"I am too much honoured by such attendance—I beseech you to retire, and send to me the soldier, my fellow prisoner. I recognise in you the daughters of the count, who so kindly saved me, when our wounded—poor souls!—were so mercilessly slaughtered at Boitzenburg yesterday."
"Our father has desired us alone to attend you, and, as his countryman, we quite love you already," said the frank Gabrielle, with one of her delightful smiles; "you can have no other attendants save us, or Corporal Spürrledter, and perhaps the soldier who accompanies you."
"Honest Dandy Dreghorn?"
"But both you and he," added the graver and statelier Ernestine, "must remain concealed closely; for, as Count Tilly will be here in the course of to-morrow, to explain reasons for our request were a needless task."
"Tilly!" I reiterated, giving a convulsive start, and glancing about for my claymore and biodag, on hearing the name of that terrible leader of the great crusade against the Protestants of Germany and the liberties of Northern Europe. "If Tilly is to pass this way, then Dandy and I have been too long here, for to the Protestant soldiers of Christian IV. he shews such mercy as a cat shews to mice. Ah! he is a merciless old savage, and will shoot us as a mere matter of course."
"John of Tserclä, the Count Tilly, is general of all the armies of the Empire!" said Ernestine proudly, and with an air of pique.
"Ah! sister, but he is very cruel," urged Gabrielle, gently.
"Yet fear nothing, sir; my father's influence will protect, and our care conceal you. Simply, he thinks it better or safer, that Tilly should not know you are here."
"But take the nice little breakfast we have prepared for you," said the childlike Gabrielle; "to-morrow you will be stronger, and we shall all talk more together."
Ernestine stood, for she seemed all unused to stoop; but Gabrielle knelt down by the side of the low bed, and, holding before me the silver salver, gave me a green crystal cup containing a certain alimentary infusion named coffee, which was to be taken warm and sweetened with Canary sugar, which, like the beverage itself, was then a luxury unknown among us in Scotland. I have since been told, by those cavaliers of our army who were taken prisoners at Worcester, that this coffee has been introduced into England by a person named Pasqua, a Greek, who came to London in 1650, with a Turkish merchant named Edwardes, and who sold it at his shop in Lombard-street, as a medicated restorative for the sick. Never having tasted any thing of this kind before, I felt so wonderfully refreshed and invigorated by one cup, that I was easily prevailed on to take a second, with a little biscuit of honey and flour.