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.