CHAPTER XXXII.

PASTOR RAD AGAIN.

After the victory of the Lutheran faith at Breitenfeld, Pastor Rad had found himself without a definite mission. In his enthusiasm he had made his way to the camp of Gustavus at Werben and marched with the Swedes to that field of triumph, using such opportunities as occurred to labour by way of exhortation and of prayer. So that his sonorous voice was lifted up, it mattered little who listened or regarded. At first the Swedes, drafted into whose ranks were many Brandenburgers, Pomeranians, and Saxons, listened to, if they only imperfectly understood, his vociferous ministrations. But after Breitenfeld the jealousy of the Swedish native ministers, who had at the beginning, while the issue was uncertain, held out the right hand of fellowship, manifested itself, and he was made to understand that his presence with the Swedish portion of Gustavus' army was superfluous. That army speedily moved onwards towards the west, and Pastor Rad, having reached Erfurt along with it, considered it a suitable opportunity for making his way back to Eisenach, where his flock, and his livelihood, lay peacefully enfolded in the forest.

His reception did not savour of fervency. The interest of utterly rural communities in external events happening a hundred miles away is hard to kindle, and, when kindled, needs much application of the bellows to keep it at a red heat. Magdeburg had fired them. His own narratives and sermons had blown up their sparks to a blaze, but, with the marching of a small body of their young men to join Gustavus, the countryside had returned to its arduous agricultural pursuits, to its wood chopping and charcoal burning, to its smithies and its inns.

"Here comes Pastor Rad!" said Jacob Putkammer, the tailor. "Now we shall hear!"

"About Breitenfeld?" was the pastor's eager question. "It was glorious."

"Yes! Yes! The Swede beat Tilly till there was not a whole suit of clothes in his army! We know all that."

"What we want to know," said Marx Englehart, the smith, "is what has become of Elspeth Reinheit?"

"Elspeth Reinheit?" queried the pastor in astonishment.

"You remember, pastor, how you set about driving the devil out of her! Over yonder at Ruhla!"

The pastor flushed at the remembrance.

"Yes! Didn't some soldier come interfering and carry her off?" said the smith. "I wasn't there. I had too much to do at the time to make a holiday."

"Holiday! Marx!" said the pastor sternly. "It was a solemn duty we had to perform, and we were shamefully interrupted."

The tailor's eyes glinted as he said--

"I can picture him now dusting your gown for you!"

The pastor looked, as he felt, very angry.

"I don't know what became of her."

"Well!" said the smith, "I shouldn't advise you to go too near old Reinheit, her father. He's in an awful fume against you, pastor. Of course at the time he thought it was all for her good, but he did not expect you would go to the length of whipping the poor girl."

"How else should one persuade the devil out of a woman?" asked Pastor Rad.

"Ah!" said the tailor. "We are not learned in these matters. Now if you had been married to her, no one would have complained. There is no better way."

"There was a good deal of talk before that that you were cocking your cap at her!" said the smith slowly.

"And might have done worse! Old Reinheit's got a fine stocking of gold somewhere, and look at his farm," said the tailor.

"Lay not up for yourselves----" began the pastor.

"That's all very well!" said the tailor. "But a good-looking wench, even if she has got a devil, is none the worse for having a rich father. _She_ didn't lay up the treasure. Besides, I wouldn't give half a batz for a woman who hadn't got a bit of the devil in her."

"Come! come! Jacob!" said the pastor. "Your tongue speaketh of vanity as your trade does. As for Nicholas Reinheit, I shall even go up to his house and comfort him."

"Well!" said the smith. "It is only just and manly so to do, but look after your skin, for he is a man who can still use his hands if he is a bit over sixty."

A good many people met Pastor Rad as he went through the town to Nicholas Reinheit's farm, and every one of them asked him--

"Where is Elspeth Reinheit?"

And some careless people even put it in this way--

"What have you done with Elspeth Reinheit?"

It was bad enough to be asked where she was. It was iniquitous that he should be taxed with having put her away.

It was not very strange that Pastor Rad should not have known what had become of Elspeth. He had seen Nigel carry her off. That was all of a piece with his own unworthy suspicions of Elspeth's character. As to her after-fate Pastor Rad had very little doubt of that. She would have been abandoned in some city to her own wretchedness and shame, not daring to return home. All armies left a track of human litter that had once been spotless maidens and chaste wives. He felt himself aggrieved at his own personal loss. He had fully intended to wed Elspeth in due time and inherit as much as he could of Nicholas Reinheit's wealth. Nicholas the farmer had not been overmuch in favour of the idea, but old Pastor Reinheit, the girl's uncle, who had died at Magdeburg, was desirous that the wedding should come about. Altogether Pastor Rad was not very eager to meet the girl's father, but the tailor and the smith, who represented public opinion in Eisenach, had led him in his haste to declare that he would face Nicholas, and he would. Pastor Rad's consciousness of his own honesty of purpose upheld him.

Nicholas gave him a grudging "good-day!" He was a stoutly built, rather fat man, but anxiety had perceptibly thinned him, and his cheeks hung loose and baggy.

"The Lord comfort you in your affliction!" said Pastor Rad.

The old man turned on him with a snarl--

"It is easy to say. You took away my daughter. You set some silly tale going about her being possessed till the countryside demanded that she should suffer discipline. Fool! It was you that was possessed. And you set about giving her a public whipping, my daughter Elspeth, as good and true a maid as ever walked, and all those mawkish fools of elders and hugger-muggers sitting in a ring all about you mum and not lifting a finger."

"The discipline has been found efficacious in cases of possession!" said Pastor Rad.

"Very likely," retorted Nicholas, "where some servant girl has gone distraught and howled like a wolf up and down the village, or an old witch has given a man's horse the murrain. Whip 'em! Burn 'em! Drown 'em. But my daughter Elspeth! And then forsooth one of the Emperor's captains takes her out of your hands and rides away with her, and you with your three or four hundred men with muskets and pikes never move a finger. Where is she now? Tell me that! Is she alive or dead? You professed to have a liking for her at one time. Why, man, if you had had a spark of love in you, you would have followed that captain's troops till you dropped! Pastor! Pastor means shepherd, doesn't it? What manner of shepherd are you that lets the wolf snatch his lamb out of his very fingers?"

Nicholas spat solemnly on the hearth.

"You forget," expostulated Pastor Rad, "that there were above three hundred troopers, well armed and well horsed. We should have been cut in pieces."

"And would they have gone scathless? Has the forest lost all its manhood?"

"What was done or left undone cannot be remedied!" said the pastor.

"Did you know the man?" the farmer asked after a pause.

"Yes, it is the same fellow, a Scot, so they told me, who broke into the house at Magdeburg!"

"And saved all your lives, so Elspeth told me! 'Tis a pity he saved yours!"

"Friend Nicholas! You are too much beside yourself with grief. I was but an instrument of God."

"He rode with you to Erfurt, as I mind," the farmer went on. "Did he treat Elspeth as a light o' love?"

As a matter of fact, the pastor had been too much engaged in the contemplation of his coming sermons to remember, so he answered truthfully enough--

"I noticed nothing unseemly in his behaviour either to Elspeth or to Ottilie von Thüringen!"

"It may be that the captain but took her to a place of safety, thinking her in danger!" said the farmer, growing more placid as the thought sprang up that there was ground for hope. "I remember a regiment staying near here the night after your hocus-pocus at Ruhla. They came at nightfall, and with the dawn, or soon after, an officer came riding helter-skelter down the hill from the Wartburg with a single soldier after him, and in half an hour they mounted and rode away. Maybe he was the very man."

"But if he brought Elspeth thither why did he not send her to you?" propounded Pastor Rad.

"Because the girl would have had more sense than to get in your path again!"

"As if I had no work of the Lord's to do, where the hosts of the Lord were drawn out unto battle?"

"Depend upon it," said the farmer, "Elspeth's in the Wartburg hiding!"

The pastor shook his head. He would have liked to know that she was. After all, there was an air of solid comfort about old Reinheit's abode, sadly marred by the lack of Elspeth's trim figure in coif and apron trotting to and fro. The more he thought of it the more he wanted to see her. At last he said--

"It may be that the Lord will vouchsafe light I will go even unto the Wartburg and question the Landgravine, if peradventure she knows where the maiden is."

"You need not darken my door again if you find her not," said Nicholas Reinheit. "She can milk against any maid, make butter against any maid or wife in the forest, bake against any, brew against any. God in heaven! she must come back. And I shan't go to the church till she does."

Pastor Rad was too much surprised to say anything. For Nicholas had been a very steadfast pillar of the Church, and it boded ill for Pastor Rad if he did not succeed in restoring the lost lamb to the fold.

So he picked up his staff and trudged thoughtfully away up the steep path to the Wartburg.

But the quest did not end there. For the Landgravine told him that the Lady Ottilie von Thüringen had taken Elspeth away with her when she set out for Halberstadt, which was the next day, or the next day but one, after the Emperor's colonel had brought her.

This news acted like a spur upon Pastor Rad. He stayed long enough to send word by one of Reinheit's cowherds that he had learned something about Elspeth and had gone to find her. If he heard nothing of Elspeth, at least he was sure of getting trace of the Lady Ottilie, who had many threads of connection with the Protestant leaders in various places. And he did not have to go farther than Erfurt before he received some information which caused him to return southward and set his face towards Bohemia.