My Lady Rotha: A Romance

I started. 'So!' I muttered, staring at her in my turn. 'It must have been he. The Waldgrave said something about him. And he must have come here to tell us.'

'And you gave him my lady's message?'

'Alas! yes.'

Fraulein Max laughed again, and kept on laughing, until I grew hot all over, and could have struck her for her malice. She saw at last that I was angry, and she stopped. 'Tut! tut!' she said, 'it is nothing. But that disposes of the old man. Now for the young one. He is here?'

'Yes.'

'Then why do you not show him up?'

'She must be prepared,' I muttered.

She laughed again; this time after a different fashion. 'Oh you fools of men!' she said. 'She must be prepared? Do you think that women are made of glass and that a shock breaks them? That she will die of joy? Or would have died of grief? Send him up, gaby, and I will prepare her! Send him up.'

I supposed that she knew women's ways, and I gave in to her, and sent him up; and I do not know that any harm was done. But, as a result of this, I was not present when my lady and the Waldgrave met, and I only learned by hearsay what happened.

* * * * *

An hour or two later, when the bustle of shrieks and questions had subsided, and the excitement caused by his return had somewhat worn itself out, Marie slipped out to me on the stairs, and sat with me in the darkness, talking. The gate of curious ironwork which guarded the house entrance was closed for the night; but the moon was up, and its light, falling through the scrollwork, lay like a pale, reedy pool at our feet. The men were at supper, the house was quiet, the city was for a little while still. Not a foot sounded on the roadway; only sometimes a skulking dog came ghost-like to the bars and sniffed, and sneaked noiselessly away.

I have said that we talked, but in truth we sat long silent, as lovers have sat these thousand years, I suppose, in such intervals of calm. The peace of the night lapped us round; after the perils and hurry, the storm and stress of many days, we were together and at rest, and content to be silent. All round us, under the covert of darkness, under the moonlight, the city lay quaking; dreading the future, torn by pangs in the present; sleepless, or dreaming of death and outrage, ridden by the nightmare of Wallenstein. But for the moment we recked nothing of this, nothing of the great camp round us, nothing of the crash of nations. We were of none of these. We had one another, and it was enough; loved one another, and the rest went by. For the moment we tasted perfect peace; and in the midst of the besieged city, were as much alone, as if the moonlight at our feet had been, indeed, a forest pool high in the hills over Heritzburg.

Does some old man smile? Do I smile myself now, though sadly? A brief madness, was it? Nay; but what if then only we were sane, and for a moment saw things as they are-lost sight of the unreal and awoke to the real? I once heard a wise man from Basle say something like that at my lady's table. The men, I remember, stared; the women looked thoughtful.

For all that, it was Marie who on this occasion broke the trance. The town clock struck ten, and at the sound hundreds, I dare swear, turned on their pillows, thinking of the husbands and sons and lovers whom the next light must imperil. My girl stirred.

'Ah!' she murmured, 'the poor Countess! Can we do nothing?'

'Do?' I said. 'What should, we do? The Waldgrave is back, and in his right mind; which of all the things I have ever known, is the oddest. That a man should lose his senses under one blow, and recover them under another, and remember nothing that has happened in the interval-it almost passes belief.'

'Yet it is true.'

'I suppose so,' I answered. 'The Waldgrave was mad-I can bear witness to it-and now he is sane. There is no more to be said.'

'But the Countess, Martin?'

'Well, I do not know that she is the worse,' I answered stupidly. 'She sent off the Count with a flea in his ear, and a poor return it was. But she can explain it to him, and after all, she has got the Waldgrave back, safe and sound. That is the main thing.'

Marie sighed, and moved restlessly. 'Is it?' she said. 'I wish I knew.'

'What?' I asked, drawing her little head on to my shoulder.

'What my lady wishes?'

'Eh?'

'Which?'

My jaw fell. I stared into the darkness open-mouthed. 'Why,' I exclaimed at last, 'he is sixty-or fifty-five at least, girl!'

Marie laughed softly, with her face on my breast. 'If she loves him,' she murmured. 'If she loves him.' And she hung on me.

I sat amazed, confounded, thinking no more of Marie, though my arm was round her, than of a doll. 'But he is fifty five,' I said.

'And if you were fifty-five, do you think that I should not love you?' she whispered. 'When you are fifty-five, do you think that I shall not love you? Besides, he is strong, brave, famous-a man; and she is not a girl, but a woman. If the Count be too old, is not the Waldgrave too young?'

'Yes,' I said cunningly. 'But why either?'

'Because love is in the air,' Marie answered; and I knew that she smiled, though the gloom hid her face. 'Because there is a change in her. Because she knows things and sees things and feels things of which she was ignorant before. And because-because it is so, my lord.'

I whistled. This was beyond me. 'And yet you don't know which?' I said.

'No; I suspect.'

'Well-but the Waldgrave?' I exclaimed. 'Why, mädchen, he is one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. An Apollo! A Fairy Prince! It is not possible that she should prefer the other.'

Marie laughed. 'Ah!' she said, 'if men chose all the husbands, there would be few wives.'

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXIII.

TWO MEN

The Waldgrave's return to his old self, and to the frankness and gaiety that, when we first knew him at Heritzburg, had surrounded him with a halo of youth, was perhaps the most noteworthy event of all within my experience. For the return proved permanent, the transformation was perfect. The moodiness, the crookedness, the crafty humours that for weeks had darkened and distorted the man's nature-so that another and a worse man seemed to look out of his eyes and speak with his mouth-were gone, leaving no cloud or remembrance. He had been mad; he was now as sane as the best. Only one peculiarity remained-and for a few days a little pallor and weakness-of all the things that had befallen him between his first wound and his second, he could remember nothing, not a jot or tittle; nor could any amount of allusion or questioning bring these things back to him. After many attempts we desisted; but there were always some who, from this date, regarded him with a certain degree of awe-as a man who had been for a time in the flesh, and yet not of it.

With sanity returned also all the wholesome ambitions and desires that had formerly moved the man; and amongst these his passion for my lady. He lay at our house that night, and spent the next two days there, recovering his strength; and I had more than one opportunity of marking the assiduity with which he followed all the Countess's movements with his eyes, the change which his voice underwent when he spoke to her, and his manner when he came into her presence. In a word, he seemed to take up his love where he had dropped it-at the point it had reached when he rode down into the green valley and secured his rival's victory at so great a cost; at the point at which Tzerclas' admiration and my lady's rebuff had at once strengthened and purified it.

Now Tzerclas was gone from the field-magically, as it seemed to the Waldgrave. And, magically also-for he knew nothing of its flight-time had passed; days and weeks running into months-a sufficiency of time, he hoped, to remove unfavourable impressions from her mind, to obliterate the memory of that unhappy banquet, and replace him on the pinnacle he had occupied at Heritzburg.

But he soon found that, though Tzerclas was gone and the field seemed open, all was not to be had for the asking. My lady was kind; she had a smile for him, and pleasant words, and a ready ear. But before he had been in the house twenty-four hours, he came and confided to me that something was wrong. The Countess was changed; was pettish as he had never seen her before; absent and thoughtful, traits equally new; restless-and placid dignity had been one of her chief characteristics.

'What is it, Martin?' he said, knitting his brows and striding to and fro in frank perplexity. 'It cannot be that, after all that has passed, she is fretting for that villain Tzerclas?'

'After risking her life to escape from him?' I answered dryly. 'No, I think not, my lord.'

'If I ever set eyes on him again I will end him!' the Waldgrave cried, still clinging, I think, to his idea, and exasperated by it. He strode up and down a time or two, and did not grow cooler. 'If it is not that, what is it?' he said at last.

'There are not many light hearts in Nuremberg,' I suggested. 'And of those, few are women's. There must be an end of this soon.'

'You think it is that?' he said.

'Why not?' I answered. 'I am told that the horses are dying by hundreds in the camp. The men will die next. In the end the King will have to march away, or see his army perish piecemeal. In either case the city will pay for all. Wallenstein will swoop down on it, and make of it another and greater Magdeburg. That is a poor prospect for the weak and helpless.'

'It is those rascally Croats!' the Waldgrave groaned. 'They cover the country like flies-are here and there and nowhere all in the same minute, and burn and harry and leave us nothing. We have no troops of that kind.'

'There was plundering in the Wert suburb last night,' I said. 'The King blames the Germans.'