CHAPTER XXIII.

A CLASH OF HEARTS.

But for the dark eyes of Ottilie von Thüringen Nigel Charteris would have led his reluctant horse down to the camp. He had leisure to make this reflection as he sat at meat some degrees below the Landgrave, who, though supper was over, still sat at the high table with a flask of Rhenish wine before him. The Landgravine had gone to her retiring room again. The Lady Ottilie had borne off Elspeth, who, Nigel reflected, must be very hungry. He did not know that this reflection he shared with the sage and high-born lady, who was at this time encouraging Elspeth to make a hearty supper, not omitting a goblet of mead, which aided Elspeth's tongue to recover its native fluency.

It was true that the dark eyes of Ottilie von Thüringen had sparkled with delight and surprise at the sight of Nigel. Nigel was a Scot, and therefore set the sparkle down to the credit of his account. But Nigel was a Scot, and therefore also asked himself why the lady's spirit, as reflected in her eyes, should be so elate. And Ottilie herself could not have told why, would not have admitted that she was elated. And half an hour after she had carried off Elspeth she had become so deeply interested in the account of the fight in the Dragon's Gorge that she had forgotten the Scots colonel altogether, in her interest in the movements of Count von Teschen.

Who was he? Elspeth Reinheit did not know. The men with him were deserters from the Emperor's troops. Where was he? Doubtless a prisoner with the regiment lying on the outskirts of Eisenach. The Scots colonel had brought the Count's holsters and valise with him. She did not know why. Elspeth, oblivious of the Lady Ottilie's anxieties, munched and drank. She had undoubtedly a healthy appetite, and was besides waxing sleepy.

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 passages 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 furnishings, 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 hoarsely 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 passed 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 spaces 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 Thüringen bade me tell your lordship 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 assured 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 assumed 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 Cæsar, 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 Archduchess Stephanie! And in truth did I not know you to be the Lady Ottilie von Thüringen, 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 workmanship.

"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!"

"And this is Wallenstein!" said Nigel. "These are his bribes, his compliments, his wheedlers to set honest Landgraves and bishops and princes against his master, the Emperor! I cannot understand it."

"It is beyond the robber lord's understanding!" Again the scorn whipped him.

Again he flushed, and for a moment Ottilie von Thüringen trembled for the outburst. It did not come. She marvelled at the strength of his will. And then she caught her breath, for her eyes saw something. Her impulse was to snatch at it, beyond all the pride of race that was hers. But she also quelled herself. He saw it too and drew it forth. He knew the hand. It was Wallenstein's. A sealed letter, and the superscription was to the high-born Baroness Ottilie von Thüringen.

With perfect coolness and grace he handed it to her.

"Our Cæsar has strange postmen of his own!" he said.

This time it was the Lady Ottilie who flushed, but whether it was with anger, or with joy, or confusion as with a woman who, while entertaining one suitor hears another announced, there was no guessing. She hid the letter in her bosom.

"Then the Count was on his way to the Wartburg!" Nigel said aloud for her to hear.

"He will be here in a short while!" she said serenely.

"What do you mean, lady?"

"Just that! Have you done with the Count's saddle-bags?"

There was nothing else in writing. Nigel replaced everything.

"And you take nothing, tall captain? Neither gold, nor raiment, nor trinkets? What ails you?"

"Not a jot! He can come for his own if he can travel so far," said Nigel. "And for your sweet aid, your comfortable words, your hospitality, I pray you, sweet Ottilie, Star of the Night, and Serpent of the Morning, take this and this." And without more preamble he took her in his arms and kissed her willy-nilly passionately upon the brow, the eyes, the lips. And then in the same whirlwind he rushed down the stair and called for his horse, his man, his baggage, and in a few minutes rode down the hill at a breakneck speed.

Looking up at the great tower before he passed out of sight he saw a white arm extended and a scarf waved in the morning breeze.

"God's truth! Where am I?" he exclaimed, and waved his sword in the sunlight.