The Mercenary Part 5

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 s.p.a.ce 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 pet.i.tion, 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 vobisc.u.m," 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 Stra.s.se.

m.u.f.fled 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 Stra.s.se?"

"It is useless to pretend! You are she who calls herself Ottilie of Thuringen! 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 pa.s.sword 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 n.o.ble lady who first tries to stab me with a dagger, then takes a pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 Stra.s.se.

They halted on the bridge and looked over the bal.u.s.trade, up the waterway. There was candlelight here and there in the back windows of the houses that ab.u.t.ted on the water. Their gaze could only penetrate a little way along the dark s.p.a.ce between the houses. A few stars reflected themselves in the water at their feet. The Lady Ottilie of Thuringen 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 Thuringen can have in common with that cold seeker after power, with him who would use the Habsburgs for a stepping-stone, and play the Caesar?"

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 w.i.l.l.y-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."

CHAPTER VI.

AT THE CASTLE OF HRADSCHIN.

It was not difficult to find at the sign of the Lily a couple of worthy merchants who were returning on the morrow to Gotha, and they readily promised Nigel to act as escort so far. From Gotha it would go hard if the girls did not get a safe journey to Eisenach.

The parting was brief. Some tears sprang to the ready eyes of Elspeth.

Ottilie's eyes showed nothing. Her lips repeated, "Till we meet again, captain!" The pastor nodded sulkily. No sooner had the coach rumbled off than Nigel sprang to his saddle, and together with his comrade, the lieutenant, and the escort, trotted to the merry jingle of the accoutrements and the clash of hoofs out of Erfurt over Steiger Hill on the road for Rudolfstadt. In consultation with some of the garrison he had planned to ride through the forest to Rudolfstadt, thence to Plauen, pa.s.s the night there, cross the Erzgebirge on the next day, and push into Bohemia as far as Pilsen; by good fortune they might be at Budweis on the evening of the third day and in Vienna by the afternoon of the fourth.

After surmounting Steiger the road lay straight enough across a broad valley through a round dozen of hamlets, and at the tenth mile they crossed the Ilm and began to ascend a more winding road, which, six miles farther, brought them to Rudolfstadt. Here they made their midday meal, and without delaying over the wine-pot, made good speed into the hills that lay between them and Plauen, the chief city of the Vogtland.

The Vogt had been careful to choose a high country for his dwelling, and so the horses found it no easy finish to their day's work to climb as they had to do to bed and fodder.

So far Nigel had paid little heed to any demonstrations of Lutheran spirit. Erfurt, for all it had nursed Luther out of monkhood into flat heresy, was still Catholic. Rudolfstadt was towards the outskirts of the Thuringer Wald and a mere hamlet, though it bore a kingly name. The other villages that lay between it and Plauen were inconsiderable, and Nigel did not let his men linger when traversing them. It was quite possible that the news of the sack of Magdeburg had preceded him, but it was unlikely that any force of the soldiers of Gustavus or of his allies were in the neighbourhood, and against any undisciplined throng of turbulent Protestants Nigel felt secure, if he were not greatly outnumbered.