Undeterred by their jesting, I examined all the doors of the empty flats below our billet; but found no trace of the one I looked for. Every chamber appeared to have been long deserted; the walls were damp; the dust lay on the floors; there was rust on the andirons and grates, and spiders had spun their webs across the small thick panes of the windows. Though completely silenced by the disappearance of the chamber, and by the consequent jests, laughter, and disbelief of my friends, I was not the less convinced that there lurked some strange mystery in the lady's concealment, and the Hausmeister's connivance thereat.
This mystery I secretly resolved to probe and unravel. It was doubtless a very impertinent determination; but there was less beard then on my chin than now, besides I was very heedless and rash.
I applied my powers of persuasion to the old housekeeper; but she was deaf as a cannon, shook her paralytic head, determined not to understand me, and pouched with true German avidity a gold Scottish noble, or a twelve shilling piece, which I gave her in mistake for a dog-dollar.
The old pile of building became invested with an interest which otherwise it would never have possessed. My friends, who frequently discovered me searching for the lost chamber, laughed at me for a time without mercy; and none entered more into their spirit of raillery than Otto Roskilde, who swore that it was a spirit I had seen, a Danish Trold from Juteland—a spirit of the Elbe—a white woman from the forests of Bremen—or a Trold, and nothing but a Trold!
Rather provoked by all this, I frequently ascended and descended the staircase alone; examined all the doors, and tapped on the walls of the desolate rooms; listened for a sound, but heard none save the guttural voices of the people in the Platz the croaking of the frogs in the canal, or the hoarser croak of Roskilde's old timber-toned housekeeper, dame Krumpel, singing a monotonous ditty of Holstein to the birr of her spinning-wheel. My beauty was certainly not in the apartments of her master; he had but two, and I had taken the liberty of examining them both, twenty times. Having been educated at the college of James IV., and moreover been a residenter in "the brave city" of Aberdeen for so many years, I considered myself more than usually acute; but I was now forced to confess, that with all the knowledge of the world I had gathered at the London of the North, in this affair of "my countess" (as Ian and Angus named her), I was completely baffled.
At Glückstadt on the Elbe we lay in quarters for some time, during which we improved in all points of discipline, according to the rules of war then practised by all noble cavaliers of the Scottish nation, who had first carried them into the armies of northern Europe.
By speaking our pure old Lowland language, I found little or no difficulty in making myself understood by the Danish officers, and by the brave and honest Holsteiners, whose peculiar dialect of the German I soon acquired.
Our pay was poor. A captain had about £130 per annum, and mine, as ensign of musketeers, was only a slet-dollar per day, out of which I had to furnish myself with wine and beer; but we had come to fight for honour and glory, not for the base lucre or copper skillings—for Elizabeth Stuart, and her uncle, the brave king Christian—for the liberties of Germany and the freedom of the Protestant religion—for, Vivat! we were all true Scottish cavaliers. Yet there were many among us who, when the season became moist and the marsh fevers thinned our ranks, grumbled sorely, and openly averred we would have been better at home, fighting our own neighbours, the English, than gasping among the frowsy fogs of Holstein.