hin cried loudly, and as the
same voice reminded him of the victories won in tournaments and sword
combats, of the open hand with which, since he had been the rich
Eysvogel's son-in-law, he had lent and given money to his brothers, and
especially of the manly resolve to provide for his wife and children as a
soldier in the service of some prince, another, lower, yet insistent,
recalled other things. It referred to the time when, with his brothers,
he had attacked a train of freight waggons and not cut down their armed
escort alone. The curse of a broad-shouldered Nordlinger carrier, whose
breast he had pierced with a lance though he cried out that he was a
father and had a wife and child to support, the shriek of the pretty boy
with curling brown hair who clung to the bridle of his steed as he rode
against the father, and whose arm he had cut off, still seemed to ring in
his ears. He also remembered the time when, after a rich capture on the
highway which had filled his purse, he had ridden to Nuremberg in
magnificent new clothes at the carnival season in order, by his brothers'
counsel, to win a wealthy bride. Fortune and the saints had permitted him
to find a woman to satisfy both his avarice and his heart, yet he had
neither kept faith with her nor even showed her proper consideration.
But, strangely enough, the warning voice reproached him still more
sharply for having, in the presence of others, accused and disparaged his
brother-in-law's betrothed bride, whose guilt he believed proved. Again
he felt how ignoble and unworthy of a knight his conduct had been. Why
had he pursued this course? Merely--he admitted it now--to harm Wolff,
the monitor and niggard whom he hated; perhaps also because he secretly
told himself that, if Wolff formed a happy marriage, he and his children,
not Siebenburg's twin boys, would obtain the larger share of the Eysvogel
property.

This greed of gain, which had brought him to Nuremberg to seek a wife,
was probably latent in his blood, though his reckless accumulation of
debts seemed to contradict it. Yesterday, at the Duke of Pomerania's, it
had again led him into that wild, mad dice-throwing.

Seitz Siebenburg was no calm thinker. All these thoughts passed singly in
swift flashes through his excited brain. Like the steady monotone of the
bass accompanying the rise and fall of the air, he constantly heard the
assurance that it would be a pity if his splendid twins should resemble
him.