CHAPTER V.

The Minorite had gone.  Biberli had noticed with delight that his master had not sought as usual to detain him.  The iron now seemed to him hot, and he thought it would be worth while to swing the hammer.

The danger in which Heinz stood of being drawn into the monastery made him deeply anxious, and he had already ventured several times to oppose his design.  Life was teaching him to welcome a small evil when it barred the way to a greater one, and his master’s marriage, even with a girl of far lower station than Eva Ortlieb, would have been sure of his favour, if only it would have deterred him from the purpose of leaving the world to which he belonged.

“True,” the servitor began, “in such heat it is easier to walk in the thin cowl than in armour.  The holy Father is right there.  But when it is necessary to be nimble, the knight has his dancing dress also.  Oh, my lord, what a sight it was when you were waltzing with the lovely Jungfrau Eva!  Look at Heinz Schorlin, the brave hero of Marchfield, and the girl with the angel face who is with him!’ said those around me, as I was gazing down from the balcony.  And just think—­I can’t help speaking of it again—­that now respectable people dare to point their fingers at the sisters and join in the base calumny uttered by a scoundrel!”

Then Heinz fulfilled Biberli’s secret longing to be questioned about the Es and the charges against them, and he forged the iron.

Not from thirst, he said, but to ascertain what fruit had grown from the hellish seeds sown by Siebenburg, and probably the still worse ones of the Eysvogel women, he went from tavern to tavern, and there he heard things which made him clench his fists, and, at the Red Ox, roused him to such violent protest that he went out of the tap-room faster than he entered it.

Thereupon, without departing far from the truth, he related what was said about the beautiful Es in Nuremberg.

It was everywhere positively asserted that a knight belonging to the Emperor’s train had been caught at the Ortlieb mansion, either in a nocturnal interview or while climbing into the window.  Both sisters were said to be guilty.  But the sharpest arrows were aimed at Els, the betrothed bride of the son of a patrician family, whom many a girl would have been glad to wed.  That she preferred the foreigner, whether a Bohemian, a Swabian, or even a Swiss, made her error doubly shameful in the eyes of most persons.

Whenever Biberli had investigated the source of these evil tales, he had invariably found it to be Seitz Siebenburg, his retainers, the Eysvogel butler, or some man or maidservant in their employ.

The Vorchtels, who, as he knew from Katterle, would have had the most reason to cherish resentment against the Ortliebs, had no share in these slanders.