of Thorn!”

Then I heard him reach over his bed for something.  I stole out of the hole in the wall and crouched down till my eyes rested at the great latchet hole through which the tang of leather to lift the bolt ordinarily goes.  I could see my father sitting on his bed and the Red Axe lying across his knees.  He took it in hand, dangling it like an infant.  He caressed it as he spoke, and ran his thumb lovingly along the shining edge.

“Ah,” he said, “my beauty, ’tis you and not your master they should make High Chancellor of this realm.  ’Tis you that have held the power of life and death, and laid the spirit of rebellion any time these twenty years.  And well indeed wouldst thou look with a red robe about thee” (here he reached for a cloak that swung from the rafters contiguous to his hand); “a noble presence wouldst thou be in a tun-bellied robe and a collar of shining gold!  Bravely, great State’s Chancellor of the Wolfmark, wouldst thou then lead the processions and preside at the diets of justice—­as indeed thou dost mostly as it is.”

And he made the Red Axe bow like a puppet in his hands as he swept the cloak of red out behind the handle.

I could see Duke Casimir now.  He had drawn up a stool and sat opposite my father, with his elbows on his knees.  One hand was stroking the side of his head, and his haughtiness had all fallen from him like a forgotten overmantle.  He looked another man from the cruel, relentless Prince who had ridden so sternly at the head of his men-at-arms and looked so callously on at the death of men and the yet more bitter agony of women.