The Mercenary: A Tale of The Thirty Years' War

by W. J. Eccott

"I did not ask! Neither did I tell them that I had business with the Duke."

"Enough!" said Nigel, and wheeled his horse.

With a rueful countenance the diviner began to replace his utensils, carefully and patiently. He had at least learned two virtues.

Nigel, gravelled, rode back into the town in an ill-humour and called for his breakfast. By the time that was finished the troopers were at the door.

There was no help but to go forward, and one may be assured that neither hill nor stream nor any wayside beauty of Bohemia could do aught to bring his mind back to a calm mood. He suspected the "Jew," as he called him. He suspected Gordon, and as for the phantasmagoria of last night, he could make nothing of it. His tendency was to disbelieve, only his respect for Wallenstein's powers of thought diminished his disbelief to something approaching mere doubt. The one thing that stood out was the vision of Ottilie von Thüringen.

Surely it was her "wraith." And if it had by chance been that of some familiar friend in Scotland, or of some one of his blood relations, he would have been awed, but he would have regarded it, in accord with tradition, as portending or announcing some stroke of fate.

He had been carried too much out of himself to hear what Wallenstein had muttered, to observe closely how that great one received the vision. This at least he had garnered, that Wallenstein also recognised her.

But who then was she? There was another feeling that sprang up in his heart, an uneasy half-born pang, which he dismissed only to find it knocking at the door again. The "wraith" of Ottilie had gazed at Wallenstein, not with eyes of speculation, as the playwright Shakespeare had it, but as one might gaze with open eyes in dream at some beloved object limned only in the brain behind.

But she had gazed at Wallenstein with a benignity which had softened the whole countenance, a benignity which he himself in his two days' contact with her had never surprised upon it. And this the geometrical hocus-pocus of the vile Jew had foreshadowed when he contrived that the right focus of her orbit should also be the centre of Wallenstein's. As Nigel had no knowledge of geometry, and regarded it as a cabalistic invention, though he had heard of telescopes, and of Columbus, and vessel charts, he esteemed this part of the diviner's doings as mere trickery, akin to the old devices of the magicians before Pharaoh. But by no explanation of mere artifice could he doubt that he saw the "wraith" of Ottilie, and that Wallenstein also saw. While recognising her as some one he knew, had Wallenstein thought of her in any close relation to himself? His attitude of surprise said no. But was it possible that Wallenstein could forget so mysterious an occurrence, dismiss it as a mere dream?

Nigel had had five or six years of close companionship with men. There are men who, from their cradle to their grave, are attended and companioned by women, and shrink from the rough and, on the whole, kindly and bracing contact with their kind. Nigel had thrust himself into the world of man at the dawn of manhood, and in the fellowship of arms he had found as mixed a chance-medley as the world of men could show, free from the namby-pamby of the courts, free from the court's petty chicane, free from the emulous avarice of the mart; not in some corners destitute of scholarship, though scholarship was rare; rejoicing in bodily strength and skill in arms, in hearty eating, in wine, and beer, and song, in which they honoured women much more than they ever did in such commerce of love or licence as the fortune of war or the conditions of the camp afforded.