One of the men--it was I--muttered something to Marie, and she snuffed the wick, and blew up the light. In a moment it filled the room, disclosing a strange medley of levelled weapons, startled faces, and flashing eyes. In one corner Fraulein Max and the two women cowered behind one another, trembling and staring. At the table sat my lady, with dull, dazed eyes, looking on, yet scarcely understanding what was happening. On either side of her stood Steve and I, covering the general with our pistols, while the Waldgrave, who was still too weak for much exertion, kept guard at the door.
Tzerclas was the first to speak. 'What is this foolery?' he said, scowling unutterable curses at us. 'What does this mean?'
'This!' I said, producing a piece of hide rope. 'We are going to tie you up. If you struggle, general, you die. If you submit, you live. That is all. Go to work, Steve.'
There was a gleam in Tzerclas' eye, which warned me to stand back and crook my finger. His face was black with fury, and for an instant I thought that he would spring upon us and dare all. But prudence and the pistols prevailed. With an evil look he sat still, and in a trice Steve had a loop round his arms and was binding him to the heavy chair.
I knew then that as far as he was concerned we were safe; and I turned to bid the women get cloaks and food, adjuring them to be quick, since every moment was precious.
'Bring nothing but cloaks and food and wine,' I said. 'We have to go a league on foot and can carry little.'
The Countess heard my words, and looked at me with growing comprehension. 'The Waldgrave?' she muttered. 'Is he here?'
He came forward from the door to speak to her; but when she saw him, and how pale and thin he was, with great hollows in his cheeks and his eyes grown too large for his face, she began to cry weakly, as any other woman might have cried, being overwrought. I bade Marie, who alone kept her wits, to bring her wine and make her take it; and in a minute she smiled at us, and would have thanked us.
'Wait!' I said bluntly, feeling a great horror upon me whenever I looked towards the general or caught his eye. 'You may have small cause to thank us. If we fail, Heaven and you forgive us, my lady, for this man will not. If we are retaken----'
'We will not be retaken!' she cried hardily. 'You have horses?'
'Five only,' I answered. 'They are all Steve could get, and they are a league away. We must go to them on foot. There are eight of us here, and young Jacob and Ernst are watching outside. Are all ready?'
My lady looked round; her eye fell on Fraulein Max, who with a little bundle in her arms had just re-entered and stood shivering by the door. The Dutch girl winced under her glance, and dropping her bundle, stooped hurriedly to pick it up.
'That woman does not go!' the Countess said suddenly.
I answered in a low tone that I thought she must.
'No!' my lady cried harshly--she could be cruel sometimes--'not with us. She does not belong to our party. Let her stay with her paymaster, and to-morrow he will doubtless reward her.'
What reward she was likely to get Fraulein Max knew well. She flung herself at my lady's feet in an agony of fear, and clutching her skirts, cried abjectly for mercy; she would carry, she would help, she would do anything, if she might go! Knowing that we dared not leave her since she would be certain to release the general as soon as our backs were turned, I was glad when Marie, whose heart was touched, joined her prayers to the culprit's and won a reluctant consent.
It has taken long to tell these things. They passed very quickly. I suppose not more than a quarter of an hour elapsed between our first appearance and this juncture, which saw us all standing in the lamplight, laden and ready to be gone; while the general glowered at us in sullen rage, and my lady, with a new thought in her mind, looked round in dismay.
She drew me aside. 'Martin,' she said, 'his orderly is waiting in the road with his horse. The moment we are gone he will shout to him.'
'We have provided for that,' I answered, nodding. Then assuring myself by a last look round that all were ready, I gave the word. 'Now, Steve!' I said sharply.
In a twinkling he flung over the general's head a small sack doubled inwards. We heard a stifled oath and a cry of rage. The bars of the strong chair creaked as our prisoner struggled, and for a moment it seemed as if the knots would barely hold. But the work had been well done, and in less than half a minute Steve had secured the sack to the chair-back. It was as good as a gag, and safer. Then we took up the chair between us, and lifting it into the back room, put it down and locked the door upon our captive.
As we turned from it Steve looked at me. 'If he catches us after this, Master Martin,' he said, 'it won't be an easy death we shall die!'
'Heaven forbid!' I muttered. 'Let us be off!'
He gave the word and we stole out into the darkness at the back of the house, Steve, who had surveyed the ground, going first. My lady followed him; then came the Waldgrave; after him the two women and Fraulein Max, with Jacob and Ernst; last of all, Marie and I. It was no time for love-making, but as we all stood a minute in the night, while Steve listened, I drew Marie's little figure to me and kissed her pale face again and again; and she clung to me, trembling, her eyes shining into mine. Then she put me away bravely; but I took her bundle, and with full hearts we followed the others across the field at the back and through the ditch.
That passed, we found ourselves on the edge of the village, with the lights of the camp forming five-sixths of a circle round us. In one direction only, where the swamp and creek fringed the place, a dark gap broke the ring of twinkling fires. Towards this gap Steve led the way, and we, a silent line of gliding figures, followed him. The moon had not yet risen. The gloom was such that I could barely make out the third figure before me; and though all manner of noises--the chorus of a song, the voice of a scolding hag, even the rattle of dice on a drumhead--came clearly to my ears, and we seemed to be enclosed on all sides, the darkness proved an effectual shield. We met no one, and five minutes after leaving the house, reached the bank of the little creek I have mentioned.
Here we paused and waited, a group of huddled figures, while Steve groped about for a plank he had hidden. Before us lay the stream, behind us the camp. At any moment the alarm might be raised. I pictured the outcry, the sudden flickering of lights, the galloping this way and that, the discovery. And then, thank Heaven! Steve found his plank, and in the work of passing the women over I forgot my fears. The darkness, the peril--for the water on the nearer side was deep--the nervous haste of some, and the terror of others, made the task no easy one. I was hot as fire and wet to the waist before it was over, and we all stood ankle-deep in the ooze which formed the farther bank.
Alas! our troubles were only beginning. Through this ooze we had to wade for a mile or more, sometimes in doubt, always in darkness; now plashing into pools, now stumbling over a submerged log, often up to our knees in mud and water. The frogs croaked round us, the bog moaned and gurgled; in the depth of the marsh the bitterns boomed mournfully. If we stood a moment we sank. It was a horrible time; and the more horrible, as through it all we had only to turn to see the camp lights behind us, a poor half-mile or so away.
None but desperate men could have exposed women to such a labour; nor could any but women without hope and at their wit's end have accomplished it. As it was, Fraulein Max, who never ceased to whimper, twice sank down and would go no farther, and we had to pluck her up roughly and force her on. My lady's women, who wept in their misery, were little better. Wet to the waist, draggled, and worn out by the clinging slime and the reek of the marsh, they were kept moving only with difficulty; so that, but for Steve's giant strength and my lady's courage, I think we should have stayed there till daylight, and been caught like birds limed on a bough.
As it was, we plunged and strove for more than an hour in that place, the dark sky above us, the quaking bog below, the women's weeping in our ears. Then, at last, when I had almost given up hope, we struggled out one by one upon the road, and stood panting and shaking, astonished to find solid ground under our feet. We had still two miles to walk, but on dry soil; and though at another time the task might have seemed to the women full of adventure and arduous, it failed to frighten them after what we had gone through. Steve took Fraulein Anna, and I one of the women. My lady and the Waldgrave went hand in hand; the one giving, I fancy, as much help as the other. For Marie, her small, white face was a beacon of hope in the darkness. In the marsh she had never failed or fainted. On the road the tears came into my eyes for pity and love and admiration.
At length Steve bade us stand, and leaving us in the way, plunged into the denser blackness of a thicket, which lay between it and the river. I heard him parting the branches before him, and stumbling and swearing, until presently the sounds died away in the distance, and we remained shivering and waiting. What if the horses were gone? What if they had strayed from the place where he had tethered them early in the day, or some one had found and removed them? The thought threw me into a cold sweat.
Then I heard him coming back, and I caught the ring of iron hoofs. He had them! I breathed again. In a moment he emerged, and behind him a string of shadows--five horses tied head and tail.
'Quick!' he muttered. He had been long enough alone to grow nervous. 'We are two hours gone, and if they have not yet discovered him they must soon! It is a short start, and half of us on foot!'
No one answered, but in a moment we had the Waldgrave, my lady, Fraulein, and one of the women mounted. Then we put up Marie, who was no heavier than a feather, and the lighter of the women on the remaining horse; and Steve hurrying beside the leader, and I, Ernst, and Jacob bringing up the rear, we were well on the road within two minutes of the appearance of the horses. Those who rode had only sacking for saddles and loops of rope for stirrups; but no one complained. Even Fraulein Max began to recover herself, and to dwell more upon the peril of capture than on aching legs and chafed knees.
The road was good, and we made, as far as I could judge, about six miles in the first hour. This placed us nine miles from the camp; the time, a little after midnight. At this point the clouds, which had aided us so far by increasing the darkness of the night, fell in a great storm of rain, that, hissing on the road and among the trees, in a few minutes drenched us to the skin. But no one complained. Steve muttered that it would make it the more difficult to track us; and for another hour we plodded on gallantly. Then our leader called a halt, and we stood listening.
The rain had left the sky lighter. A waning moon, floating in a wrack of watery clouds to westward, shed a faint gleam on the landscape. To the right of us it disclosed a bare plain, rising gradually as it receded, and offering no cover. On our left, between us and the river, it was different. Here a wilderness of osiers--a grey willow swamp that in the moonlight shimmered like the best Utrecht--stretched as far as we could see. The road where we stood rose a few feet above it, so that our eyes were on a level with the highest shoots; but a hundred yards farther on the road sank a little. We could see the water standing on the track in pools, and glimmering palely.
'This is the place,' Steve muttered. 'It will be dawn in another hour. What do you think, Master Martin?'
'That we had better get off the road,' I answered. 'Take it they found him at midnight; the orderly's patience would scarcely last longer. Then, if they started after us a quarter of an hour later, they should be here in another twenty minutes.'
'It is an aguey place,' he said doubtfully.
'It will suit us better than the camp,' I answered.
No one else expressed an opinion, and Steve, taking my lady's rein, led her horse on until he came to the hollow part of the road. Here the moonlight disclosed a kind of water-lane, running away between the osiers, at right angles from the road. Steve turned into it, leading my lady's horse, and in a moment was wading a foot deep in water. The Waldgrave followed, then the women. I came last, with Marie's rein in my hand. We kept down the lane about one hundred and fifty paces, the horses snorting and moving unwillingly, and the water growing ever deeper. Then Steve turned out of it, and began to advance, but more cautiously, parallel with the road.
We had waded about as far in this direction, sidling between the stumps and stools as well as we could, when he came again to a stand and passed back the word for me. I waded on, and joined him. The osiers, which were interspersed here and there with great willows, rose above our heads and shut out the moonlight. The water gurgled black about our knees. Each step might lead us into a hole, or we might trip over the roots of the osiers. It was impossible to see a foot before us, or anything above us save the still, black rods and the grey sky.
'It should be in this direction,' Steve said, with an accent of doubt. 'But I cannot see. We shall have the horses down.'
'Let me go first,' I said.
'We must not separate,' he answered hastily.
'No, no,' I said, my teeth beginning to chatter. 'But are you sure that there is an eyot here?'
'I did not go to it,' he answered, scratching his head. 'But I saw a clump of willows rising well above the level, and they looked to me as if they grew on dry land.'
He stood a moment irresolutely, first one and then another of the horses shaking itself till the women could scarcely keep their seats.
'Why do we not go on?' my lady asked in a low voice.
'Because Steve is not sure of the place, my lady,' I said. 'And it is almost impossible to move, it is so dark, and the osiers grow so closely. I doubt we should have waited until daylight.'
'Then we should have run the risk of being intercepted,' she answered feverishly. 'Are you very wet?'
'No,' I said, though my feet were growing numb, 'not very. I see what we must do. One of us must climb into a willow and look out.'
We had passed a small one not long before. I plashed my way back to it, along the line of shivering women, and, pulling myself heavily into the branches, managed to scramble up a few feet. The tree swayed under my weight, but it bore me.
The first dawn was whitening the sky and casting a faint, reflected light on the glistening sea of osiers, that seemed to my eyes--for I was not high enough to look beyond it--to stretch far and away on every side. Here and there a large willow, rising in a round, dark clump, stood out above the level; and in one place, about a hundred paces away on the riverside of us, a group of these formed a shadowy mound. I marked the spot, and dropped gently into the water.
'I have found it,' I said. 'I will go first, and do you bring my lady, Steve. And mind the stumps. It will be rough work.'
It was rough work. We had to wind in and out, leading and coaxing the frightened horses, that again and again stumbled to their knees. Every minute I feared that we should find the way impassable or meet with a mishap. But in time, going very patiently, we made out the willows in front of us. Then the water grew more shallow, and this gave the animals courage. Twenty steps farther, and we passed into the shadow of the trees. A last struggle, and, plunging one by one up the muddy bank, we stood panting on the eyot.
It was such a place as only despair could choose for a refuge. In shape like the back of some large submerged beast, it lay in length about forty paces, in breadth half as many. The highest point was a poor foot above the water. Seven great willows took up half the space; it was as much as our horses, sinking in the moist mud to the fetlock, could do to find standing-room on the remainder. Coarse grass and reeds covered it; and the flotsam of the last flood whitened the trunks of the willows, and hung in squalid wisps from their lower branches.
For the first time we saw one another's faces, and how pale and woe-begone, mudstained and draggled we were! The cold, grey light, which so mercilessly unmasked our refuge, did not spare us. It helped even my lady to look her worst. Fraulein Anna sat a mere lifeless lump in her saddle. The waiting-women cried softly; they had cried all night. The Waldgrave looked dazed, as if he barely understood where he was or why he was there.
To think over-much in such a place was to weep. Instead, I hastened to get them all off their horses, and with Steve's help and a great bundle of osiers and branches which we cut, I made nests for them in the lower boughs of the willows, well out of reach of the water. When they had all taken their places, I served out food and a dram of Dantzic waters, which some of us needed; for a white mist, drawn up from the swamp by the rising sun, began to enshroud us, and, hanging among the osiers for more than an hour, prolonged the misery of the night.
Still, even that rolled away at last--about six o'clock--and let us see the sun shining overhead in a heaven of blue distance and golden clouds. Larks rose up and sang, and all the birds of the marsh began to twitter and tweet. In a trice our mud island was changed to a bower--a place of warmth and life and refreshment--where light and shade lay on the dappled floor, and the sunshine fell through green leaves.
Then I took the cloaks, and the saddles, and everything that was wet, and spread them out on branches to dry; and leaving the women to make themselves comfortable in their own way and shift themselves as they pleased, we two, with the Waldgrave and the two servants, went away to the other end of the eyot.
'I shall sleep,' Steve said drowsily.
The insects were beginning to hum. The horses stood huddled together, swishing their long tails.
'You think they won't track us?' I asked.
'Certain,' he said. 'There are six hundred yards of mud and water, eel-holes, and willow shoots between us and the road.'
The Waldgrave assented mechanically; it seemed so to me too. And by-and-by, worn out with the night's work, I fell asleep, and slept, I suppose, for a good many hours, with the sun and shade passing slowly across my face, and the bees droning in my ears, and the mellow warmth of the summer day soaking into my bones. When I awoke I lay for a time revelling in lazy enjoyment. The oily plop of a water-rat, as it dived from a stump, or the scream of a distant jay, alone broke the laden silence. I looked at the sun. It lay south-west. It was three o'clock then.
pg 251We were alone.... I whispered in her ear ...
A light touch fell on my knee. I started, looked down, and for a moment stared in sleepy wonder. A tiny bunch of blue flowers, such as I could see growing in a dozen places on the edge of the island, lay on it, tied up with a thread of purple silk. I started up on my elbow, and--there, close beside me, with her cheeks full of colour, and the sunshine finding golden threads in her dark hair, sat Marie, toying with more flowers.
'Ha!' I said foolishly. 'What is it?'
'My lady sent me to you,' she answered.
'Yes,' I asked eagerly. 'Does she want me?'
But Marie hung her head, and played with the flowers. 'I don't think so,' she whispered. 'She only sent me to you.'
Then I understood. The Waldgrave had gone to the farther end. Steve and the men were tending the horses half a dozen paces beyond the screen of willow-leaves. We were alone. A rat plashed into the water, and drove Marie nearer to me; and she laid her head on my shoulder, and I whispered in her ear, till the lashes sank down over her eyes and her lips trembled. If I had loved her from the first, what was the length and height and breadth of my love now, when I had seen her in darkness and peril, sunshine and storm, strong when others failed, brave when others flinched, always helpful, ready, tireless! And she so small! So frail, I almost feared to press her to me; so pale, the blood that leapt to her cheeks at my touch seemed a mere reflection of the sunlight.
I told her how Steve had made the guards at the prison drunk with wine bought with her dowry; how the horses he had purchased and taken out of the camp by twos and threes had been paid for from the same source; and how many ducats had gone for meats and messes to keep the life, that still ran sluggishly, in the Waldgrave's veins. She listened and lay still.
'So you have no dowry now, little one,' I said, when I had told her all. 'And your gold chain is gone. I believe you have nothing but the frock you stand up in. Why, then, should I marry you?'
I felt her heart give a great leap under my hand, and a shiver ran through her. But she did not raise her head, and I, who had thought to tease her into looking at me, had to put back her little face till it gazed into mine.
'Why?' I said; 'why?'--drawing her closer and closer to me.
Then the colour came into her face like the sunlight itself. 'Because you love me,' she whispered, shutting her eyes.
And I did not gainsay her.
We lay in the osier bed two whole days and a night, during which time two at least of us were not unhappy, in spite of peril and hardship. We left it at last, only because our meagre provision gave out, and we must move or starve. We felt far from sure that the danger was over, for Steve, who spent the second day in a thick bush near the road, saw two troops of horse go by; and others, we believed, passed in the night. But we had no choice. The neighbourhood was bleak and bare. Such small homesteads as existed had been eaten up, and lay abandoned. If we had felt inclined to venture out for food, none was to be had. And, in fine, though we trembled at the thought of the open road, and my heart for one grew sick as I looked from Marie to my lady, and reckoned the long tale of leagues which lay between us and Cassel, the risk had to be run.
Steve had discovered a more easy though longer way out of the willow-bed, and two hours before midnight on the second night, he and I mounted the women and prepared to set out. He arranged that we should go in the same order in which we had come: that he should lead the march, and I bring up the rear, while the Waldgrave, who was still far from well, and whose continued lack of vigour troubled us the more as we said little about it, should ride with my lady.
The night seemed likely to be fine, but the darkness, the sough of the wind as it swept over the plain, and the melancholy plashing of the water as our horses plodded through it, were not things of a kind to allay our fears. When we at last left our covert, and reaching the road stood to listen, the fall of a leaf made us start. Though no sounds but those of the night came to our ears--and some of these were of a kind to reassure us--we said 'Hush!' again and again, and only moved on after a hundred alarums and assurances.
I walked by Marie, with my hand on the withers of her horse, but we did not talk. The two waiting-women riding double were before us, and their muttered fears alone broke the silence which prevailed at the end of the train. We went at the rate of about two leagues an hour, Steve and I and the men running where the roads were good, and everywhere and at all times urging the horses to do their best. The haste of our movements, the darkness, our constant alarm, and the occasional confusion when the rear pressed on the van at an awkward place, had the effect of upsetting the balance of our minds; so that the most common impulse of flight--to press forward with ever-increasing recklessness--began presently to possess us. Once or twice I had to check the foremost, or they would have outrun the rear; and this kind of race brought us gradually into such a state of alarm, that by-and-by, when the line came to a sudden stop on the brow of a gentle descent, I could hardly restrain my impatience.
'What is it?' I asked eagerly. 'Why are we stopping?' Surely the road is good enough here.'
No one answered, but it was significant that on the instant one of the women began to cry.
'Stop that folly!' I said. 'What is in front there? Cannot some one speak?'
'The Waldgrave thinks that he hears horsemen before us,' Fraulein Max answered.
In another moment the Waldgrave's figure loomed out of the darkness. 'Martin,' he said--I noticed that his voice shook--'go forward. They are in front. Man alive, be quick!' he continued fiercely. 'Do you want to have them into us?'
I left my girl's rein, and pushing past the women and Fraulein, joined Steve, who was standing by my lady's rein. 'What is it?' I said.
'Nothing, I think,' he answered in an uncertain tone.
I stood a moment listening, but I too could hear nothing. I began to argue with him. 'Who heard it?' I asked impatiently.
'The Waldgrave,' he answered.
I did not like to say before my lady what I thought--that the Waldgrave was not quite himself, nor to be depended upon; and instead I proposed to go forward on foot and learn if anything was amiss. The road ran straight down the hill, and the party could scarcely pass me, even in the gloom. If I found all well, I would whistle, and they could come on.
My lady agreed, and, leaving them halted, I started cautiously down the hill. The darkness was not extreme; the cloud drift was broken here and there, and showed light patches of sky between; I could make out the shapes of things, and more than once took a clump of bushes for a lurking ambush. But halfway down, a line of poplars began to shadow the road on our side, and from that point I might have walked into a regiment and never seen a man. This, the being suddenly alone, and the constant rustling of the leaves overhead, which moved with the slightest air, shook my nerves, and I went very warily, with my heart in my mouth and a cry trembling on my lips.
Still I had reached the hillfoot before anything happened. Then I stopped abruptly, hearing quite distinctly in front of me the sound of footsteps. It was impossible that this could be the sound that the Waldgrave had heard, for only one man seemed to be stirring, and he moved stealthily; but I crouched down and listened, and in a moment I was rewarded. A dark figure came out of the densest of the shadow and stood in the middle of the road. I sank lower, noiselessly. The man seemed to be listening.
It flashed into my head that he was a sentry; and I thought how fortunate it was that I had come on alone.
Presently he moved again. He stole along the track towards me, stooping, as I fancied, and more than once standing to listen, as if he were not satisfied. I sank down still lower, and he passed me without notice, and went on, and I heard his footsteps slowly retreating until they quite died away.
But in a moment, before I had risen to my full height, I heard them again. He came back, and passed me, breathing quickly and loudly. I wondered if he had detected our party and was going to give the alarm; and I stood up, anxious and uncertain, at a loss whether I should follow him or run back.
At that instant a fierce yell broke the silence, and rent the darkness as a flash of lightning might rend it. It came from behind me, from the brow of the hill; and I started as if I had been struck. Hard on it a volley of shouts and screams flared up in the same direction, and while my heart stood still with terror and fear of what had happened, I heard the thunder of hoofs come down the road, with a clatter of blows and whips. They were coming headlong--my lady and the rest. The danger was behind them, then. I had just time to turn and get to the side of the road before they were on me at a gallop.
I could not see who was who in the darkness, but I caught at the nearest stirrup, and, narrowly escaping being ridden down, ran on beside the rider. The horses, spurred down the slope, had gained such an impetus that it was all I could do to keep up. I had no breath to ask questions, nor state my fear that there was danger ahead also. I had to stride like a giant to keep my legs and run.
Some one else was less lucky. We had not swept fifty yards from where I joined them, when a dark figure showed for a moment in the road before us. I saw it; it seemed to hang and hesitate. The next instant it was among us. I heard a shrill scream, a heavy fall, and we were over it, and charging on and on and on through the darkness.
To the foot of the hill and across the bottom, and up the opposite slope. I do not know how far we had sped, when Steve's voice was heard, calling on us to halt.
'Pull up! pull up!' he cried, with an angry oath. 'It is a false alarm! What fool set it going? There is no one behind us. Donner und Blitzen! where is Martin?'
The horses were beginning to flag, and gladly came to a trot, and then to a walk.
'Here! I panted.
'Himmel! I thought we had ridden you down!' he said, leaving my lady's side. His voice shook with passion and loss of breath. 'Who was it? We might all have broken our necks, and for nothing!'
The Waldgrave--it was his stirrup I had caught--turned his horse round. 'I heard them--close behind us!' he panted. There was a note of wildness in his voice. My elbow was against his knee, and I felt him tremble.
'A bird in the hedge,' Steve said rudely. 'It has cost some one dear. Whose horse was it struck him?'
No one answered. I left the Waldgrave's side and went back a few paces. The women were sobbing. Ernst and Jacob stood by them, breathing hard after their run. I thought the men's silence strange. I looked again. There was a figure missing; a horse missing.
'Where is Marie?' I cried.
She did not answer. No one answered; and I knew. Steve swore again. I think he had known from the beginning. I began to tremble. On a sudden my lady lifted up her voice and cried shrilly--
'Marie! Marie!'
Again no answer. But this time I did not wait to listen. I ran from them into the darkness the way we had come, my legs quivering under me, and my mouth full of broken prayers. I remembered a certain solitary tree fronting the poplars, on the other side of the way, which I had marked mechanically at the moment of the fall--an ash, whose light upper boughs had come for an instant between my eyes and the sky. It stood on a little mound, where the moorland began to rise on that side. I came to it now, and stopped and looked. At first I could see nothing, and I trod forward fearfully. Then, a couple of paces on, I made out a dark figure, lying head and feet across the road. I sprang to it, and kneeling, passed my hands over it. Alas! it was a woman's.
I raised the light form in my arms, crying passionately on her name, while the wind swayed the boughs overhead, and, besides that and my voice, all the countryside was still. She did not answer. She hung limp in my arms. Kneeling in the dust beside her, I felt blindly for a pulse, a heart-beat. I found neither--neither; the woman was dead.
And yet it was not that which made me lay the body down so quickly and stand up peering round me. No; something else. The blood drummed in my ears, my heart beat wildly. The woman was dead; but she was not Marie.
She was an old woman, sixty years old. When I stooped again, after assuring myself that there was no other body near, and peered into her face, I saw that it was seamed and wrinkled. She was barefoot, and her clothes were foul and mean. She had the reek of one who slept in ditches and washed seldom. Her toothless gums grinned at me. She was a horrible mockery of all that men love in women.
When I had marked so much, I stood up again, my head reeling. Where was the man I had seen scouting up and down? Where was Marie? For a moment the wild idea that she had become this thing, that death or magic had transformed the fair young girl into this toothless hag, was not too wild for me. An owl hooted in the distance, and I started and shivered and stood looking round me fearfully. Such things were; and Marie was gone. In her place this woman, grim and dead and unsightly, lay at my feet. What was I to think?
I got no answer. I raised my voice and called, trembling, on Marie. I ran to one side of the road and the other and called, and still got no answer. I climbed the mound on which the ash-tree stood, and sent my voice thrilling through the darkness of the bottom. But only the owl answered. Then, knowing nothing else I could do, I went down wringing my hands, and found my lady standing over the body in the road. She had come back with Steve and the others.
I had to listen to their amazement, and a hundred guesses and fancies, which, God help me! had nothing certain in them, and gave me no help. The men searched both sides of the road, and beat the moor for a distance, and tried to track the horse--for that was missing too, and there lay my only hope--but to no purpose. At last my lady came to me and said sorrowfully that nothing more could be done.
'In the morning!' I cried jealously.
No one spoke, and I looked from one to another. The men had returned from the search, and stood in a dark group round the body, which they had drawn to the side of the road. It wanted an hour of daylight yet, and I could not see their faces, but I read in their silence the answer that no one liked to put into words.
'Be a man!' Steve muttered, after a long pause. 'God help the girl. But God help us too if we are found here!'
Still my lady did not speak, and I knew her brave heart too well to doubt her, though she had been the first to talk of going. 'Get to horse,' I said roughly.
'No, no,' my lady cried at last. 'We will all stay, Martin.'
'Ay, all stay or all go!' Steve muttered.
'Then all go!' I said, choking down the sobs that would rise. And I turned first from the place.
I will not try to state what that cost me. I saw my girl's face everywhere--everywhere in the darkness, and the eyes reproached me. That she of all should suffer, who had never fainted, never faltered, whose patience and courage had been the women's stay from the first--that she should suffer! I thought of the tender, weak body, and of all the things that might happen to her, and I seemed, as I went away from her, the vilest thing that lived.
But reason was against me. If I stayed there and waited on the road by the old crone's body until morning, what could I do? Whither could I turn? Marie was gone and already might be half a dozen miles away. So the bonds of custom and duty held me. Dazed and bewildered, I lacked the strength that was needed to run counter to all. I was no knight-errant, but a plain man, and I reeled on through the last hour of the night and the first grey streaks of dawn, with my head on my breast and sobs of despair in my throat.
If it had been our fate after that to continue our flight in the same weary fashion we had before devised, lying in woods by day, and all night riding jaded horses, until we passed the gates of some free city, I do not think that I could have gone through with it. Doubtless it was my duty to go with my lady. But the long hours of daylight inaction, the slow brooding tramp, must have proved intolerable. And at some time or other, in some way or other, I must have snapped the ties that bound me.
But, as if the loss of my heart had rid us of some spell cast over us, by noon of that day we stood safe. For, an hour before noon, while we lay in a fir-wood not far from Weimar, and Jacob kept watch on the road below, and the rest slept as we pleased, a party of horse came along the way, and made as if to pass below us. They numbered more than a hundred, and Jacob's heart failed him, lest some ring or buckle of our accoutrements should sparkle and catch their eyes. To shift the burden he called us, and we went to watch them.
'Do they go north or south?' I asked him as I rose.
'North,' he whispered.
After that they were nothing to me, but I went with the rest. Our lair was in some rocks overhanging the road. By the time we looked over, the horsemen were below us, and we could see nothing of them; though the sullen tramp of their horses, and the jingle of bit and spur, reached us clearly. Presently they came into sight again on the road beyond, riding steadily away with their backs to us.
'That is not General Tzerclas?' my lady muttered anxiously.
'Nor any of his people!' Steve said with an oath.
That led me to look more closely, and I saw in a moment something that lifted me out of my moodiness. I sprang on the rock against which I was leaning and shouted long and loudly.
'Himmel!' Steve cried, seizing me by the ankle. 'Are you mad, man?'
But I only shouted again, and waved my cap frantically. Then I slipped down, sobered. 'They see us,' I cried. 'They are Leuchtenstein's riders. And Count Hugo is with them. You are safe, my lady.'
She turned white and red, and I saw her clutch at the rock to keep herself on her feet. 'Are you sure?' she said. The troop had halted and were wheeling slowly and in perfect order.
'Quite sure, my lady,' I answered, with a touch of bitterness in my tone. Why had not this happened yesterday or the day before? Then my girl would have been saved. Now it came too late! Too late! No wonder I felt bitterly about it.
We went down into the road on foot, a little party of nine--four women and five men. The horsemen, as they came up, looked at us in wonder. Our clothes, even my lady's, were dyed with mud and torn in a score of places. We had not washed for days, and our faces were lean with famine. Some of the women were shoeless and had their hair about their ears, while Steve was bare-headed and bare-armed, and looked so huge a ruffian the stocks must have yawned for him anywhere. They drew up and gazed at us, and then Count Hugo came riding down the column and saw us.
My lady went forward a step. 'Count Leuchtenstein,' she said, her voice breaking; she had only seen him once, and then under the mask of a plain name. But he was safety, honour, life now, and I think that she could have kissed him. I think for a little she could have fallen into his arms.
'Countess!' he said, as he sprang from his horse in wonder. 'Is it really you? Gott im Himmel! These are strange times. Waldgrave! Your pardon. Ach! Have you come on foot?'
'Not I. But these brave men have,' my lady answered, tears in her voice.
He looked at Steve and grunted. Then he looked at me and his eyes lightened. 'Are these all your party?' he said hurriedly.
'All,' my lady answered in a low voice. He did not ask farther, but he sighed, and I knew that he had looked for his child. 'I came north upon a reconnaissance, and was about to turn,' he said. 'I am thankful that I did not turn before. Is Tzerclas in pursuit of you?'
'I do not know,' my lady answered, and told him shortly of our flight, and how we had lain two days and a night in the osier-bed.
'It was a good thought,' he said. 'But I fear that you are half famished.' And he called for food and wine, and served my lady with his own hands, while he saw that we did not go without. 'Campaigner's fare,' he said. 'But you come of a fighting stock, Countess, and can put up with it.'
'Shame on me if I could not,' she answered.
There was a quaver in her voice, which showed how the rencontre moved her, how full her heart was of unspoken gratitude.
'When you have finished, we will get to horse,' he said. 'I must take you with me to Nuremberg, for I am not strong enough to detach a party. But this evening we will make a long halt at Hesel, and secure you a good night's rest.'
'I am sorry to be so burdensome,' my lady said timidly.
He shrugged his shoulders without compliment, but I did not hear what he answered. For I could bear no more. Marie seemed so forgotten in this crowd, so much a thing of the past, that my gorge rose. No word of her, no thought of her, no talk of a search party! I pictured her forlorn, helpless little figure, her pale, uncomplaining face--I and no one else; and I had to go away into the bushes to hide myself. She was forgotten already. She had done all for them, I said to myself, and they forgot her.
Then, in the thicket screened from the party, I had a thought--to go back and look for her, myself. Now my lady was safe, there was nothing to prevent me. I had only to lie close among the rocks until Count Hugo left, and then I might plod back on foot and search as I pleased. In a flash I saw the poplars, and the road running beneath the ash-tree, and the woman's body lying stiff and stark on the sward. And I burned to be there.
Left to myself I should have gone too. But the plan was no sooner formed than shattered. While I stood, hotfoot to be about it, and pausing only to consider which way I could steal off most safely, a rustling warned me that some one was coming, and before I could stir, a burly trooper broke through the bushes and confronted me. He saluted me stolidly.
'Sergeant,' he said, 'the general is waiting for you.'
'The general?' I said.
'The Count, if you like it better,' he answered. 'Come, if you please.'
I followed him, full of vexation. It was but a step into the road. The moment I appeared, some one gave the word 'Mount!' A horse was thrust in front of me, two or three troopers who still remained afoot swung themselves into the saddle; and I followed their example. In a trice we were moving down the valley at a dull, steady pace--southwards, southwards. I looked back, and saw the fir trees and rocks where we had lain hidden, and then we turned a corner, and they were gone. Gone, and all round me I heard the measured tramp of the troop-horses, the swinging tones of the men, and the clink and jingle of sword and spur. I called myself a cur, but I went on, swept away by the force of numbers, as the straw by the current. Once I caught Count Hugo's eye fixed on me, and I fancied he had a message for me, but I failed to interpret it.
Steve rode by me, and his face too was moody. I suppose that we should all of us have thanked God the peril was past. But my lady rode in another part with Count Leuchtenstein and the Waldgrave; and Steve yearned, I fancy, for the old days of trouble and equality, when there was no one to come between us.
I saw Count Hugo that night. He sent for me to his quarters at Hesel, and told me frankly that he would have let me go back had he thought good could come of it.
'But it would have been looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, my friend,' he continued. 'Tzerclas' men would have picked you up, or the peasants killed you for a soldier, and in a month perhaps the girl would have returned safe and sound, to find you dead.'
'My lord!' I cried passionately, 'she saved your child. It was to her as her own!'
'I know it,' he answered with gravity, which of itself rebuked me. 'And where is my child?'
I shook my head.
'Yet I do not give up my work and the task God and the times have given me, and go out looking for it!' he answered severely. 'Leaving Scot, and Swede, and Pole, and Switzer to divide my country. For shame! You have your work too, and it lies by your lady's side. See to it that you do it. For the rest I have scouts out, who know the country; if I learn anything through them you shall hear it. And now of another matter. How long has the Waldgrave been like this, my friend?'
'Like this, my lord?' I muttered stupidly.
He nodded. 'Yes, like this,' he repeated. 'I have heard him called a brave man. Coming of his stock, he should be; and when I saw him in Tzerclas' camp he had the air of one. Now he starts at a shadow, is in a trance half his time, and a tremor the other half. What ails him?'
I told him how he had been wounded, fighting bravely, and that since that he had not been himself.
Count Hugo rubbed his chin gravely. 'It is a pity,' he said. 'We want all--every German arm and every German head. We want you. Man alive!' he continued, roused to anger, I suppose, by my dull face, 'do you know what is in front of you?'
'No, my lord,' I said in apathy.
He opened his mouth as if to hurl a volley of words at me. But he thought better of it and shut his lips tight. 'Very well,' he said grimly. 'Wait three days and you will see.'
But in truth, I had not to wait three days. Before sunset of the next I began to see, and, downcast as I was, to prick up my ears in wonder. Beyond Romhild and between that town and Bamberg, the great road which runs through the valley of the Pegnitz, was such a sight as I had never seen. For many miles together a column of dust marked its course, and under this went on endless marching. We were but a link in a long chain, dragging slowly southwards. Now it was a herd of oxen that passed along, moving tediously and painfully, driven by half-naked cattle-men and guarded by a troop of grimy horse. Now it was a reinforcement of foot from Fulda, rank upon rank of shambling men trailing long pikes, and footsore, and parched as they were, getting over the ground in a wonderful fashion. After them would come a long string of waggons, bearing corn, and hay, and malt, and wines; all lurching slowly forward, slowly southward; often delayed, for every quarter of a mile a horse fell or an axle broke, yet getting forward.
And then the most wonderful sight of all, a regiment of Swedish horse passed us, marching from Erfurt. All their horses were grey, and all their head-pieces, backs and breasts of black metal, matched one another. As they came on through the dust with a tramp which shook the ground, they sang, company by company, to the music of drums and trumpets, a hymn, 'Versage nicht, du Häuflein klein!' Behind them a line of light waggons carried their wives and children, also singing. And so they went by us, eight hundred swords, and I thought it a marvel I should never see beaten.
When they were gone out of sight, there were still droves of horses and mighty flocks of sheep to come, and cargoes of pork, and more foot and horse and guns. Some companies wore buff coats and small steel caps, and carried arquebuses; and some marched smothered in huge headpieces with backs and breasts to match. And besides all the things I have mentioned and the crowds of sutlers and horse-boys that went with them, there were munition waggons closely guarded, and pack-horses laden with powder, and always and always waggons of corn and hay.
And all hurrying, jostling, crawling southwards. It seemed to me that the world was marching southwards; that if we went on we must fall in at the end of this with every one we knew. And the thought comforted me.
Steve put it into words after his fashion. 'It must be a big place we are going to,' he said, about noon of the second day, 'or who is to eat all this? And do you mark, Master Martin? We meet no one coming back. All go south. This place Nuremberg that they talk of must be worth seeing.'
'It should be,' I said.
And after that the excitement of the march began to take hold of me. I began to think and wonder, and look forward, with an eagerness I did not understand, to the issues of this.
We lay a night at Bamberg, where the crowd and confusion and the stress of people were so great that Steve would have it we had come to Nuremberg. And certainly I had never known such a hurly-burly, nor heard of it except at the great fair at Dantzic. The night after we lay at Erlangen, which we found fortified, trenched, and guarded, with troops lying in the square, and the streets turned into stables. From that place to Nuremberg was a matter of ten miles only; but the press was so great on the road that it took us a good part of the day to ride from one to the other. In the open country on either side of the way strong bodies of horse and foot were disposed. It seemed to me that here was already an army and a camp.
But when late in the afternoon we entered Nuremberg itself, and viewed the traffic in the streets, and the endless lines of gabled houses, the splendid mansions and bridges, the climbing roofs and turrets and spires of this, the greatest city in Germany, then we thought little of all we had seen before. Here thousands upon thousands rubbed shoulders in the streets; here continuous boats turned the river into solid land. Here we were told were baked every day a hundred thousand loaves of bread; and I saw with my own eyes a list of a hundred and thirty-eight bakehouses. The roar of the ways, choked with soldiers and citizens, the babel of strange tongues, the clamour of bells and trumpets, deafened us. The constant crowding and pushing and halting turned our heads. I forgot my grief and my hope too. Who but a madman would look to find a single face where thousands gazed from the windows? or could deem himself important with this swarming, teeming hive before him? Steve stared stupidly about him; I rode dazed and perplexed. The troopers laughed at us, or promised us greater things when we should see the Swedish Lager outside the town, and Wallenstein's great camp arrayed against it. But I noticed that even they, as we drew nearer to the heart of the city, fell silent at times, and looked at one another, surprised at the great influx of people and the shifting scenes which the streets presented.
For myself and Steve and the men, we were as good as nought. A house in the Ritter-Strasse was assigned to my lady for her quarters--no one could lodge in the city without the leave of the magistrates; and we were glad to get into it and cool our dizzy heads, and look at one another. Count Hugo stayed awhile, standing with my lady and the Waldgrave in one of the great oriels that overlooked the street. But a mounted messenger, sent on from the Town House, summoned him, and he took horse again for the camp. I do not know what we should have done without him at entering. The soldiers, who crowded the streets, showed scant respect for names, and would as soon have jostled my lady as a citizen's wife; but wherever he came hats were doffed and voices lowered, and in the greatest press a way was made for him as by magic.
For that night we had seen enough. I thought we had seen all, or that nothing in my life would ever surprise me again. But next day my lady went up to the Burg on the hill in the middle of the city to look abroad, and took Steve and myself with her. And then I found that I had not seen the half. The city, all roofs and spires and bridges, girt with a wall of seventy towers, roared beneath us; and that I had expected. But outside the wall I now saw a second city of huts and tents, with a great earthwork about it, and bastions and demilunes and picquets posted.
This was the Swedish Lager. It lay principally to the south of the city proper, though on all sides it encircled it more or less. They told me that there lay in it about forty thousand soldiers and twenty thousand horses, and twenty thousand camp followers; but the number was constantly increasing, death and disease notwithstanding, so that it presently stood as high as sixty thousand fighting men and half as many followers, to say nothing of the garrison that lay in the city, or the troops posted to guard the approaches. It seemed to me, gazing over that mighty multitude from the top of the hill, that nothing could resist such a force; and I looked abroad with curiosity for the enemy.
I expected to view his army cheek by jowl with us; and I was disappointed when I saw beyond our camp to southward, where I was told he lay, only a clear plain with the little river Rednitz flowing through it. This plain was a league and more in width, and it was empty of men. Beyond it rose a black wooded ridge, very steep and hairy.
My lady explained that Wallenstein's army lay along this ridge--seventy thousand men, and forty thousand horses, and Wallenstein himself. His camp we heard was eight miles round, the front guarded by a line of cannon, and taking in whole villages and castles. And now I looked again I saw the smoke hang among the trees. They whispered in Nuremberg that no man in that army took pay; that all served for booty; and that the troopers that sacked Magdeburg and followed Tilly were, beside these, gentle and kindly men.
'God help us!' my lady cried fervently. 'God help this great city! God help the North! Never was such a battle fought as must be fought here!'
We went down very much sobered, filled with awe and wonder and great thoughts, the dullest of us feeling the air heavy with portents, the more clerkly considering of Armageddon and the Last Fight. Briefly--for thirteen years the Emperor and the Papists had hustled and harried the Protestants; had dragooned Donauwörth, and held down Bohemia, and plundered the Palatinate, and crushed the King of Denmark, and wherever there was a weak Protestant state had pressed sorely on it. Then one short year before I stood on the Burg above the Pegnitz, the Protestant king had come out of the North like a thunderbolt, had shattered in a month the Papist armies, had run like a devouring fire down the Priests' Lane, rushed over Bohemia, shaken the Emperor on his throne!
But could he maintain himself? That was now to be seen. To the Emperor's help had come all who loved the old system, and would have it that the south was Germany; all who wished to chain men's minds and saw their profit in the shadow of the imperial throne; all who lived by license and plunder, and reckoned a mass to-day against a murder to-morrow. All these had come, from the great Duke of Friedland grasping at empire, to the meanest freebooter with peasant's blood on his hands and in his veins; and there they lay opposite us, impregnably placed on the Burgstall, waiting patiently until famine and the sword should weaken the fair city, and enable them to plunge their vulture's talons into its vitals.
No wonder that in Nuremberg the citizens could be distinguished from the soldiers by their careworn faces; or that many a man stood morning and evening to gaze at the carved and lofty front of his house--by St. Sebald's or behind the new Cathedral--and wondered how long the fire would spare it. The magistrates who had staked all--their own and the city's--on this cast, went about with stern, grave faces and feared almost to meet the public eye. With a doubled population, with a huge army to feed, with order to keep, with houses and wives and daughters of their own to protect, with sack and storm looming luridly in the future, who had cares like theirs?
One man only, and him I saw as we went home from the Burg. It was near the foot of the Burg hill, where the strasse meets three other ways. At that time Count Tilly's crooked, dwarfish figure and pale horse's face, and the great hat and boots which seemed to swallow him up, were fresh in my mind; and sometimes I had wondered whether this other great commander were like him. Well, I was to know; for through the crowd at the junction of these four roads, while we stood waiting to pass, there came a man on a white horse, followed by half a score of others on horseback; and in a moment I knew from the shouting and the way women thrust papers into his hands that we saw the King of Sweden.
He wore a plain buff coat and a grey flapped hat with a feather; a tall man and rather bulky, his face massive and fleshy, with a close moustache trimmed to a point and a small tuft on his chin. His aspect was grave; he looked about him with a calm eye, and the shouting did not seem to move him. They told me that it was Baner, the Swedish General, who rode with him, and our Bernard of Weimar who followed. But my eye fell more quickly on Count Leuchtenstein, who rode after, with the great Chancellor Oxenstierna; in him, in his steady gaze and serene brow and wholesome strength, I traced the nearest likeness to the king.
And so I first saw the great Gustavus Adolphus. It was said that he would at times fall into fits of Berserk rage, and that in the field he was another man, keen as his sword, swift as fire, pitiless to those who flinched, among the foremost in the charge, a very thunderbolt of war. But as I saw him taking papers from women's hands at the end of the Burg Strasse, he had rather the air of a quiet, worthy prince--of Coburg or Darmstadt, it might be,--no dresser and no brawler; nor would any one, to see him then, have thought that this was the lion of the north who had dashed the pride of Pappenheim and flung aside the firebrands of the south. Or that even now he had on his shoulders the burden of two great nations and the fate of a million of men.