[CHAPTER XL.]
RIDE, RIDE TOGETHER.
To cover three leagues in an hour on such a horse as Nigel bestrode was no great affair.
It may have been a little more or a little less when Sergeant Blick, with his watchful eyes, descried that his former colonel was rapidly overtaking a little party that rode in the same direction. It consisted apparently of a lady habited in a riding-dress suitable for the winter, surmounted by a military-looking cloak, and a groom on another horse just behind.
As Sergeant Blick was a long way off when he saw so much, he did not even attempt to guess who she might be. There were many highly-born ladies in Ratisbon just at that time, though Blick did not know why.
He was not long before he noticed that Nigel rode up on the lady's right and saluted her, and that her movements were such as to suggest to an observer that the meeting was a chance rencontre and a surprise.
The groom, who, like themselves, carried pistols in his holsters, fell back and gradually took up a position not far in front of Sergeant Blick, but kept his horse trotting at a certain distance as if aware of the soldiers, and not willing to mingle with them.
But the colonel did not seem to have any intention of leaving the lady to conclude her promenade alone. The two, in fact, rode quickly side by side, as if bent on reaching some still distant goal in company. And it was some time before it dawned upon Blick's mind that this had been a rendezvous, and that his former colonel had entered upon the first phase of the enterprise to which he had referred the night before.
Had Blick been a Frenchman instead of a German he would have sniffed out an affair of the heart as soon as he caught a glimpse of a petticoat, but Blick was a German soldier, who had begun to get grizzled, and was already weather-beaten and scarred, and cared a vast deal more for a good dinner and a jovial emptying of beer-mugs than for toying with wenches, and on the occasions when Cupid had asserted his rights of dominion over him, the manifestations of Sergeant Blick's possession had been uncouth and rough, and in nowise redolent of sentiment or of poetry. Nor had he ever observed any amorous tendencies in his former captain and colonel. He, on the contrary, had seemed to shun all such opportunities of dalliance as the fortune of war threw in his way, to care nothing, in fact, for women kind or unkind, only moderately for the more gratifying enjoyments of wine and meat, and prodigiously, for an officer, for clean muskets and well-sharpened pikes, or for well-groomed horses and bright swords. Sergeant Blick could not account for the change, and did not in his heart approve of it, the more that he could make no manner of guess who the lady was.