About a week had passed since the private conversation to which we last listened. The Jesuit during this time had not left the prisoner to himself. He was seen to enter Messenius' room every day, under the pretext of medical attendance, and spent some hours with him. He was too acute to rely upon the prisoner's promise. No one in the castle knew what they did together, and the Governor was unsuspicious. The remote situation of Kajajneborg, far from the rest of the world, had lulled Wernstedt into security; he rather found pleasure in the society of the learned and experienced foreign doctor.
There was one, however, who with a constant and vigilant eye followed every motion of the stranger, and this was Lucia Grothusen, Messenius' wife. A Catholic by education and conviction, she had always strengthened her husband in his faith; the Jesuit well knew this, and therefore felt sure of her co-operation, although he carefully avoided confiding his plans to the mercy of female gossip. But the most artful plans are often frustrated by those hidden springs and motives in the human heart, especially in a woman's heart, which work in quite a different direction from that of cold reason. The Jesuit, in spite of his astuteness, was mistaken in our Lucia. He did not know that when the fanaticism in her mind shouted, push on! love cried still louder in her heart, hold back! and love in women always gets the upper hand.
Lucia was a very penetrating person; she had looked through the Jesuit before he knew it. She saw the ruinous inward strife which raged in Messenius; a struggle for life and death between fanaticism on the one hand, which bade him sacrifice fame and posterity for the victory of the Church, and ambition on the other, which continually pleaded to him not to sacrifice with his own hand his whole life's work? "Will you," it said, "blindly desecrate the sanctuary of history? Will you expose to contempt the brilliant name, which in the night of captivity still constitutes your wealth and pride?"
Lucia saw all this with the discernment of love; she saw that the man for whom she lived an entire life of self-denial and restraint, would sink under this terrible internal battle, and she resolved to save him with a bold and decisive stroke.
Late one evening the lamp still burned on Messenius' writing-table, where he and the Jesuit had been working together ever since the morning. Lucia had received permission to retire to her bed, which stood at the other end of the room near the door, and pretended to be asleep. The two men had finished their work, and were conversing together with low voices, in Latin, which Lucia well understood.
"I am satisfied with you, my friend," said the Jesuit approvingly. "These documents, which bear the stamp of truth, will be sufficient to prove the conversion of King Gustaf Vasa and King Carl, and this preface, signed by you, will further confirm their veracity. I will now return to Germany through Sweden, and have these prayers printed, through our adherents in Stockholm, or if that is impossible, in Lübeck or Leyden."
Messenius involuntarily stretched out his hand, as if to snatch back a precious treasure from a robber's hands.
"Holy father," he exclaimed with visible consternation, "is there no reprieve? My name ... my reputation ... have mercy upon me, holy father, and give me back my name!"
The Jesuit smiled.
"Do I not give you a name," he said, "far greater and more abiding than the one you lose—a name in the chronicles of our holy order; a name among the martyrs and benefactors of the Church; a name which may one day be counted amongst the saints?"