We are left to imagine the despairing cries he may have uttered to God for pity, and to man for help—cries heard only by the wild and the flitting seabirds; we are left to imagine the burning thirst that must have scorched his vitals, and the complication of agony endured by him from so many wounds and sores; and, greater yet than all, the scorpion's sting of wakened conscience, that, like boiling lead, and falling drop by drop upon his breast, must have tortured his dying hours—for they were many.
Why pursue further this revolting description of the wrath and retribution exercised by fate upon his miserable frame? Blind, for the gulls had torn his eyes from their sockets; maimed, for his limbs had been shattered by falling into the shallow water; tortured to madness by thirst, by the reptiles and salt that festered together in his wounds—he was found by the sailors of Sir Nickelas, who could only survey him with horror and astonishment, as he lay dying and despairing with his battered frame partly merged in the rippling water.
One, less feeling than his companions, stirred Bandolo with an oar, and he immediately expired. Then a shot was attached to his heels, and, dragged off the shelf of rock by a boat-hook, the body was immediately buried in the sea.
It was not for some months after this, that I learned this terrible sequel to the story of his fate, and to our adventure on the Stubbenkamer.
CHAPTER XLV.
THE BLACK PLAGUE.
Believing that Bandolo had perished at the moment he disappeared over the Stubbenkamer, we descended the Kœningstuhl, and took the direct road along the granite isthmus towards Bergen, which we reached about mid-day, and where we were hospitably entertained by the burgomaster, who was very friendly to us, as foes of the Imperialists; for Bogislaus IV., Duke of Pomerania and Rügen, was in alliance with the northern kings. As the duke's vassal, he considered it his duty to show us every attention, and procured us a waggon, drawn by two stout horses, by which we travelled towards the Sound. I took care that the night should be set in before we reached Oldevehr, for the narrow strait was full of Austrian gunboats.
In the creek, we found our little shallop still safe in its concealment, and, embarking, put forth before the moon rose, and reached the mole of Stralsund in safety; but to find that we had now to encounter another and more terrible foe than starvation or the Imperialists.
A pestilence, like unto that terrible Black Plague which desolated Denmark in the thirteenth century, and carried off two-thirds of the inhabitants, committing irreparable injury on its agriculture and commerce, a pestilence now conduced by starvation and misery, by excitement, grief, and poverty, and by the terrible malaria arising from the slime of the wet ditches, the sluices of which had been destroyed by the Austrian artillery, and increased by the fetid atmosphere of the shallow trenches, where Wallenstein had buried vast numbers of his slain to windward of the city—for so I may call it, from the long prevalence of the wind in one direction—a pestilence that assailed the old and the young, the active and the listless, the bravo soldiers who manned the ramparts, and the timid citizens who lurked in their cellars to avoid the bursting bombs and passing cannon-shot, had now broken out in Stralsund, to increase the troubles, the anxieties, and the already manifold dangers of the siege.
In one day this terrible epidemic had seized on more than fifty persons. Next day there were a hundred victims. No pen can convey an adequate idea of the terror of the Stralsunders. The upper classes, however, comforted themselves that the pest confined itself as yet to the lower—those poor, haggard, and wretched beings, whom lack of raiment, work, and food, made their shattered frames, like those of the drunken and the dissipated, most liable to infection.