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 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.