The Mercenary Part 27

The Landgrave said little. He yawned a good deal, and Nigel had supped.

He too felt drowsy. It was not wonderful after his long day. The serving-man who had attended to his needs took a silver candlestick and led him up the stair towards his chamber. But at the top, where two pa.s.sages met on a broad landing, the Lady Ottilie swept out of the darkness and took the candlestick from the man's hand, and motioning to Nigel to follow, herself ushered him into his bedroom.

There was something womanly and homely about the action, that accorded well with Nigel's notion of hospitality, yet she carried herself with the air of the chatelaine, as if she, and not the Landgravine, who doubtless had deputed the courtesies to her, had been the mistress of Wartburg.

As he threw an involuntary glance about the chamber, noting the great four-posted and canopied bed, the ambry for linen, the Venetian mirror, and other furnis.h.i.+ngs, she said--

"In Magdeburg 'twas Elspeth who gave up her bed to you. Here do I the same. It is a small courtesy for your many."

"Did I not say to you at Erfurt that a woman owes a man nothing that she does not pay a thousand-fold? But now you do me untold honour!" was Nigel's word of thanks.

"Sweet thanks and compliments! And doubtless you gave as much and more to little Elspeth at Magdeburg. She has poured such a tale of Colonel Nigel Charteris into my ears to-night I am wellnigh tired of him. Who is your prisoner at the camp?"

"A Bohemian, a Count von Teschen!"

"And his crime?"

"He caused some of my troopers to desert, and then pursued me hotly on my road to the Wartburg."

"It was a scurvy trick!" There was genuine indignation in her tone. "You must beware! Promise me, you will beware!" she pleaded; and Nigel, looking at the dimming of her eyes and her lips on the brink of quivering, felt a wave of tenderness flow over him. He leaned towards her and took her hands.

"You care for me, Ottilie?" There was a world of eagerness in his tones, such eagerness as made his voice sound hoa.r.s.ely in his own ears.

She smiled a pitiful smile as she drew her hands from his as not trusting her silly tell-tales. Then she said--

"Do you so soon forget my words at Erfurt, my tall captain?"

"You said I should be a fool to dream of it!"

She nodded, but this time sadly.

"I shall play the fool, Star Ottilie! So help me, Holy Mother of Heaven!"

"Not here then! I have stayed too long. What of your valise? Give me an order. They shall bring your baggage."

There was an inkhorn and paper at a little table and he wrote a line and signed it.

"This is to my soldier servant!" He handed it to her in a dream of happiness.

She went swiftly, and before many minutes had pa.s.sed the man brought his baggage and holsters and laid them on the floor. The trooper was half asleep and bemused with the beer or the mead he had drunk.

"And the Count von Teschen's?" Nigel asked.

The man waved an arm vaguely and explained something in an inarticulate way, and then stared and blinked at his colonel in a manner that made it clear at least that there would be no sense in his head till the morrow, and Nigel sympathised with the man, for he was scarcely rested enough himself to take off his own boots. So he dismissed the man, and a few more minutes saw his devotions, addressed mainly to a mythical Saint Ottilie, and his ablutions, alike concluded, and the Landgrave's four-poster shut him into dreamless oblivion.

At five the sun streaming in, even finding its way between the curtains of the four-poster, awoke him. A moment to regain the sense of his position in the universe, during which the geometrical figure of the great Pietro Bramante sprang to his mind again, and made him wonder where he was on the line of his own orbit, and he leaped from the bed and gazed out and down upon that wonderful rolling sea of tree-tops and hills behind hills, all clad in pines, and little villages in green s.p.a.ces here and there.

He did not dawdle over his dressing, yet before it was half accomplished the Landgrave's barber was at his door craving admittance with the implements of his art, and his expert fingers made the colonel's face as fresh and dapper as razor and soap could do.

"The Lady Ottilie von Thuringen bade me tell your lords.h.i.+p that your other baggage has been brought up by your trooper and placed in the little room which is beside this one."

One may be sure that the colonel was not long in entering the room, which a look at the tambour frame, the spinning-wheel, and some other objects, told him was a small boudoir used by the ladies of the castle.

Upon a stout oaken table lay the valises and holsters of the mysterious emissary.

Nigel's hands were upon the straps when the Lady Ottilie came in, partly with the a.s.sured air of the woman in her own domain, partly showing the modest shyness of a woman who, liking a man beyond the common measure, seems to crave pardon for intrusion into his company.

"You have slept well? I see you have, tall captain!"

"Thanks to you, Ottilie!" he said, taking her hands and gazing into her proud beautiful face with something of mastery in his grip and in his eyes.

Her own countenance grew cold as she looked far beyond him out upon the pine-clad hills.

"How well you begin the day, sir!" Her glance fell scornfully upon the baggage. "The sack of cities! The plunder of travellers! A strange life!"

There was no need to point the irony, a woman's irony, full of half truth and false inference.

The blood flushed into his face. Then he a.s.sumed command over his fiery temper.

"The fortunes of war merely! This von Teschen is I know not what. He comes from Wallenstein."

"From Wallenstein!" She repeated it with eyes again seeking the pine-clothed hill-tops.

"Yes! From that cold seeker after power who would use the Habsburgs for a stepping-stone and play the Caesar, as you said at Erfurt. I have not forgotten your saying, Ottilie!"

"You are strangely familiar, sir, to a ..." she faltered.

"To a cousin of the Habsburgs," he put in.

"Who told you I was cousin to the Habsburgs?" she asked promptly.

"The Archd.u.c.h.ess Stephanie! And in truth did I not know you to be the Lady Ottilie von Thuringen, I could believe Her Highness was here."

"Her Highness is very gracious to acknowledge me of kin. My interests and the Habsburgs lie far apart."

"And I," said Nigel, "eat the bread of the Habsburgs, and what I do must and shall be right in your eyes, if it be right in mine!"

The Lady Ottilie's eyes blazed with scorn and resentment.

"Go on with your task of rifling the traveller's saddle-bags," she said, but made no movement to go. Nigel smiled to himself as he bent again over the straps.

First the holsters were rummaged. Pistoles and a few travellers'

necessaries. Nothing! Then the first saddle-bag revealed two rich suits, linen, the impedimenta of a man of rank on a long journey. Nigel examined the sewing, the lining of the bag. Again nothing. Next came the turn of the other saddle-bag. In it were many rouleaux of gold, enclosed in many wrappings. Again she taunted him.

"Said I not plunder?" she said. "Surely a fair ransom for the Count von Teschen! Pay for the troopers and their brave colonel!"

Again Nigel heeded not a jot. If it bit into his pride, at least he smiled as he went on. Packages of costly trinkets, jewels, articles of great price and workmans.h.i.+p.

"It is no wonder the Count helped himself to an escort!" she said. "And all for nought! To fall in with a robber lord from Scotland! 'Twas ill luck!"