My Lady Rotha: A Romance

by Stanley John Weyman

  CHAPTER XXV.

  NUREMBERG.

  If it had been our fate after that to continue our flight in the sameweary fashion we had before devised, lying in woods by day, and allnight riding jaded horses, until we passed the gates of some freecity, I do not think that I could have gone through with it. Doubtlessit was my duty to go with my lady. But the long hours of daylightinaction, the slow brooding tramp, must have proved intolerable. Andat some time or other, in some way or other, I must have snapped theties 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 welay in a fir-wood not far from Weimar, and Jacob kept watch on theroad below, and the rest slept as we pleased, a party of horse camealong the way, and made as if to pass below us. They numbered morethan a hundred, and Jacob's heart failed him, lest some ring or buckleof our accoutrements should sparkle and catch their eyes. To shift theburden 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 lairwas in some rocks overhanging the road. By the time we looked over,the horsemen were below us, and we could see nothing of them; thoughthe sullen tramp of their horses, and the jingle of bit and spur,reached us clearly. Presently they came into sight again on the roadbeyond, 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 thatlifted me out of my moodiness. I sprang on the rock against which Iwas 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 slippeddown, sobered. 'They see us,' I cried. 'They are Leuchtenstein'sriders. 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 keepherself on her feet. 'Are you sure?' she said. The troop had haltedand were wheeling slowly and in perfect order.

  'Quite sure, my lady,' I answered, with a touch of bitterness in mytone. Why had not this happened yesterday or the day before? Then mygirl would have been saved. Now it came too late! Too late! No wonderI felt bitterly about it.

  We went down into the road on foot, a little party of nine--four womenand 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 ofplaces. We had not washed for days, and our faces were lean withfamine. Some of the women were shoeless and had their hair about theirears, while Steve was bare-headed and bare-armed, and looked so huge aruffian the stocks must have yawned for him anywhere. They drew up andgazed at us, and then Count Hugo came riding down the column and sawus.

  My lady went forward a step. 'Count Leuchtenstein,' she said, hervoice breaking; she had only seen him once, and then under the mask ofa plain name. But he was safety, honour, life now, and I think thatshe could have kissed him. I think for a little she could have falleninto his arms.

  'Countess!' he said, as he sprang from his horse in wonder. 'Is itreally you? Gott im Himmel! These are strange times. Waldgrave! Yourpardon. Ach! Have you come on foot?'

  'Not I. But these brave men have,' my lady answered, tears in hervoice.

  He looked at Steve and grunted. Then he looked at me and his eyeslightened. 'Are these all your party?' he said hurriedly.

  'All,' my lady answered in a low voice. He did not ask farther, but hesighed, and I knew that he had looked for his child. 'I came northupon a reconnaissance, and was about to turn,' he said. 'I am thankfulthat 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 halffamished.' And he called for food and wine, and served my lady withhis own hands, while he saw that we did not go without. 'Campaigner'sfare,' he said. 'But you come of a fighting stock, Countess, and canput up with it.'

  'Shame on me if I could not,' she answered.

  There was a quaver in her voice, which showed how the rencontre movedher, how full her heart was of unspoken gratitude.

  'When you have finished, we will get to horse,' he said. 'I must takeyou with me to Nuremberg, for I am not strong enough to detach aparty. But this evening we will make a long halt at Hesel, and secureyou 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 whathe answered. For I could bear no more. Marie seemed so forgotten inthis crowd, so much a thing of the past, that my gorge rose. No wordof her, no thought of her, no talk of a search party! I pictured herforlorn, helpless little figure, her pale, uncomplaining face--I andno one else; and I had to go away into the bushes to hide myself. Shewas 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 goback and look for her, myself. Now my lady was safe, there was nothingto prevent me. I had only to lie close among the rocks until CountHugo 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 theash-tree, and the woman's body lying stiff and stark on the sward. AndI burned to be there.

  Left to myself I should have gone too. But the plan was no soonerformed than shattered. While I stood, hotfoot to be about it, andpausing only to consider which way I could steal off most safely, arustling warned me that some one was coming, and before I could stir,a burly trooper broke through the bushes and confronted me. He salutedme 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 youplease.'

  I followed him, full of vexation. It was but a step into the road. Themoment I appeared, some one gave the word 'Mount!' A horse was thrustin front of me, two or three troopers who still remained afoot swungthemselves into the saddle; and I followed their example. In a tricewe were moving down the valley at a dull, steady pace--southwards,southwards. I looked back, and saw the fir trees and rocks where wehad 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 andspur. I called myself a cur, but I went on, swept away by the force ofnumbers, as the straw by the current. Once I caught Count Hugo's eyefixed on me, and I fancied he had a message for me, but I failed tointerpret it.

  Steve rode by me, and his face too was moody. I suppose that we shouldall of us have thanked God the peril was past. But my lady rode inanother part with Count Leuchtenstein and the Waldgrave; and Steveyearned, I fancy, for the old days of trouble and equality, when therewas 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 thoughtgood could come of it.

  'But it would have been looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, myfriend,' he continued. 'Tzerclas' men would have picked you up, or thepeasants killed you for a soldier, and in a month perhaps the girlwould have returned safe and sound, to find you dead.'

  'My lord!' I cried passionately, 'she saved your child. It was to heras 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 havegiven me, and go out looking for it!' he answered severely. 'LeavingScot, and Swede, and Pole, and Switzer to divide my country. Forshame! You have y
our work too, and it lies by your lady's side. See toit that you do it. For the rest I have scouts out, who know thecountry; if I learn anything through them you shall hear it. And nowof another matter. How long has the Waldgrave been like this, myfriend?'

  'Like this, my lord?' I muttered stupidly.

  He nodded. 'Yes, like this,' he repeated. 'I have heard him called abrave man. Coming of his stock, he should be; and when I saw him inTzerclas' camp he had the air of one. Now he starts at a shadow, is ina 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 sincethat he had not been himself.

  Count Hugo rubbed his chin gravely. 'It is a pity,' he said. 'We wantall--every German arm and every German head. We want you. Man alive!'he continued, roused to anger, I suppose, by my dull face, 'do youknow 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 hethought better of it and shut his lips tight. 'Very well,' he saidgrimly. 'Wait three days and you will see.'

  But in truth, I had not to wait three days. Before sunset of the nextI 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 whichruns through the valley of the Pegnitz, was such a sight as I hadnever seen. For many miles together a column of dust marked itscourse, and under this went on endless marching. We were but a link ina long chain, dragging slowly southwards. Now it was a herd ofoxen that passed along, moving tediously and painfully, driven byhalf-naked cattle-men and guarded by a troop of grimy horse. Now itwas a reinforcement of foot from Fulda, rank upon rank of shamblingmen trailing long pikes, and footsore, and parched as they were,getting over the ground in a wonderful fashion. After them would comea long string of waggons, bearing corn, and hay, and malt, and wines;all lurching slowly forward, slowly southward; often delayed, forevery quarter of a mile a horse fell or an axle broke, yet gettingforward.

  And then the most wonderful sight of all, a regiment of Swedish horsepassed us, marching from Erfurt. All their horses were grey, and alltheir head-pieces, backs and breasts of black metal, matched oneanother. As they came on through the dust with a tramp which shook theground, they sang, company by company, to the music of drums andtrumpets, a hymn, 'Versage nicht, du Haeuflein klein!' Behind them aline of light waggons carried their wives and children, also singing.And so they went by us, eight hundred swords, and I thought it amarvel I should never see beaten.

  When they were gone out of sight, there were still droves of horsesand mighty flocks of sheep to come, and cargoes of pork, and more footand horse and guns. Some companies wore buff coats and small steelcaps, and carried arquebuses; and some marched smothered in hugeheadpieces with backs and breasts to match. And besides all thethings I have mentioned and the crowds of sutlers and horse-boys thatwent with them, there were munition waggons closely guarded, andpack-horses laden with powder, and always and always waggons of cornand hay.

  And all hurrying, jostling, crawling southwards. It seemed to me thatthe world was marching southwards; that if we went on we must fall inat the end of this with every one we knew. And the thought comfortedme.

  Steve put it into words after his fashion. 'It must be a big place weare going to,' he said, about noon of the second day, 'or who is toeat all this? And do you mark, Master Martin? We meet no one comingback. All go south. This place Nuremberg that they talk of must beworth seeing.'

  'It should be,' I said.

  And after that the excitement of the march began to take hold of me. Ibegan to think and wonder, and look forward, with an eagerness I didnot understand, to the issues of this.

  We lay a night at Bamberg, where the crowd and confusion and thestress of people were so great that Steve would have it we had come toNuremberg. And certainly I had never known such a hurly-burly, norheard of it except at the great fair at Dantzic. The night after welay at Erlangen, which we found fortified, trenched, and guarded, withtroops lying in the square, and the streets turned into stables. Fromthat place to Nuremberg was a matter of ten miles only; but the presswas so great on the road that it took us a good part of the day toride from one to the other. In the open country on either side of theway strong bodies of horse and foot were disposed. It seemed to methat here was already an army and a camp.

  But when late in the afternoon we entered Nuremberg itself, and viewedthe traffic in the streets, and the endless lines of gabled houses,the splendid mansions and bridges, the climbing roofs and turrets andspires of this, the greatest city in Germany, then we thought littleof all we had seen before. Here thousands upon thousands rubbedshoulders in the streets; here continuous boats turned the river intosolid land. Here we were told were baked every day a hundred thousandloaves of bread; and I saw with my own eyes a list of a hundred andthirty-eight bakehouses. The roar of the ways, choked with soldiersand citizens, the babel of strange tongues, the clamour of bells andtrumpets, deafened us. The constant crowding and pushing and haltingturned our heads. I forgot my grief and my hope too. Who but a madmanwould look to find a single face where thousands gazed from thewindows? or could deem himself important with this swarming, teeminghive before him? Steve stared stupidly about him; I rode dazed andperplexed. The troopers laughed at us, or promised us greater thingswhen we should see the Swedish Lager outside the town, andWallenstein's great camp arrayed against it. But I noticed that eventhey, as we drew nearer to the heart of the city, fell silent attimes, and looked at one another, surprised at the great influx ofpeople and the shifting scenes which the streets presented.

  For myself and Steve and the men, we were as good as nought. A housein the Ritter-Strasse was assigned to my lady for her quarters--no onecould lodge in the city without the leave of the magistrates; and wewere glad to get into it and cool our dizzy heads, and look at oneanother. Count Hugo stayed awhile, standing with my lady and theWaldgrave in one of the great oriels that overlooked the street. But amounted messenger, sent on from the Town House, summoned him, and hetook horse again for the camp. I do not know what we should have donewithout him at entering. The soldiers, who crowded the streets, showedscant respect for names, and would as soon have jostled my lady as acitizen's wife; but wherever he came hats were doffed and voiceslowered, 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 thatnothing in my life would ever surprise me again. But next day my ladywent up to the Burg on the hill in the middle of the city to lookabroad, and took Steve and myself with her. And then I found that Ihad 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 hadexpected. But outside the wall I now saw a second city of huts andtents, with a great earthwork about it, and bastions and demilunes andpicquets posted.

  This was the Swedish Lager. It lay principally to the south of thecity proper, though on all sides it encircled it more or less. Theytold me that there lay in it about forty thousand soldiers and twentythousand horses, and twenty thousand camp followers; but the numberwas constantly increasing, death and disease notwithstanding, so thatit presently stood as high as sixty thousand fighting men and half asmany followers, to say nothing of the garrison that lay in the city,or the troops posted to guard the approaches. It seemed to me, gazingover that mighty multitude from the top of the hill, that nothingcould resist such a force; and I looked abroad with curiosity for theenemy.

  I expected to view his army cheek by jowl with us; and I wasdisappointed when I saw beyond our camp to southward, where I was toldhe lay, only a clear plain with the little river Rednitz flowingthrough it. This plain was a league and more in width, and it wasempty of men. Beyond it rose a black wooded ridge, very steep andhairy.

  My lady explained that Wallenstein's army lay along thisridge--seventy thousand men, and forty thousand horses, andWallenstein himself. His camp we heard was eight miles round, thefront g
uarded by a line of cannon, and taking in whole villages andcastles. 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; thatall served for booty; and that the troopers that sacked Magdeburg andfollowed Tilly were, beside these, gentle and kindly men.

  'God help us!' my lady cried fervently. 'God help this great city! Godhelp the North! Never was such a battle fought as must be foughthere!'

  We went down very much sobered, filled with awe and wonder andgreat 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 hustledand harried the Protestants; had dragooned Donauwoerth, and held downBohemia, and plundered the Palatinate, and crushed the King ofDenmark, and wherever there was a weak Protestant state had pressedsorely on it. Then one short year before I stood on the Burg above thePegnitz, the Protestant king had come out of the North like athunderbolt, had shattered in a month the Papist armies, had run likea devouring fire down the Priests' Lane, rushed over Bohemia, shakenthe Emperor on his throne!

  But could he maintain himself? That was now to be seen. To theEmperor's help had come all who loved the old system, and would haveit that the south was Germany; all who wished to chain men's minds andsaw their profit in the shadow of the imperial throne; all who livedby license and plunder, and reckoned a mass to-day against a murderto-morrow. All these had come, from the great Duke of Friedlandgrasping at empire, to the meanest freebooter with peasant's blood onhis hands and in his veins; and there they lay opposite us,impregnably placed on the Burgstall, waiting patiently until famineand the sword should weaken the fair city, and enable them to plungetheir vulture's talons into its vitals.

  No wonder that in Nuremberg the citizens could be distinguished fromthe soldiers by their careworn faces; or that many a man stood morningand 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 firewould spare it. The magistrates who had staked all--their own and thecity's--on this cast, went about with stern, grave faces and fearedalmost to meet the public eye. With a doubled population, with a hugearmy to feed, with order to keep, with houses and wives and daughtersof their own to protect, with sack and storm looming luridly in thefuture, who had cares like theirs?

  One man only, and him I saw as we went home from the Burg. It was nearthe foot of the Burg hill, where the strasse meets three other ways.At that time Count Tilly's crooked, dwarfish figure and pale horse'sface, and the great hat and boots which seemed to swallow him up, werefresh in my mind; and sometimes I had wondered whether this othergreat commander were like him. Well, I was to know; for through thecrowd at the junction of these four roads, while we stood waiting topass, there came a man on a white horse, followed by half a score ofothers on horseback; and in a moment I knew from the shouting and theway 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; atall man and rather bulky, his face massive and fleshy, with a closemoustache trimmed to a point and a small tuft on his chin. His aspectwas grave; he looked about him with a calm eye, and the shouting didnot seem to move him. They told me that it was Ba[=n]er, the SwedishGeneral, 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 andserene brow and wholesome strength, I traced the nearest likeness tothe king.

  And so I first saw the great Gustavus Adolphus. It was said that hewould at times fall into fits of Berserk rage, and that in the fieldhe was another man, keen as his sword, swift as fire, pitiless tothose who flinched, among the foremost in the charge, a verythunderbolt of war. But as I saw him taking papers from women's handsat 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 nobrawler; nor would any one, to see him then, have thought that thiswas the lion of the north who had dashed the pride of Pappenheim andflung aside the firebrands of the south. Or that even now he had onhis shoulders the burden of two great nations and the fate of amillion of men.