"And powder and ball and matches?"
"Sufficient store!"
"Ah!" said Wallenstein. "If Saxony and Brandenburg together make up their minds they can find work for Count Tilly. And then there is Gustavus! Who is to oppose him, and with what? Where do they say Gustavus is?"
"In Pomerania, your Grace!"
"So I have heard, and is negotiating a treaty with France! If the Protestants but knew it, they could beset Tilly and ruin the Emperor."
"But you forget the Elector Maximilian?"
"He is forgettable! He is a Jesuit, who should have been a priest, but was unhappily born a prince. He has an arm, and that arm is Pappenheim. With men enough Pappenheim could face Gustavus. But Pappenheim is with Tilly. An army can have but one head."
"When the Emperor's advisers grow frightened they will send again for your Grace!" said Nigel.
"They must pay dearly!" was Wallenstein's grim remark, with a curl of his thick lower lip. Then he asked abruptly, in a tone which suggested an amused contempt for such toys, "Do you believe in the stars?"
Had Nigel been sitting over a flagon with Hildebrand von Hohendorf instead of with Albrecht von Waldstein he would have laughed out a "No." But two experiences, the sudden apparition of Ottilie outside Hradschin, a possible delusion of the sense of sight, and the disappearance of his despatches from beneath his head in defiance of sentries and all his senses, which was no delusion, had shaken his hitherto light esteem for witchcraft, star-gazing, horoscopes, alchemy, and all the other ingenious paltering with past and future. It had been whispered too among the armies that Wallenstein had commanded that he, like many other great ones of the time, devout Catholics all, consulted necromancers, and this came to Nigel's mind. He made a cautious reply.