The Mercenary.
by W. J. Eccott.
CHAPTER I.
IN SEARCH OF BOOTY.
It was the evening of the second day of the sack of Magdeburg. Nigel Charteris, soldier of fortune by profession and in rank captain of musketeers, sought a certain house in the Kloster Stra.s.se, if haply it were still standing.
It troubled the captain little that Magdeburg should be sacked. He was of the Catholic faith. And Magdeburg had proved herself malignantly Protestant. She had flouted the Edict of Rest.i.tution. The Emperor Ferdinand II., Habsburger by race, Catholic to the marrow, had proclaimed that the possessions, wrenched from the grasp of the Catholics a hundred years before by the Lutherans and Calvinists, should be restored to Catholic hands, that the ma.s.s bell should tinkle in every chancel, and all be as if that pestilent monk, that Junker Georg of the Wartburg, had never been. Rome had bided her time, as Rome can always bide her time, and seize her opportunity. The Emperor found himself with a right good flail and a stout husbandman, Count Tilly, to wield it. The husbandman with his flail had arrived before the threshing-floors of Magdeburg in bleak March. It had taken him to jocund May to force an entrance, and then the threshing and the winnowing began.
It was a question if the house in the Kloster Stra.s.se still stood, for even before the turbulent entry of the Emperor"s troops fires had broken out, and still burned furiously. It was a city of shards and carcases.
Here and there streets still stood, as a patch of corn stands, left for to-morrow"s cutting, amid the p.r.o.ne swathes. Nigel wondered if he would be able to recognise the street that he had left as the dawn broke that morning.
"This is the street, Captain. The spire"s had a shake!" said Sergeant Blick.
Nigel nodded, and strode over the stones, and the sheet-lead, and the broken images of stone and of human flesh that lay in his path. But for the loss of its church-tower the street was still pa.s.sably whole.
Clambering over the barrier of ruins, a half company of musketeers followed in loose order, expectant of more plunder. All day they had spent in camp, and were now let out for their share in the ruthless harvesting. There was method too in their captain"s gleaning.
He halted his men, and addressed Sergeant Blick in the tone of a man used to command and accustomed to be obeyed.
"Now, Sergeant, you and two men come with me. The rest may help themselves in this street. It is now seven o"clock. At nine they will fall in, and march back to camp. No throat-cutting! No drunkenness! And no mishandling of women!"
Sergeant Blick wheeled about, marched three paces to the front, and repeated the orders in a fine sonorous voice. By way of making them more intelligible, he called his men "drunken pigs" and "little calves" and "blunderheads," and added a few very personal admonitions to the more wilfully or weakly inclined of the flock. Then he wheeled about again, his two picked men followed, and Nigel, in front of the three, marched up the street till he came to a tall house which stood with projecting upper storeys and an almost magisterial aspect amid its smaller fellows.
The ma.s.sive door yielded to a push, admitting them to a stone-paved hall, on either side of which there were some very meagrely furnished rooms, and behind it kitchens, larders, and servants" quarters equally bare. Nothing of potable or eatable was to be seen. Nor was there a single kitchen wench.
Having made this reconnaissance, Nigel mounted the wide open staircase with Sergeant Blick at his heels, and the two musketeers, two steps behind, to preserve the distance prescribed by the sergeant"s rank.
They halted at the first landing. From behind the first door came the stifled cry of a woman, and a dull sound of a fall. Sergeant Blick essayed to open it in vain.
Nigel Charteris rapped upon it with the hilt of his sword.
"Open in the name of the Emperor!" he demanded.
A key turned in the lock.
"I warn you!" said a haughty voice, the voice of a woman of rank, rich and full. "You enter at your own peril!"
For answer Nigel thrust his foot and his steel cap into the opening as the door gave way a span, and a dagger descended with the breathless fury of a woman"s onset, only to glance off the casque, while the a.s.sailed swung round and seized the wrist of the thruster. The dagger fell to the floor. Blick stooped and picked it up and thrust it into his belt, where it had company of the same sort. It was worth a guilder, he reflected; and stood waiting just inside the door, his men without.
The soldier of fortune was a tall man, and she who faced him, flushed and disappointed, was a tall woman. The soldier of fortune was a handsome fellow of a dark russet upon olive complexion, with a crisp curl to his moustaches and his hair, though little of that emerged from the steel cap inlaid with gold that had so well protected him. Her eyes ran over him and said to her "Lineage." His eyes in turn told him that the woman was sprung of a ruling race, incapable of fear, unused to any domination: told him also that she had dark hair in abundance, dark mist-laden eyes, a clear paleness of complexion which was neither white nor yellow nor pink nor olive; told him that her carriage was that of a queen, and that she was as virginal as the dawn.
If the eagle in her held his eyes in its imperious clutch, hers encountered a spirit just as much an eagle"s. High lineage and high poverty had been his portion, and no Charteris had ever feared to look a haughty beauty in the eyes.
It was the matter of an instant. Nigel looked round.
In the embrasure of the princ.i.p.al window, seated in a great chair, was the figure of an old man, whose dress denoted a Lutheran pastor. His head was fallen helplessly sidelong on the pillows that had but a few moments ago supported it. He was dead. At his feet, half on the dais of the window, lay a golden-haired girl. The great white kerchief that covered her shoulders and bosom showed a red spot over the heart, and a little dagger was still enclosed by the listless fingers that lay quiet in her lap. She too looked like one that is dead.
"Your handiwork, brave captain!" said the dark lady bitterly. "Pastor Reinheit died of shock as you halted without. Elspeth stabbed herself to save her honour as soon as she heard your footsteps on the stair. It was well done!"
"Count Tilly does not make war upon girls!" said Nigel angrily, striding across and kneeling beside the girl. "Bring water, linen, and salve!"
Gently he laid her flat upon the floor with a cushion beneath her head.
Quickly he unfastened the neckerchief and staunched the blood till he could see the wound, of what width it was, and how the blood welled up into its mouth. Then he looked at the dagger.
"Blick! Look you here! A flesh wound! A thumbnail"s depth? What say you?"
Sergeant Blick gently pinched the wound.
"Aye, is it! More fright than hurt! A barber"s st.i.tch of a silk thread.
A bandage and salve! "Tis all she needs."
Nigel looked up. The lady of the misty eyes looked down.
"She lives!" said he. "You have but to wash the wound, put in three st.i.tches, lay salve upon it and a bandage of linen. She will not bleed to death this time."
The woman knelt down and did as she was bidden with deft long fingers and without a word.
Before the bandage was made secure the girl Elspeth opened her eyes and her gaze fell first upon Nigel. A red flush came to her cheek, perhaps because of her neck lying so uncovered before a man, perhaps by reason of other thoughts. And as the colour natural to her face, a healthy rosy hue, came back, Nigel on his part gave a little start of surprise and turned away. He wondered that he had not known her again. Yesterday she had worn a healthy ruddiness in her cheeks and a white dress upon her jolly plump form. To-day with the absolute pallor of her swoon and her sombre grey clothes his eyes had been cheated, or was it that his eyes had lost something of their natural sharpness in the duello with those others of the race of eagles?
The service rendered to her golden-haired friend, the snowy neck once more shrouded in its covering kerchief, the dark lady resumed her haughty aloofness. A flash had broken through the mists of her eyes, as a pa.s.sing gleam of the moon breaks for an instant through fast scudding clouds, when she saw the recognition pa.s.s. Perhaps she wondered. Elspeth was of the burgher-cla.s.s, well-to-do it might be, and she who looked was n.o.ble by every outward token, and might well disregard such affairs as brought a poor gentleman of the sword, and an outlander to boot, into contact with a burgher-maiden at the sack of Magdeburg.
Nigel Charteris was indifferent. He concerned himself as little with the thoughts of either girl. His present business was the gathering of booty. No man became soldier or officer in Tilly"s army for his pay. Pay was a mighty uncertain thing. So was the sack of a town. So many were the avenues to perdition, or to salvation, according to one"s views of the future state, and of one"s own destination in it. A shot from a window, a tile from a roof, a stab in a dark corner, any of the three might "his quietus make." It was only common justice in the soldier"s rough code that, when Dame Fortune came his way and opened a town"s gates to him, he should fill his pockets, and any odd sack he could bear with him on his march. How should he pay Peter for the ultimate repose of his soul if not by relieving Paul of those riches that were an actual impediment to Paul"s salvation?
Nigel took a brief survey of the room, and his eyes rested upon the motionless figure of the dead pastor, unreal-looking in posture and in face. He frowned and crossed himself.
The proud lady followed his glance.
"A brave piece of work your Edict of Rest.i.tution! Is it not time to get on with your trade?" she taunted.
"In good time!" he said curtly. "Call in two men!" was his order to Sergeant Blick.
The two men came in, muskets at the ready.
"This lady will show you where to lay the old man!" he said.
As before she obeyed, stepping across the room to a door which opened into a small bedchamber. The two men-at-arms at a sign from the sergeant lifted the body and laid it on the bed. Elspeth of the golden-hair made an effort to rise, bent on following, but her strength had not yet returned. She lay back again on her cushion and wept silently.
"Peace! Lie still, dear heart!" said the dark lady, kneeling beside her and holding her hand, raising about her the bulwark of her own compa.s.sion, as who should say to Nigel Charteris that he was without the pale.
When the door of the dead man"s chamber closed and the musketeers stood once more to command he bade them make ready their weapons. Without a look at the women he strode across the chamber to another door at the opposite side of the room to that which he had entered and flung it open.
In the doorway stood three very determined-looking men armed with pikes, and behind them a motley a.s.sembly of burghers, some armed, some not.
A curiously interested expression came upon the face of her who knelt.
To her mind Tilly"s captain was in the toils.