CHAPTER V.

THE DOGGER.

By the end of March a great and unexpected change came over the weather. The wind, which had long blown from the chill north, now came softly and mildly from the west, but still the atmosphere was cold; for though the vast field-ice floated away from, the Guldborg sound, and the dark blue water rolled freely between the isles, their shores were covered with a pure white mantle of deep and dazzling snow.

Hearing that an expedition led by Christian IV. was about to be made against the Imperialists, and that a king's ship had been seen off the coast, I rode one day beyond Skielbye towards the mouth of the Sound, to see her, as I looked anxiously for the return of Ian.

On leaving Ernestine, I thought she seemed more sad than usual, and that her voice trembled when I bade her adieu. This might all have been fancy; but I could not expel such fancies from my head, and again and again they recurred to me, as I spurred a stout Holstein troop-horse (which Baron Fœyœ had lent me) along the frozen beach.

I waited long at a small house near the seashore, watching a little dogger beating with her two sails to seaward against a head wind, and threading a devious passage between the fragments of ice that flecked the sea with white; and in the evening I had the satisfaction of seeing a large king's ship, with her white sails shining in the setting sun, and her decks evidently crowded by soldiers, standing up the bosom of the narrow Sound.

I remounted my trooper, which I received from a cottager, who was remarkably polite for a Danish boor, and who informed me that he was half a Scot, as his father had come over with Captain Michael Wemyss' Scottish band in the preceding century, to serve in the old Swedish war. But the peasants were frequently very insolent to us, as foreign soldiers; on many occasions our men had been maltreated, and in two instances our officers had been murdered. For these pranks we usually made the people pay dearly, by sending the slain man's nearest kinsmen under a sergeant to the immediate locality, where, if they failed to find and shoot the perpetrators, they burned the houses, and houghed the cattle by a gash of the skene-dhu, in the old Highland fashion.

On this evening I was involved in one of those quarrels, when returning through a village at the entrance of which the bailiff of Laaland had established a toll, for some reason best known to his worship. In consequence of the dilapidated condition of King Christian's exchequer, we had been without pay for three months; thus I was without a coin to satisfy the gate ward, who peremptorily demanded a Danish fourpenny piece (twelve of which make a rixdollar), and deliberately barred my progress with a halbert.

In vain did I tell this churlish boor that I was travelling on the king's service (which by the by was not quite the case), others sallied out from the adjacent houses variously armed; and it was evident that, unless I chose to share the fate of poor Ensign Ludovick Lamond, who had lately been cut to pieces by the boors at Rodbye, there was no time to be lost. Drawing my claymore, and putting spurs to my horse, I hewed the fellow's halbert in two by one blow, hurled him to the earth, and passed the toll-gate, narrowly escaping the discharge of five or six pistolettes which were fired at that moment from behind an evergreen hedge; the leaves of which were scattered about me by the bullets.

Intent on avenging this outrage; I galloped back to the castle of Nyekiöbing; but soon found that fate had prepared other work for me.

By that time the king's ship had just come to anchor abreast of the town; a boat which shot off her side had just reached the landing-place; an officer of Highlanders sprang upon the mole, and I recognised the outspread eagle's pinion of Ian's helmet, even before he approached me.

With two thousand five hundred musketeers and pikemen, the wreck of his army, King Christian required us to repair to Rodbye, whither he had commanded the scattered companies of the regiment to muster under Ian Dhu, our lieutenant-colonel; and as the rash prince was about to make a bold attack upon the cantonments of some of Wallenstein and Tilly's now united and mighty host, which occupied all the promontory of North and South Juteland, from the banks of the Elbe to the Skagen cape, my company was to embark without an hour's delay on board the _Anna Catharina_, the ship of Sir Nickelas Valdemar, who had already received the companies of Angus Roy M'Alpine, Munro of Culcraigie, and Sir Patrick Mackay, from Maribœ, in the centre of Laaland, and all the little detachments of ours which occupied the castles of the isles.

"Alas, for Ernestine!" thought I, when hurrying back to the castle of Nyekibing; "how joyous to me would these tidings once have been!"

I met one of her attendants (Juliane Vüg, the warder's daughter), and desired her to inform Lady Ernestine that I craved a moment's interview, to bid a long farewell.

The girl went to her apartments, and returned to me almost immediately, with an expression of astonishment and consternation impressed on her fair, florid, and otherwise stolid visage, but unable to articulate a syllable, save some trash about "the fate of her mother--and the Trolds."

"Juliane, have you lost your tongue?" said I. "Speak, girl--Ernestine is ill--ill, my God! and I am to sail in an hour!"

Regardless of all etiquette in the excitement of the moment, I rushed up-stairs to her chamber, and knocked. There was no reply. My heart beat violently as I entered; there was no one within, and every thing bore marked evidence of confusion, and a hurried departure. A wardrobe with its drawers stood open--ransacked and in disorder; a letter, addressed to me, lay upon the table.

My brain became giddy; Prudentia had left me just in the same manner; but I thought not of her then, as I snatched up the letter and tore it open.

"Forgive me, dearest Philip," it ran; "forgive me the step I have taken--to leave this island; it is a course I have long contemplated, but lacked the spirit to put in execution, until this day at noon, when a faithful messenger in a small vessel arrived from our father to say, that he is dying in Holstein, and cannot depart from this world in peace unless he beholds us once again. You know how he loves Gabrielle and me. Could we remain after a request so touching and so terrible? Beg the good queen to pardon us. Moreover, Gabrielle is ill; and I know that a change of scene alone can cure her. The vessel we sail with is a Dantzic dogger, with two large sails. Should you see her in the Sound, do say one prayer for us; and, until we meet again, farewell, dearest Philip, and believe me your own

"ERNESTINE."

"Nyekiöbing, _March_ 28th."

I remembered the little craft I had seen tacking out of the Sound, and my heart sank as, with a feeling of bitterness and desolation, I descended to the castle-yard, where old Torquil Gorm, our pipe-major, was playing the gathering, strutting to and fro with his helmet on, and the long ribands streaming from his drones.

"Dioul! my kinsman--accoutre! accoutre!" exclaimed Ian, rushing after me with his cuirass half buckled; "hark to the gallant war-pipe! Mars and Bellona require new victims. And what do you think Heinrich Vug (the warder whose wife was carried off by the fairies) has just told me?"

"Oh, Ian, do not talk to me," said I; "my mind is a chaos! I am a fit companion only for madmen. But what did Heinrich tell you?"

"That our old friend Bandolo has been seen in the Sound by Fynböe the pilot, on board of a dogger with two large sails--the same we passed near Skeilbye."

"_A dogger with two sails_! Bandolo!--dost thou say so?" I exclaimed in a broken voice. My heart shrunk up at the words of Ian--a mountain seemed to fall upon me. "Ernestine in his power!" I staggered, and supported myself upon my claymore; the light seemed to leave my eyes.

Ernestine, in whom was centred all my hopes of the future--entwined with life itself--my happiness, my glory, and fortune, for she was all to me--and Gabrielle, too!--what might be her fate?

I knew that Bandolo had long fostered the most extravagant ambition--to become the purchaser of a county and coronet in some of those beggared states of Germany where such things were saleable; and Tilly's favour and the Imperial gold had made the bravo and scoutmaster rich as a Lombard Jew. I remembered the conversation between the wretch and his patron at Luneburg; and, if their father was really dying, trembled for the fate of the sisters.

I was stunned, benumbed, and had no sense save that a dreadful calamity--I knew not altogether what--had suddenly dissolved every tie between the world and me. Some time elapsed before Ian could understand me--that Ernestine and her sister had but too surely been decoyed away by a stratagem of the accomplished desperado.

All that passed on this evening appeared to me as a dream. Phadrig Mhor accoutred me; the parade, and inspection of locks and ammunition, the rattle of our drums as we marched under the old castle arch, and filed down to the landing-place; the tears of the kind old queen, who, in her goodness of heart, wept as the brave Highland band embarked on that desperate expedition, from which few--perhaps none--might ever return; all seemed parts of the same misty dream. Then came our reception onboard, the warm congratulations of our comrades, stout old Culcraigie, and Red M'Alpine, still wearing his scarf of crape; then the noisy supper in the gun-room, where salted beef, cold Russian tongue, and Holstein bacon, were washed down by many a brown flagon of German wine; then came the frolics and merriment--for, with the heedlessness of soldiers, my comrades forgot the hardships and dangers of the past year, and cared nothing for those that were to come. They spent that night in jovialty as our ship bore away for Rodbye.

I alone was mute, pale, downcast, and inexpressibly miserable.

I was at times in a state of absolute horror. I could not realize my separation from Ernestine; and if, when overcome by thought, sleep closed my eyes, it was but for a moment--her voice came to my ear, and I started and awoke.