Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  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.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  THE FACE AT THE WINDOW.

  After this it fared with us as it fares at last with the driftwood that chance or the woodman’s axe has given to a forest stream in Heritzburg. After rippling over the shallows and shooting giddily down slopes — or perchance lying cooped for days in some dark bend, until the splash of the otter or the spring freshet has sent it dancing on in sunshine and shadow — it reaches at last the Werra. It floats out on the bosom of the great stream, and no longer tossed and chafed by each tiny pebble, feels the force of wind and stream — the great forces of the world. The banks recede from sight, and one of a million atoms, it is borne on gently and irresistibly, whither it does not know. So it was with us. From the day we fell in with Count Leuchtenstein and set our faces towards Nuremberg, and in a greater degree after we reached that city, we embarked on a wider current of adventure, a fuller and less selfish life. If we had still our own cares and griefs, hopes and perils — as must be the case, I suppose, until we die — we had other common ones which we shared with tens of thousands, rich and poor, gentle and simple. We had to dread sack and storm; we prayed for relief and safety in company with all who rose and lay down within the walls. When a hundred waggons of corn slipped through the Croats and came in, or Duke Bernard of Weimar beat up a corner of the Burgstall and gave Wallenstein a bad night, we ran out into the streets to tell and hear the news. Similarly, when tidings came that Tzerclas with his two thousand ruffians had burned the King of Sweden’s colours, put on green sashes, and marched into the enemy’s camp, we were not alone in our gloomy anticipations. We still had our private adventures, and I am going to tell them. But besides these, it should be remembered that we ran the risks, and rose every morning fresh to the fears, of Nuremberg. When bread rose to ten, to fifteen, to twenty times its normal price; when the city, where many died every day of famine, plague, and wounds, began to groan and heave in its misery; when through all the country round the peasants crawled and died among the dead; when Wallenstein, that dark man, heedless of the fearful mortality in his own camp, still sat implacable on the heights and refused all the king’s invitations to battle, we grew pale and gloomy, stern-eyed and thin-cheeked with the rest. We dreamed of Magdeburg as they did; and as the hot August days passed slowly over the starving city and still no end appeared, but only with each day some addition of misery, we felt our hearts sink in unison with theirs.

  And we had to share, not their lot only, but their labours. We had not been in the town twenty-four hours before Steve, Jacob, and Ernst were enrolled in the town militia; to me, either out of respect to my lady, or on account of my stature, a commission as lieutenant was granted. We drilled every morning from six o’clock until eight in the fields outside the New Gate; the others went again at sunset to practise their weapons, but I was exempt from this drill, that the women might not be left alone. At all times we had our appointed rendezvous in case of alarm or assault. The Swedish veterans strolled out of the camp and stood to laugh at our clumsiness. But the excellent order which prevailed among them made them favourites, and we let them laugh, and laughed again.

  The Waldgrave, who had long had Duke Bernard’s promise, received a regiment of horse, so that he lay in the camp and should have been a contented man, since his strength had come back to him. But to my surprise he showed signs of lukewarmness. He seemed little interested in the service, and was often at my lady’s house in the Ritter Strasse, when he would have been better at his post. At first I set this down to his passion for my lady, and it seemed excusable; but within a week I stood convinced that this no longer troubled him. He paid scant attention to her, but would sit for hours looking moodily into the street. And I — and not I alone — began to watch him closely.

  I soon found that Count Hugo was right. The once gallant and splendid young fellow was a changed man. He was still comely and a brave figure, but the spirit in him was quenched. He was nervous, absent, irritable. His eyes had a wild look; on strangers he made an unfavourable impression. Doubtless, though his wounds had healed, there remained some subtle injury that spoiled the man; and often I caught my lady looking at him sadly, and knew that I was not the only one with cause for mourning.

  But how strange he was we did not know until a certain day, when my lady and I were engaged together over some accounts. It was evening, and the three men were away drilling. The house was very quiet. Suddenly he flung in upon us with a great noise, his colour high, his eyes glittering. His first action was to throw his feathered hat on one chair, and himself into another.

  ‘I’ve seen him!’ he said. ‘Himmel! he is a clever fellow. He will worst you, cousin, yet — see if he does not. Oh, he is a clever one!’

  ‘Who?’ my lady said, looking at him in some displeasure.

  ‘Who? Tzerclas, to be sure!’ he answered, chuckling.

  ‘You have seen him!’ she exclaimed, rising.

  ‘Of course I have!’ he answered. ‘And you will see him too, one of these days.’

  My lady looked at me, frowning. But I shook my head. He was not drunk.

  ‘Where?’ she asked, after a pause. ‘Where did you see him, Rupert?’

  ‘In the street — where you see other men,’ he answered, chuckling again. ‘He should not be there, but who is to keep him out? He is too clever. He will get his way in the end, see if he does not!’

  ‘Rupert!’ my lady cried in wrathful amazement, ‘to hear you, one would suppose you admired him.’

  ‘So I do,’ he replied coolly. ‘Why not? He has all the wits of the family. He is as cunning as the devil. Take a hint, cousin; put yourself on the right side. He will win in the end!’ And the Waldgrave rose restlessly from his chair, and, going to the window, began to whistle.

  My lady came swiftly to me, and it grieved me to see the pain and woe in her face.

  ‘Is he mad?’ she muttered.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Do you think he has really seen him?’ she whispered. We both stood with our eyes on him.

  ‘I fear so, my lady,’ I said with reluctance.

  ‘But it would
cost him his life,’ she muttered eagerly, ‘if he were found here!’

  ‘He is a bold man,’ I answered.

  ‘Ah! so was he — once,’ she replied in a peculiar tone, and she pointed stealthily to the unconscious man in the window. ‘A month ago he would have taken him by the throat anywhere. What has come to him?’

  ‘God knows,’ I answered reverently. ‘Grant only he may do us no harm!’

  He turned round at that, humming gaily, and went out, seeming almost unconscious of our presence; and I made as light of the matter to my lady as I could. But Tzerclas in the city, the Waldgrave mad, or at any rate not sane, and last, but not least, the strange light in which the latter chose to regard the former, were circumstances I could not easily digest. They filled me with uneasy fears and surmises. I began to perambulate the crowd, seeking furtively for a face; and was entirely determined what I would do if I found it. The town was full, as all besieged cities are, of rumours of spies and treachery, and of reported overtures made now to the city behind the back of the army, and now to the army to betray the city. A single word of denunciation, and Tzerclas’ life would not be worth three minutes’ purchase — a rope and the nearest butcher’s hook would end it. My mind was made up to say the word.

  I suppose I had been going about in this state of vigilance three days or more, when something, but not the thing I sought, rewarded it. At the time I was on my way back from morning drill. It was a little after eight, and the streets and the people wore an air bright, yet haggard. Night, with its perils, was over; day, with its privations, lay before us. My mind was on the common fortunes, but I suppose my eyes were mechanically doing their work, for on a sudden I saw something at a window, took perhaps half a step, and stopped as if I had been shot.

  I had seen Marie’s face! Nay, I still saw it, while a man might count two. Then it was gone. And I stood gasping.