My Lady Rotha: A Romance

by Stanley John Weyman

CHAPTER XXX.

[THE END OF THE DAY.]

Ludwig was found dead in the hall, slain on the spot by the explosion of the petard which had driven in the door. His two comrades, less fortunate, were taken alive, and, with the hag who kept the house, were hanged within the hour on the elms in St. Austin's churchyard. The Waldgrave and Neumann, both wounded, the former by the explosion and the latter in his desperate resistance, were captured and held for trial. But Tzerclas, the chief of all, arch-tempter and arch-traitor, vanished in the confusion of the assault, and made his escape, no one knew how. Some said that he went by way of a secret passage known only to himself; some, that he had a compact with the devil, and vanished by his aid; some, that he had friends in the crowd who sheltered him. For my part, I set down his disappearance to his own cool wits and iron nerves, and asked no further explanation.

For an hour the little dark court behind the ill-omened house seethed with a furious mob. No sooner were one party satisfied than another swept in with links and torches and ransacked the house, tore down the panels, groped through the cellars, and probed the chimneys; all with so much rage, and with gestures so wild and extravagant, that an indifferent spectator might have thought them mad. Nor were those who did these things of the lowest class; on the contrary, they were mostly burghers and traders, solid townsfolk and their apprentices, men who, with wives and daughters and sweethearts, could not sleep at night for thoughts of storm and sack, and in whom the bare idea that they had amongst them wretches ready to open the gates, was enough to kindle every fierce and cruel passion.

I stood for a time unnoticed, gazing at the scene in a kind of stupor, which the noise and tumult aggravated. Little by little, however, the cool air did its work; memory and reason began to return, and, with anxiety awaking in my breast, I looked round for Herr Krapp. Presently I saw him coming towards me with a leather flask in his hand.

'Drink some of this,' he said, looking at me keenly. 'Why so wild, man?'

'The girl?' I stammered. I had not spoken before since my release, and my voice sounded strange and unnatural.

'She is safe,' he answered, nodding kindly. 'I was at my window when she swung herself on to the roof by the rope which you left hanging. Donner! you may be proud of her! But she was distraught, or she would not have tried such a feat. She must inevitably have fallen if I had not seen her. I called out to her to stand still and hold fast; and my son, who had come upstairs, ran down for a twelve-foot pike. We thrust that out to her, and, holding it, she tottered along the pike to my window, where I caught her skirts, and we dragged her in in a moment.'

I shuddered, remembering how I had suffered, hanging above the yawning street. 'I suppose that it was she who warned you and sent you here?' I said.

'No,' he answered. 'This house had been watched for two days, though I did not tell you so. We had been suspicious of it for a week or more, or I should not have helped you into a neighbour's house as I did. However, all is well that ends well; and though we have not got that bloodthirsty villain to hang, we have stopped his plans for this time.'

He was just proposing that, if I now felt able, I should return to my lady's, when a rush of people from the house almost carried me off my feet. In a moment we were pushed aside and squeezed against the wall. A hoarse yell, like the cry of a wild beast, rose from the crowd, a hundred hands were brandished in the air, weapons appeared as if by magic. The glare of torches, falling on the raging sea of men, picked out here and there a scared face, a wandering eye; but for the most part the mob seemed to feel only one passion--the thirst for blood.

'What is it?' I shouted in Herr Krapp's ear.

'The prisoners,' he answered. 'They are bringing them out. Your friend the Waldgrave, and the other. They will need a guard.'

And truly it was a grim thing to see men make at them, striking over the shoulders of the guard, leaping at them wolf-like, with burning eyes and gnashing teeth, striving to tear them with naked hands. Down the narrow passage to the churchyard the soldiers had an easy task; but in the open graveyard, whither Herr Krapp and I followed slowly, the party were flung this way and that, and tossed to and fro--though they were strong men, armed, and numbered three or four score--like a cork floating on rapids. Their way lay through the Ritter Strasse, and I went with them so far. Though it was midnight, the town, easily roused from its feverish sleep, was up and waking. Scared faces looked from windows, from eaves, from the very roofs. Men who had snatched up their arms and left their clothes peered from doorways. The roar of the mob, as it swayed through narrow ways, rose and fell by turns, now loud as the booming of cavern-waves, now so low that it left the air quivering.

When it died away at last towards the Burg, I took leave of Herr Krapp, and hurried to my lady's, passing the threshold in a tumult of memories, of emotions, and thankfulness. I could fancy that I had lived an age since I last crossed it--eight hours before. The house, like every other house, was up. Herr Krapp had sent the news of my escape before me, and I looked forward with a tremulous, foolish expectation that was not far from tears to the first words two women would say to me.

But though men and women met me with hearty greetings on the threshold, on the stairs, on the landing, and Steve clapped me on the back until I coughed again, they did not appear. It was after midnight, but the house was still lighted as if the sun had just set, and I went up to the long parlour that looked on the street. My heart beat, and my face grew hot as I entered; but I might have spared myself. There was only Fraulein Max in the room.

She came towards me, blinking. 'So Sancho Panza has turned knight-errant,' she said with a sneer, 'as well as Governor?'

I did not understand her, and I asked gently where my lady was.

She laughed in her gibing way. 'You beg for a stone and expect bread,' she said. 'You care no more where my lady is than where I am! You mean, where is your Romanist chit, with her white face and wheedling ways.'

I saw that she was bursting with spite; that Marie's return and the stir made about it had been too much for her small, jealous nature, and I was not for answering her. She was out of favour; let her spit, her venom would be gone the sooner. But she had not done yet.

'Of course she has had some wonderful adventures!' she continued, her face working with malice and ill-nature. 'And we are all to admire her. But to a lover does she not seem somewhat blandula, vagula? Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Dolus latet in generalibus, the Countess says'--and here the Dutch girl mimicked my lady, her eyes gleaming with scorn. 'But dolus latet in virginibus, too, Master Martin, as you will find some day! Oh, a great escape, a heroic escape,--but from her friends!'

'If you mean to infer, Fraulein----' I said hotly.

'Oh, I infer nothing. I leave you to do that!' she replied, smirking. 'But pigs go back to the dirt, I read. You know where you found her and the brat!'

'I know where we should all be to-day,' I cried, trembling with indignation, 'if it had not been for her!'

'Perhaps not worse off than we are now,' she snapped. 'However, keep your eyes shut, if it pleases you.'

My raised voice had reached the Countess's chamber, and as Fraulein Max, giggling spitefully, went out through one door the other opened and stood open. My anger melted away. I stood trembling, and looking, and waiting.

They came in together, my lady with her arm round Marie, the two women I loved best in the world. I have heard it said that evil runs to evil as drops of water to one another. But the saying is equally true of good. Little had I thought, a few weeks back, that my lady would come to treat the outcast girl from Klink's as a friend; nor I believe were there ever two people less alike, and yet both good, than these two. But that one quality--which is so quick to see its face mirrored in another's heart--had brought them close together, and made each to recognise the other; so that, as they came in to me, there was not a line of my lady's figure, not a curve of her head, not a glance of her proud eyes, that was not in sympathy with the girl who clung to her--Romanist stranger, low born as she was. I looked and worshipped, and would have changed nothing. I found the dignity of the one as beautiful as the dependence of the other.

Not a word was spoken. I had wondered what they would say to me--and they said nothing. But my lady put her into my arms, and she clung to me, hiding her face.

The Countess laughed, yet there were tears in her voice. 'Be happy,' she said. 'Child, from the day you were lost he never forgave me. Martin, see where the rope has cut her wrist. She did it to save you.'

'And myself!' Marie whispered on my breast.

'No!' my lady said. 'I will not have it so! You will spoil both him and my love-story. Per tecta, per terram, you have sought one another. You have gone down sub orco. You have bought one another back from death, as Alcestis bought her husband Admetus. At the first it was a gold chain that linked you together, soon----'

I felt Marie start in my arms. She freed herself gently, and looked at my lady with trouble in her eyes. 'Oh,' she said, 'I had forgotten!'

'What?' the Countess said. 'What have you forgotten?'

'The child!' Marie replied, clasping her hands. 'I should have told you before!'

'You have had no time to tell us much!' my lady answered smiling. 'And you are trembling like an aspen now. Sit down, girl. Sit down at once!' she continued imperatively. 'Or, no! You shall go to your bed, and we will hear it in the morning.'

But Marie seemed so much distressed by this that my lady did not insist; and in a few minutes the girl had told us a tale so remarkable that consideration of her fatigue was swallowed up in wonder.

'It was the night I was lost,' she said; 'the night when the alarm was given on the hill, and we rode down it. I clung to my saddle--it was all I could do--and remember only a dreadful shock, from which I recovered to find myself lying in the road, shaken and bruised. Fear of those whom I believed to be behind us was still in my mind, and I rose, giddy and confused, my one thought to get off the road. As I staggered towards the bank, however, I stumbled over something. To my horror I found that it was a woman. She was dead or senseless, but she had a child in her arms; it cried as I felt her face. I dared not stay, but, on the impulse of the moment--I could not move the woman, and I expected our pursuers to ride down the hill each instant--I snatched the child up and ran into the brushwood. After that I only remember stumbling blindly on through bog and fern, often falling in my haste, but always rising and pushing on. I heard cries behind me, but they only spurred me to greater exertions. At last I reached a little wood, and there, unable to go farther, I sank down, exhausted, and, I suppose, lost my senses, for I awoke, chilled and aching, in the first grey dawn. The leaves were black overhead, but the white birch trunks round me glimmered like pale ghosts. Something stirred in my arms. I looked down, and saw the face of my child--the child I found in the wood by Vach.'

'What!' the Countess cried, rising and staring at her. 'Impossible! Your wits were straying, girl. It was some other child.'

But Marie shook her head gently. 'No, my lady,' she said. 'It was my child.'

'Count Leuchtenstein's?'

'Yes, if the child I found was his.'

'But how--did it come where you found it?' the Countess asked.

'I think that the woman whom I left in the road was the poor creature who used to beg at our house in the camp,' Marie answered, hesitating somewhat--'the wife of the man whom General Tzerclas hung, my lady. I saw her face by a glimmer of light only, and, at the moment, I thought nothing. Afterwards it flashed across me that she was that woman. If so, I think that she stole the child to avenge herself. She thought that we were General Tzerclas' friends.'

'But then where is the child?' my lady exclaimed, her eyes shining. I was excited myself; but the delight, the pleasure which I saw in her face took me by surprise. I stared at her, thinking that I had never seen her look so beautiful.

Then, as Marie answered, her face fell. 'I do not know,' my girl said. 'After a time I found my way back to the road, but I had scarcely set foot on it when General Tzerclas' troopers surprised me. I gave myself up for lost; I thought that he would kill me. But he only gibed at me, until I almost died of fear, and then he bade one of his men take me up behind him. They carried me with them to the camp outside this city, and three days ago brought me in and shut me up in that house.'

'But the child?' my lady cried. 'What of it?'

'He took it from me,' Marie said. 'I have never seen it since, but I think that he has it in the camp.'

'Does he know whose child it is?'

'I told him,' Marie replied. 'Otherwise they might have let it die on the road. It was a burden to them.'

The Countess shuddered, but in a moment recovered herself. '"While there is life there is hope,"' she said. 'Martin, here is more work for you. We will leave no stone unturned. Count Leuchtenstein must know, of course, but I will tell him myself. If we could get the child back and hand it safe and sound to its father, it would be---- Perhaps the Waldgrave may be able to help us?'

'I think that he will need all his wits to help himself,' I said bluntly.

'Why?' my lady questioned, looking at me in wonder.

'Why?' I cried in astonishment. 'Have you heard nothing about him, my lady?'

'Nothing,' she said.

'Not that he was taken to-night, in Tzerclas' company,' I answered, 'and is a prisoner at this moment at the Burg, charged, along with the villain Neumann, with a plot to admit the enemy into the city?'

My lady sat down, her face pale, her aspect changed, as the countryside changes when the sun goes down. 'He was there' she muttered--'with Tzerclas?'

I nodded.

'The Waldgrave Rupert--my cousin?' she murmured, as if the thing passed the bounds of reason.

'Yes, my lady,' I said, as gently as I could. 'But he is mad. I am assured that he is mad. He has been mad for weeks past. We know it. We have known it. Besides, he knew nothing, I am sure, of Tzerclas' plans.'

'But--he was there!' she cried. 'He was one of those two men they carried by? One of those!'

'Yes,' I said.

She sat for a moment stricken and silent, the ghost of herself. Then, in a voice little above a whisper, she asked what they would do to him.

I shrugged my shoulders. To be candid, I had not given the Waldgrave much thought, though in a way he had saved my life. Now, the longer I considered the matter, the less room for comfort I found. Certainly he was mad. We knew him to be mad. But how were we to persuade others? For weeks his bodily health had been good; he had carried himself indoors and out-of-doors like a sane man; he had done duty in the trenches, and mixed, though grudgingly, with his fellows, and gone about the ordinary business of life. How, in the face of all this, could we prove him mad, or make his judges, stern men, fighting with their backs to the wall, see the man as we saw him?

'I suppose that there will be a trial?' my lady said at last, breaking the silence.

I told her yes--at once. 'The town is in a frenzy of rage,' I continued. 'The guards had a hard task to save them to-night. Perhaps Prince Bernard of Weimar----'

'Don't count on him,' my lady answered. 'He is as hard as he is gallant. He would hang his brother if he thought him guilty of such a thing as this. No; our only hope is in'--she hesitated an instant, and then ended the sentence abruptly--'Count Leuchtenstein. You must go to him, Martin, at seven, or as soon after as you can catch him. He is a just man, and he has watched the Waldgrave and noticed him to be odd. The court will hear him. If not, I know no better plan.'

Nor did I, and I said I would go; and shortly afterwards I took my leave. But as I crept to my bed at last, the clocks striking two, and my head athrob with excitement and gratitude, I wondered what was in my lady's mind. Remembering the Waldgrave's gallant presence and manly grace, recalling his hopes, his courage, and his overweening confidence, as displayed in those last days at Heritzburg, I could feel no surprise that so sad a downfall touched her heart. But--was that all? Once I had deemed him the man to win her. Then I had seen good cause to think otherwise. Now again I began to fancy that his mishaps might be crowned with a happiness which fortune had denied to him in his days of success.