"And what have you done with your prisoners?" inquired Anton.
The locksmith scratched his ear and twitched his cap as he answered in a crestfallen tone: "So you have not yet heard? The very first night came a message from the enemy to the effect that if we did not give up the nobleman at once, they would march upon us with their whole force and set fire to our barns. I opposed the measure, and so did our captain; but every one who had a barn raised an outcry, and the end of it was that the town had to come to terms with Von Tarow. He gave his word that he and his would undertake nothing further against us, and then we took him over the bridge and let him go."
"So he is free, false man that he is!" cried Anton, in indignation.
"Yes, indeed," said the locksmith; "he is on his estate again, and has a number of young gentlemen about him. They ride with their cockades over the fields just as they did before. Tarowski is a cunning man, who can open every castle door with a stroke of a pen, and get on with every one. There's no reaching him."
Of course, farming suffered from these warlike preparations. Anton insisted, indeed, upon what was absolutely necessary being done, but he felt that a time was come when anxiety about individual profit and loss vanished before graver terrors. The rumors, which grew daily more threatening, kept him, and those around him, in ever-increasing excitement; and at last they fell into a habitual state of feverish suspense, in which the future was looked forward to with reckless indifference, and the discomforts of the present endured as matter of course.
But more strongly than on any of the men around did this general fever seize upon Lenore. Since the day that she had waited for the absent Anton, she had seemed to begin a new life. Her mother mourned and despaired, but the daughter's young heart beat high against the storm, and the excitement was to her a wild enjoyment, to which she gave herself up, heart and soul. She was out of doors the whole day long, whatever the weather, and at the tavern door as often as the worst drunkard in the village, for each day the landlord and his wife had something new to tell her. Ever since Karl had mounted his hussar coat, she treated him with the familiarity of a comrade, and when he held a consultation with the forester, her fair head was put together with theirs. The three spent many an hour in council of war in Karl's room or in the farm-yard, the men listening with reverence to her courageous suggestions, and requesting her opinion as to whether Ignatz, Gottlieb, or Blasius from the village deserved to be trusted with a gun. It was in vain that the baroness remonstrated with her martial daughter; in vain that Anton tried to check her ardor; for, the greater his own, the more the mood displeased him in the young lady. Again, she struck him as too vehement and bold; nor did he disguise his views. Upon that she subsided a little, and tried to conceal her warlike tendencies from him, but they did not really abate. She would have dearly liked to go with him to Neudorf and Kunau, to play at soldiers there, but Anton, once made so happy by her company, protested so strongly against the step that the young lady had to turn back at the end of the village.
However, on the day when the first drill of the men belonging to the estate was to take place, Lenore came out with a soldier's cap and a light sword, took her pony out of the stable, and said to Anton, "I shall exercise with you."
"Pray do nothing of the kind," replied he.
"Indeed I will," replied Lenore, saucily. "You want men, and I can do as good service as if I were one."
"But, dear young lady, it is so singular!"