Otto
Of the Silver Hand
by Howard Pyle
FOREWORD.
Between the far away past history of the world, and that which
lies near to us; in the time when the wisdom of the ancient
times was dead and had passed away, and our own days of light
had not yet come, there lay a great black gulf in human history,
a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of
wickedness.
That time we call the dark or middle ages.
Few records remain to us of that dreadful period in our world's
history, and we only know of it through broken and disjointed
fragments that have been handed down to us through the
generations.
Yet, though the world's life then was so wicked and black, there
yet remained a few good men and women here and there (mostly in
peaceful and quiet monasteries, far from the thunder and the
glare of the worlds bloody battle), who knew the right and the
truth and lived according to what they knew; who preserved and
tenderly cared for the truths that the dear Christ taught, and
lived and died for in Palestine so long ago.
This tale that I am about to tell is of a little boy who lived
and suffered in those dark middle ages; of how he saw both the
good and the bad of men, and of how, by gentleness and love and
not by strife and hatred, he came at last to stand above other
men and to be looked up to by all. And should you follow the
story to the end, I hope you may find it a pleasure, as I have
done, to ramble through those dark ancient castles, to lie with
little Otto and Brother John in the high belfry-tower, or to sit
with them in the peaceful quiet of the sunny old monastery
garden, for, of all the story, I love best those early peaceful
years that little Otto spent in the dear old White Cross on the
Hill.
Poor little Otto's life was a stony and a thorny pathway, and it
is well for all of us nowadays that we walk it in fancy and not
in truth.
I.
The Dragon's House.
Up from the gray rocks, rising sheer and bold and bare, stood
the walls and towers of Castle Drachenhausen. A great gate-way,
with a heavy iron-pointed portcullis hanging suspended in the
dim arch above, yawned blackly upon the bascule or falling
drawbridge that spanned a chasm between the blank stone walls
and the roadway that winding down the steep rocky slope to the
little valley just beneath. There in the lap of the hills around
stood the wretched straw-thatched huts of the peasants belonging
to the castle - miserable serfs who, half timid, half fierce,
tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard
soil barely enough to keep body and soul together. Among those
vile hovels played the little children like foxes about their
dens, their wild, fierce eyes peering out from under a mat of
tangled yellow hair.
Beyond these squalid huts lay the rushing, foaming river,
spanned by a high, rude, stone bridge where the road from the
castle crossed it, and beyond the river stretched the great,
black forest, within whose gloomy depths the savage wild beasts
made their lair, and where in winter time the howling wolves
coursed their flying prey across the moonlit snow and under the
net-work of the black shadows from the naked boughs above.
The watchman in the cold, windy bartizan or watch-tower that
clung to the gray walls above the castle gateway, looked from
his narrow window, where the wind piped and hummed, across the
tree-tops that rolled in endless billows of green, over hill and
over valley to the blue and distant slope of the Keiserberg,
where, on the mountain side, glimmered far away the walls of
Castle Trutz-Drachen.
Within the massive stone walls through which the gaping gateway
led, three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that
even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness,
looked down, with row upon row of windows, upon three sides of
the bleak, stone courtyard. Back of and above them clustered a
jumble of other buildings, tower and turret, one high-peaked
roof overtopping another.
The great house in the centre was the Baron's Hall, the part to
the left was called the Roderhausen; between the two stood a
huge square pile, rising dizzily up into the clear air high
above the rest - the great Melchior Tower.
At the top clustered a jumble of buildings hanging high aloft in
the windy space a crooked wooden belfry, a tall, narrow watch-
tower, and a rude wooden house that clung partly to the roof of
the great tower and partly to the walls.
>From the chimney of this crazy hut a thin thread of smoke would
now and then rise into the air, for there were folk living far
up in that empty, airy desert, and oftentimes wild, uncouth
little children were seen playing on the edge of the dizzy
height, or sitting with their bare legs hanging down over the
sheer depths, as they gazed below at what was going on in the
court-yard. There they sat, just as little children in the town
might sit upon their father's door-step; and as the sparrows
might fly around the feet of the little town children, so the
circling flocks of rooks and daws flew around the feet of these
air-born creatures.
It was Schwartz Carl and his wife and little ones who lived far
up there in the Melchior Tower, for it overlooked the top of the
hill behind the castle and so down into the valley upon the
further side. There, day after day, Schwartz Carl kept watch
upon the gray road that ran like a ribbon through the valley,
from the rich town of Gruenstaldt to the rich town of
Staffenburgen, where passed merchant caravans from the one to
the other - for the lord of Drachenhausen was a robber baron.
Dong! Dong! The great alarm bell would suddenly ring out from
the belfry high up upon the Melchior Tower. Dong! Dong! Till the
rooks and daws whirled clamoring and screaming. Dong! Dong! Till
the fierce wolf-hounds in the rocky kennels behind the castle
stables howled dismally in answer. Dong! Dong! - Dong! Dong!
Then would follow a great noise and uproar and hurry in the
castle court-yard below; men shouting and calling to one
another, the ringing of armor, and the clatter of horses' hoofs
upon the hard stone. With the creaking and groaning of the
windlass the iron-pointed portcullis would be slowly raised, and
with a clank and rattle and clash of iron chains the drawbridge
would fall crashing. Then over it would thunder horse and man,
clattering away down the winding, stony pathway, until the great
forest would swallow them, and they would be gone.
Then for a while peace would fall upon the castle courtyard, the
cock would crow, the cook would scold a lazy maid, and Gretchen,
leaning out of a window, would sing a snatch of a song, just as
though it were a peaceful farm-house, instead of a den of
robbers.
Maybe it would be evening before the men would return once more.
Perhaps one would have a bloody cloth bound about his head,
perhaps one would carry his arm in a sling; perhaps one - maybe
more than one - would be left behind, never to return again, and
soon forgotten by all excepting some poor woman who would weep
silently in the loneliness of her daily work.
Nearly always the adventurers would bring back with them pack-
horses laden with bales of goods. Sometimes, besides these, they
would return with a poor soul, his hands tied behind his back
and his feet beneath the horse's body, his fur cloak and his
flat cap wofully awry. A while he would disappear in some gloomy
cell of the dungeon-keep, until an envoy would come from the
town with a fat purse, when his ransom would be paid, the
dungeon would disgorge him, and he would be allowed to go upon
his way again.
One man always rode beside Baron Conrad in his expeditions and
adventures a short, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, with
sinewy arms so long that when he stood his hands hung nearly to
his knees.
His coarse, close-clipped hair came so low upon his brow that
only a strip of forehead showed between it and his bushy, black
eyebrows. One eye was blind; the other twinkled and gleamed like
a spark under the penthouse of his brows. Many folk said that
the one-eyed Hans had drunk beer with the Hill-man, who had
given him the strength of ten, for he could bend an iron spit
like a hazel twig, and could lift a barrel of wine from the
floor to his head as easily as though it were a basket of eggs.
As for the one-eyed Hans he never said that he had not drunk
beer with the Hill-man, for he liked the credit that such
reports gave him with the other folk. And so, like a half savage
mastiff, faithful to death to his master, but to him alone, he
went his sullen way and lived his sullen life within the castle
walls, half respected, half feared by the other inmates, for it
was dangerous trifling with the one-eyed Hans.
