The Mercenary: A Tale of The Thirty Years' War

by W. J. Eccott

For an instant a flush came into Nigel's cheeks and passed. Had she not come sooner than the Jesuit expected?

The interview ended, Nigel proffered a formal request to the War Department to be allowed to join General Tilly. As the permission did not depend upon the War Department so much as upon the Emperor, not upon the Emperor so much as Father Lamormain, still a few days elapsed before he could set out. Couriers were expected. Negotiations had been begun with Wallenstein with as much ceremony as if he had been a crowned head.

To any man less genuinely a man of action, this compulsory and to himself excusable dawdling in the very neighbourhood of the Archduchess, would have been a delightful interlude between the stern acts of war. Such a man would have had the capacity for idleness in some measure, and some knowledge how to enjoy it rather than employ it. He would, far more quickly than Nigel, have found a way to enjoy it, and to enjoy it in company with some beloved fair, or perhaps with several.

Nigel's love was a possession. The Archduchess, mysterious combination of Stephanie and Ottilie, had the whole of his heart for her encampment. There was no little citadel or outward tower which her forces did not occupy. But as yet the exaltation of his love did not manifest itself in any outward signs. He neither talked more, as many lovers do, nor was more silent, as some are wont to be, nor manifested exceeding nor profuse gentleness, a manner unbecoming in a soldier. If any at Vienna had known him well, they might have thought him more self-contained than usual. He felt that he must needs keep a close-knitted grip upon himself, for he told himself that, if he should come within arm's length of the object of his worship, his will would be as the green withes that bound Samson, and his lips would incontinently profane the image of the goddess, as they had once before done when she had appeared under the humbler of her guises. That the Archduchess, on her side, might be as fully and completely woman as he was man, did not realise itself to him. It was not possible that it should. So that he did not picture her as beating her wings against the palace cage, whose wires were the servant spies, stifling or trying to stifle in her generous heart the desire to give of her womanhood with lavishness to him whom her imagination had crowned and enthroned in a vision of perfect man.

But where lover and beloved are within a bowshot length, and both are thirsty to gaze the one upon the other, both eager to exchange the story of their moods, surely the god Cupid will find a way to bring about their meeting.

And Love, who laughs at locksmiths, employed one. One noon, as he returned from some of his military duties, Nigel found an apprentice locksmith awaiting him in his quarters, whose grimy hand drew from his leathern apron a key bright from its new forging and chasing by the tools. Nigel, being asked by the lad if it pleased him, replied with the wonderful presence of mind Dan Cupid gives, that it pleased him well. It was the duplicate of the key of that orchard close within the gardens of the palace.

The place was no longer in doubt. Where Colonel Charteris had been received in jocund May by the Archduchess, Nigel would meet Stephanie in hoar December. And the hour? Love dictated that the first hour of dusk was the first possible, and the first possible was the one of which Love must avail himself.

To gain access to the gardens by night it was necessary to reach them by one of the doors which led from one of the lower corridors of the palace into the orangery, and by one of those of the orangery into the garden terrace.

That afternoon Nigel spent an hour not unprofitably in the orangery examining the trees, learning their history from the gardeners, and where the keys hung by which one might let one's self out into the terrace.

By this time his face and figure were too well known to the pages or the domestics of the palace to excite remark, and he easily contrived an errand to one of the officers on guard in the palace, which made it reasonable for him to be seen passing along the corridor in question and returning. But on his return he took the left hand into the orangery instead of the right into the courtyard, and an instant sufficed for him to find the key and let himself out on to the terrace.