“Ay, Lord Gyldenlöve, they helped me—Lord Gyldenlöve, they helped me, may God find them for it! ‘Daniel,’ they said, ‘Daniel, go home and pick the maggots out of your damson prunes!’ They had believed I had too much tact to come here with my buffoonery. ’Twas all very well if they thought me fit to wear cap and bells at a merry bout, but when they were on duty I was to keep out of their sight. Now, was that well spoken, Lord Gyldenlöve? No, ’twas a sin, a sin! Even if they’d made free with me in the wine-cellars, they said, I needn’t think I was one of them, or that I could be with them when they were at their post. I was too presumptuous for them, Lord Gyldenlöve! I’d best not force myself into their company, for they needed no merry-andrew here. That’s what they told me, Lord Gyldenlöve! And yet I asked but to risk my life side by side with the other citizens.”
“Oh, ay,” said Ulrik Frederik, yawning, “I can well understand that it vexes you to have no part in it all. You might find it irksome to sweat over your desk while the fate of the realm is decided here on the ramparts. Look you, you shall be in it! For—” He broke off and looked at Daniel with suspicion. “There’s no foul play, sirrah?”
The little man stamped the ground in his rage and gritted his teeth, his face pale as a whitewashed wall.
“Come, come,” Ulrik Frederik went on, “I trust you, but you can scarce expect me to put faith in your word as if ’twere that of a gentleman. And remember, ’twas your own that scorned you first. Hush!”
From a bastion at East Gate boomed a shot, the first that had been fired in this war. Ulrik Frederik drew himself up, while the blood rushed to his face. He looked after the white smoke with eager, fascinated eyes, and when he spoke there was a strange tremor in his voice.
“Daniel,” he said, “toward noon you can report to me, and think no more of what I said.”
Daniel looked admiringly after him, then sighed deeply, sat down in the grass, and wept as an unhappy child weeps.
In the afternoon of the same day, a fitful wind blew through the streets of the city, whirling up clouds of dust, whittlings, and bits of straw, and carrying them hither and thither. It tore the tiles from the roofs, drove the smoke down the chimneys, and wrought sad havoc with the tradesmen’s signs. The long, dull-blue pennants of the dyers were flung out on the breeze and fell down again in spirals that tightened around their quivering staffs. The turners’ spinning-wheels rocked and swayed; hairy tails flapped over the doors of the furriers, and the resplendent glass suns of the glaziers swung in a restless glitter that vied with the polished basins of the barber-surgeons. Doors and shutters were slamming in the back-yards. The chickens hid their heads under barrels and sheds, and even the pigs grew uneasy in their pens, when the wind howled through sunlit cracks and gaping joints.
The storm brought an oppressive heat. Within the houses the people were gasping for breath, and only the flies were buzzing about cheerfully in the sultry atmosphere. The streets were unendurable, the porches were draughty, and hence people who possessed gardens preferred to seek shelter there.