Читать книгу The Mercenary: A Tale of The Thirty Years' War - W. J. Eccott - Страница 12

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Strassfurt gave the travellers too poor an entertainment to make them tarry by it. They got a change of horses and pushed on another ten miles, the ground rising steadily as they began to leave the plains and cross the eastern spurs of the Harz mountains. At Aschersleben the air was noticeably purer and laden with the resinous smell of the pines. They made a long rest here for the evening meal and then rode slowly, for the troopers' horses were tired and sore with the weight of men and mail. The lieutenant made his men walk up the steep hills, but it was late when they clattered and rumbled into little Sangershausen and came to a good inn in the shadow of St Ulrich.

The inn was not large but the stables were spacious enough to take in all the troopers as well as their horses: a fortunate thing, since, at the late hour it was, to have made any endeavour to quarter them on the inhabitants would have been a possible cause of tumult. They were already sufficiently near to Thüringen, a Protestant state in the main, for Protestant feeling to be uppermost. Some news of the vengeance executed on Protestant Magdeburg would have preceded the travellers even at this remote town on the borders of the Harz, and Nigel and the lieutenant were both aware of the danger they ran, peaceful as their errand was.

Despite their fatigue they set off again early, covering the ten miles to Frankenhausen with ease. Then the road began to wind in and out among the hills, which lay across their path to Erfurt. The lower slopes of the hills already showed corn ripening; the grass stood knee-deep in the valleys, but above the cornlands on every hillside rose the forest. There were a few woodcutters in the forest, a labourer or two here and there in the fields, and at long intervals tiny hamlets, with perhaps a mill or an indifferent inn. To the travellers one and all, the continuous ascents to high ground, the long forest roads, the descents into new valleys, became monotonous and seemingly interminable. They made no haste. It was no countryside for haste. At the best Nigel expected to reach Erfurt at sundown: for the horses had not thrown off the weariness of yesterday, and they could not expect to get a relay for the coach. At the inn where they made what midday meal the place was capable of they could get nothing but smoked ham, little tough cheeses, rye-bread and beer. Fortunately there was plenty of the latter, and the troopers made no grumbling at its quality. Elspeth Reinheit appeared to be blessed with a good appetite, and found ham and rye-bread and cheese to her liking, for she did well by them. The other and more highly-born girl ate little and drank goat's milk, which has a sustaining quality for those who can put up with its richness. Pastor Rad was no more talkative than he had been the day before, and brooded alike in valley and on hill-top with a morose perseverance that foreboded a wealth of prophetic outburst, whenever he should come to his opportunity and to his flock. He watched Nigel in all his approaches and conversation with Elspeth, which the chance or the tedium of the journey brought about. Nigel was on his side quite natural and unconstrained in his behaviour to the girl, who had done him a vital service which he had in his turn requited. There was no feeling except that of human kindness, which perhaps runs a little thicker as between man and woman, more so still if the man be comely and the woman not less well-seeming than a woman should be.

The longest day of travel comes to an end: and at last they spied the cathedral and the sister church of Saint Severus perched on its eminence. Then the spires of St Martin, St Michael, St Laurence, and later on the walls of Erfurt, rose to view. There were gates to pass, two waterways to cross by little bridges, which let one see a wilderness of little streets, and then they drew rein at a demure hostelry in the Prediger Strasse, well thought of by the Protestant community of Erfurt.

Nigel and the lieutenant having seen their charges safely housed, rode on with their escort, and readily found quarters for them with the soldiers of the garrison; for Erfurt, if it showed no active partisanship at this time, was passively more for the Emperor than for the cause of Gustavus. Originally one of the free cities of the Hanseatic League, it had become annexed by some threads of service to the Electorate of Mainz, the Elector being the Archbishop, and so able to exercise influence, if not precisely dominion, by the spiritual arm as well as by his considerable secular forces. Despite Luther, Erfurt was still to be reckoned as a Catholic city, and not many months after this very day Gustavus treated it accordingly in the swift foray that followed his victory of Breitenfeld.

The lieutenant being by habit a good companion and a great man at a bottle, where he could find both company and bottle, having once sat down with the officers of the garrison, was in no mood to leave them. Nigel Charteris, on the other hand, like many of his fellow-countrymen, was prone to content himself with his own company rather than make himself profoundly uncomfortable for the sake of being sociable. Wine, Woman, and Song, as the triune object of German idolatry, especially in garrisons, camps, and universities, did not evoke any enthusiasm in him.

He drank wine for good cheer. Song he could bear rather than love, so it had a lilt in it. As for woman, as she followed the camp, or in the character of the helpless quarry of the licentious chase of officers and soldiers alike, or again as the fat helpmeet of the German burgher, redundant with all the virtues but lacking equally all the graces, Nigel Charteris paid her no heed. His gorge rose from one cause or another at all three. Through all the coarse scenes of camp life, the brutalities of the sack of cities, he had preserved with religious fervour the memory of his mother, and of the maidens of gentle quality whom he had known in his own land, tall, straight-limbed women with broad foreheads and blue-grey or dark-brown eyes, looking boldly out upon a world that dared not asperse them.

In Ottilie von Thüringen he had recognised at a glance one of their peers, with less of their frankness, with more of their pride of race, a woman of rare beauty, mysterious, tangible yet intangible. For the first time in his prime of manhood did he feel troubled in spirit by the consciousness that something in him strove towards the infinite that is the spirit of woman.

But whether it was this, or the consciousness that of late he had been remiss in his devotions, he stole out beneath the intense blue of a starlit sky towards the cathedral, in the precincts of which he trusted to find a priest to hear his confession.

The builders in their desire to set their holy city on a little hill, and the only hill having a steep declivity to more mundane levels, had constructed a series of under-buildings, called cavaten, till they got a continuous level on which to build the cathedral. And a penitent who has to mount a matter of fifty steps, and does so, certainly deserves well of Mother Church. So at least thought Nigel Charteris, as, somewhat breathless, he peered in and found it almost dark. A lantern standing on the floor in a corner announced the presence of some one, who proved to be the sacristan coming out of the sacristy.

By the aid of a few small coins the sacristan remembered that Father Felix lodged at the priest's house close by, and offered to fetch him. While he was gone Nigel made the round of the nave, the side-aisles, and the chancel. So lofty was the roof his eye could not pierce the gloom, but the cathedral was of no great extent, the chancel being in fact very nearly as large as the nave. The faint rays of the lantern lit up the carved and polished ages-old woodwork of the choir seats. Beyond was a shadowy land round which he walked in the space of a few minutes.

From the still deeper shadow of a group of pillars Nigel was startled by a woman's sobbing. Out of the great silence of the place it was audible, when his own footfall ceased for an instant, and then it ceased suddenly, as if the woman, learning that she was not alone, had regained command of herself. There ensued a soft murmur as of a recited prayer, one long familiar to her who prayed, and then as of some concluding personal petition, in which Nigel was almost certain that he heard the name of Albrecht von Waldstein. His mind being intent upon this name, that he should think to hear it even in this solemn environment was not in itself strange, but Nigel was inclined to regard the fancied recognition as having something of a supernatural significance.

At this moment the priest and the sacristan entered, and the holy father and his soldier penitent entered the confessional.

When Nigel came out he walked slowly to the door, where he was joined by the priest, who, his office performed, was cheerfully curious as any layman to hear the latest details from Magdeburg. News of the victory of the Church, as every Catholic was bound to esteem it, had reached him. He was willing to hear more, but made no comment. His sympathies, it appeared, were mainly confined to his own surroundings, his personal charge in Erfurt, and did not travel outward to the greater world. He was curious to hear whether the Jesuits were jubilant over the new phase in politics. It was clear that he at least was no Jesuit. The priest secular has always had a certain jealousy of the priest regular.

Nigel received his "Pax vobiscum," and turned away to make for his quarters. A few, and those feeble, lights burned at a distance from the cathedral. There was the blue sky, starlit as when he had entered. Standing still a moment or two to make sure of his direction in this solitary part of the city, he heard a light step beside him, and a tall closely-veiled lady asked him to set her on her way to the Prediger Strasse.

Muffled as the tones were, Nigel recognised them.

"Then it was your ladyship in the cathedral a while ago?"

"Sir! I do not know of what you speak! Can you not point me to the Prediger Strasse?"

"It is useless to pretend! You are she who calls herself Ottilie of Thüringen! And you are of the Holy Catholic faith! I am Nigel Charteris!"

"Had the night been lighter," she said in a tone of vexation, "I should have asked no man! Now I am forced to confide what I wished not to tell; I am of your faith."

"You may trust me!" said Nigel, taking her by the arm and making across the Mainzerhof bridge over the Bergstrom, a branch of the main waterway that threads the town as a string does a row of paunchy beads from Leipzig Fair.

"'Tis not the shortest way, but it is the least lonely. Tell me why you consorted with Protestants even to the risk of death or worse in Magdeburg?"

"Captain Charteris!" She spoke in low clear tones which could reach his ear alone. "It is no article of our compact to tell you these things. It is just as well for you to know nothing. It is a great protection sometimes not to know anything."

"Count Tilly said that same thing!" said Nigel. "Is it a password of the Rosicrucians?"

"Then he warned you against me!" she said in a tone of triumph.

Nigel bit his lip for its indiscretion.

"He gave it as a piece of general advice," he said. "But what is in our compact?"

"Merely this!" she replied. "You were to conduct us to Erfurt. You were to put us into the company of trustworthy people so that we might pursue our way to Eisenach."

"That is true!" said Nigel. "Yet it is not to be wondered at if I cast about to know more of a noble lady who first tries to stab me with a dagger, then takes a passing interest in my parentage, whom next I find by an extraordinary chance sobbing in a dark corner of a cathedral, whom, finally, I have the honour of conducting to her lodging at an hour when most noble ladies are glad to be within doors." There was a vein of humour in his tone rather than in what he said.

"You think I owe it to you, sir?"

"Does woman ever owe anything to man that she does not pay a thousand-fold? I count no woman my debtor!" He said it in a tone of tenderness she had not heard before from this soldier of fortune.

"Trust me then in turn! I tell you nothing! Believe me, there are things I dare not tell my confessor that I could tell you; only it is better not."

"Let it be so, madame! 'Trust me all in all or not at all' is a proverb of my country."

They had reached the further end of the street called Fischersand and turned on to the Long Bridge, from which it was but the length of a small side street to the Prediger Strasse.

They halted on the bridge and looked over the balustrade, up the waterway. There was candlelight here and there in the back windows of the houses that abutted on the water. Their gaze could only penetrate a little way along the dark space between the houses. A few stars reflected themselves in the water at their feet. The Lady Ottilie of Thüringen was in a restless mood, in that mood when a woman wants everything and nothing, when she is eager to reveal and careful to hide everything but her eagerness. To an older man perhaps there would have been no puzzle, but to Nigel Charteris, who had never known the spell of woman, she was a mysterious child following her own phantasies.

She gazed into the dark vista for a full minute or so of silence—a silence only broken by the tramp of the guard going its rounds. Then she said—

"Have you ever known what love is?"

Nigel started at the question, for he was conscious of the exaltation of spirit that he felt at being alone with this mysterious child, who was a woman who had proud eyes, that he felt at being her protector in this old garrisoned city that was strange to both of them.

"No, lady!" He spoke truth, and she knew it.

"It is like this!" she said, and pointed downwards. "It is dark and in movement, and you see stars in it glittering,—wavy stars that you know are not real, though they look so near. You know that it would be cold to plunge in, and that you would not get your stars. There are the stars above in the blue at an immense distance.... It's like that too!" She pointed up the waterway into the darkness. "You can see a little of the way, and then it is all dark, all a mystery, and yet you know that you are eager to go, and that if you go far enough you will expect to reach the stars."

Nigel listened and was troubled—troubled because he was not by nature a poet, and could not well follow her thought, and troubled because he felt that her note was impersonal as relating to himself. If she was referring to a particular man it was not himself.

"To think," she went on, "that a woman could be so stirred, so set above herself by any man that she would become even as his slave in return for nothing but his barest thanks, that her mind could be full of him day and night, that all he might do or say, were it to her own injury, would be right in her eyes!"

"And yours—your mind is full of Albrecht von Waldstein, if I guess rightly?" Nigel asked.

"Sir!" She flashed upon him, turning towards the pathway. "Go you and seek your Wallenstein! What think you that Ottilie von Thüringen can have in common with that cold seeker after power, with him who would use the Habsburgs for a stepping-stone, and play the Cæsar?"

Nigel was silent. He was confident that he had struck the keynote of her meditation, but refrained from placing his finger upon it with insistence, as he might have done, from fear that he should find that she resounded to none other. For he began willy-nilly to desire that this harpsichord of hers should give forth melody beneath his own fingers. But after a moment or two, with the directness of the Scot, without irony, stating a fact, he said—

"Lady, I would gladly be the man you spoke of!"

She turned towards him, hurling him a look through her veil.

"My tall captain! You would be a fool even to dream of it!"

"So be it!" he said in his plain way. "Here is your inn. To-morrow your escort will be here. At what hour?"

"At eight, sir, if you can so contrive."