The Mercenary Part 22

The priest received him with the urbanity that sat so well upon him, and bade him be seated.

"I trust that your visit to Vienna has been a pleasant and a profitable one!" he said.

"Both the one and the other beyond all expectations!" said Nigel heartily.

"You are entering upon a perilous adventure," said the priest. "But the Emperor and his councillors have great hopes that you will acquit yourself successfully. Your journey is a long one, and you will pa.s.s through many states, towns, bishoprics, and it depends upon yourself what speed you make. I do not doubt but that your zeal will conduct you to our armies. But the Emperor desires that you should note with care the disposition and affection of each district to his rule, so that he may know on whom to count for support or enmity. More than that, it is suspected here that the Duke of Friedland has intelligence with many princes and magistrates, even with Gustavus of Sweden."

"Impossible, Father!" the young man interposed with a flush of indignation. "Wallenstein a traitor!"

Father Lamormain made a little movement with his hands.

"I do not say treasonable! We live in times when we find it as difficult to say what is honour as Pilate found it hard to say what was truth.

Besides, Wallenstein, being a private gentleman holding no office, may if he so chooses write letters even to Gustavus about ... shall we say b.u.t.terflies, or forestry, or a thousand subjects."

"But with the open enemy of the Emperor!" protested Nigel.

The priest maintained his suavity.

"Injudicious, let us say, if it be true! It is suspected. Now if you should in your journeying intercept any of his messengers, the Emperor's service demands that you should possess yourself of his letters and hand them to the next regular priest you meet for transmission to the Emperor."

At the first grasp of the proposal Nigel was inclined to hesitate. But at the second he saw that there was nothing essentially unbecoming in it. He was in the service of the Emperor, and the Emperor's enemies avowed or secret must be his. There could be no division of allegiance.

Besides, it was too impossible.

Father Lamormain watched his face, saw the hesitation, and drew forth a written order, signed by the Emperor himself, to seize the person of any messenger he would who carried letters, examine him, and send unbroken to the Emperor any letters he might seize.

Nigel read it and nodded.

"I understand, Father. It is for the safety of the Empire!"

"And Holy Church!" added the priest. "Your responsibility ceases when you report yourself to Count Tilly."

Nigel devoutly hoped that he would reach Tilly in the shortest possible s.p.a.ce of time. Fighting was one thing. In so far as one did not get shot oneself or maimed, it was an impersonal thing. Provided one did not have too much of it, it was exciting and almost enjoyable; besides that, it was the exercise of an old and honourable profession. But stopping messengers on the highroad, when there was no chance of reprisals on their part, questioning them at point of pistol, or rifling their holsters, seemed to be the work of a lower order entailing a certain stain upon him who performed it.

"I would ask you a question, Father. Why have I been chosen for this work?"

The priest smiled.

"For your knowledge of your craft the Archduke Lothar vouches. For your being a good Catholic the Church vouches. And that you are of the Scottish nation is good pledge that you will have no personal end to serve in Germany but your own advancement. To you Saxony is Saxony, Bavaria, Bavaria, but they mean nothing. You have taken service with the Emperor, and him only will you serve. So long as you serve the Emperor with a single eye you will succeed. The blessing of Heaven will follow you. The higher you climb, the more difficult the path will be. But only obey!"

The openness of the priest's avowal and his fatherly manner, almost a benediction in itself, won upon Nigel to a great degree, so that his suspicions of the Jesuits and their ways were almost, if not quite, laid to rest.

"To obey comes easy to the soldier, Father! But it does not make some duties less irksome."

"Ah! There I disagree with you," said the priest. "The rule of my order is obedience. The patience, the skill demanded of us, the interest involved in carrying out the task to a complete and successful issue beyond the possibility of doubt, remove all that you call irksomeness.

Strive after our conception of obedience and all else becomes easy to you."

"But in your case," said Nigel, "there is no tie of blood that binds you. You admit neither father nor mother. The Church and your order stand in their stead."

"That is true! The member of the brotherhood of Jesus reckons no human relations.h.i.+p as having any meaning in his regard, and being free he moves safely to his instructed purpose. There is but one human pa.s.sion which can be a source of danger to you. You are young. You may love. At present no danger threatens. Am I right?"

Nigel answered tersely enough.

"No woman claims me. I claim no woman!"

And his answer was as sincere as it appeared to be to Father Lamormain.

For if his thoughts had often turned towards the lost Ottilie, and his admiration been roused by the Archd.u.c.h.ess Stephanie, the unknown distance of the one and the exalted rank of the other had stayed the fire, as trenches widely dug will upon a burning heath.

Nigel was sensible of the pervading influence of the priest. He had pa.s.sed the stage at which he had silently questioned his instructions, nor did he think it strange that the confessor of the Emperor should have been the channel of their conveyance: for by this time from one and another he had realised the peculiarly close leaning that the Emperor had towards the Church and towards its regular priests. He, however, did not recognise that one purpose of the interview was that Father Lamormain should make the further acquaintance with the instrument the Emperor and himself proposed to use.

On the whole, Father Lamormain was well pleased, and satisfied on the main head that Nigel was no creature of Wallenstein, though as a soldier he reverenced his old commander. For any further work beyond the present, time would show if this Scottish gentleman might become a more confidential agent of the order.

On the morrow Nigel set forth from Vienna with his three hundred "Rough-riders," and if, horses and men, they presented an uncouth and unfinished appearance, they also had a certain aspect of the formidable that boded ill for any obstacle they might encounter.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE GUESTS OF THE ABBOT OF FULDA.

Of the earlier marches of Colonel Nigel Charteris it is not needful to say anything. For the first day brought them across the plains to Budweiss, where a strong garrison of the Emperor's troops lay, and the next to the Bohmerwald, crossing which they came into Bavaria, and so on the evening of the fourth day made Nuremberg. Bavaria being a country ruled by that masterful Duke Maximilian, who was a pupil of the Jesuits, though of a far more flexible mind than his cousin Ferdinand, was a stronghold of Catholicism, and, beyond a few natural grumbles at having to find quarters and food for so undesirable-looking a regiment, placed no obstacles in their way.

Nuremberg certainly showed a sullenness of the populace which seemed to indicate that below the surface there was a strong Protestant feeling, despite Maximilian's orthodoxy, but to Nigel it mattered little. His march next led him to Bamberg, a town entirely dominated by a Catholic Bishop, and a hostelry on the "Priestlane" to the Rhine, as the chain of Bishoprics was called by the untaught lewd of the Protestants. The next stage was Fulda, the seat of the Abbot of St Boniface, across the Bavarian border, and before him lay on one side the westernmost strip of the Thuringian forest, and on the other the State of Hesse Ca.s.sel.

Now and again in Bavaria Nigel heard news of the army that was with Pappenheim and Tilly. He learned that no action had been fought, that the Elector of Saxony was still maintaining a neutrality, though he had gathered large numbers of troops. Of Gustavus he learned nothing.

Evidently he was still in Pomerania. Nigel antic.i.p.ated a peaceful march through the territories he had yet to traverse, albeit they were territories still Protestant in the main.

The Abbot of Fulda was the chief of all the abbots of the Empire. His territory extended twenty miles to the north and fifteen from east to west. It was for the most part a fertile plain of great cultivation lying between two ranges of hills which met at the northmost angle of a rough triangle. Fulda itself was in the south of the domain and near the Bavarian border. For forty years or more the Abbots of Fulda had kept Lutheranism at bay with as much zeal as the Emperor himself, while Hesse Ca.s.sel and Thuringia, the neighbouring states, had as sedulously fostered the heresy.

Nigel and his men readily gained entry to the town, and were surprised, as they rode through, at the palace of the Abbot and the buildings inhabited by his dependants and officers as well as those of the abbey itself, where the monks continued to extol, if not to emulate, the holiness of St Boniface, whose bones lay beneath the altar in the chapel beneath the choir of the cathedral. The town reflected in its shops and dwellings as well as in the dress of its inhabitants the wealth and prosperity of the Abbot, for the shrine of St Boniface brought numerous pilgrims, and the long and orderly rule of the Church for long generations over the domains had enabled the abbey to acc.u.mulate a considerable treasure. Nor were evidences lacking that the Abbot was alive to the scriptural advice about the strong man armed keeping his goods in peace. For the Abbot commanded a goodly a.s.semblage of lay brothers, who acted as his fighting force, for reprisals or for defence.

The object of their visit being explained to the chief officer of the abbey, quarters were a.s.signed to the men and horses in the outlying portions, while Nigel and Hildebrand were received with much ceremony into the palace of the Prince-Abbot himself, and treated with every courtesy as the representatives of the Emperor.

The Abbot loved good cheer, and those who sat at meat with him had no cause to complain of famine or of drought, nor was he himself sparing.

Beside the two soldiers were two of the Abbot's princ.i.p.al officers, and another gentleman, like the soldiers, a sojourner in the territories of Fulda. The high cheek-bones and small dark eyes, the swarthy gipsy-like complexion, all denoted an Eastern birthplace.

The Abbot presented the newcomers to him and named him as the Count von Teschen. His manners were pleasant. He was affable, but it was an affability that told nothing.

"So you were at Magdeburg!" said the Abbot. "A grave blunder!"

Nigel looked questioningly.

"Not on your part, colonel! Nor for that matter on Tilly's. But the Jesuits!"

"But Magdeburg had flouted the Edict!" opposed Nigel.