That same night a full meeting of the most distinguished students was
assembled at the mansion of Count St. Aldenheim. Much stormy discussion
arose upon two points. First, upon the particular means by which they
were to pursue an end upon which all were unanimous. Upon that,
however, they were able for the present to arrive at a preliminary
arrangement with sufficient harmony. This was to repair in a body, with
Count St. Aldenheim at their head, to the castle, and there to demand
an audience of the Landgrave, at which a strong remonstrance was to be
laid before his highness, and their determination avowed to repel the
indignities thrust upon them, with their united forces. On the second
they were more at variance. It happened that many of the persons
present, and amongst them Count St. Aldenheim, were friends of
Maximilian. A few, on the other hand, there were, who, either from
jealousy of his distinguished merit, hated him; or, as good citizens of
Klosterheim, and connected by old family ties with the interests of
that town, were disposed to charge Maximilian with ambitious views of
private aggrandizement, at the expense of the city, grounded upon the
emperor's favor, or upon a supposed marriage with some lady of the
imperial house. For the story of Paulina's and Maximilian's mutual
attachment had transpired through many of the travellers; but with some
circumstances of fiction. In defending Maximilian upon those charges,
his friends had betrayed a natural warmth at the injustice offered to
his character; and the liveliness of the dispute on this point had
nearly ended in a way fatal to their unanimity on the immediate
question at issue. Good sense, however, and indignation at the
Landgrave, finally brought them round again to their first resolution;
and they separated with the unanimous intention of meeting at noon on
the following day, for the purpose of carrying it into effect.
But their unanimity on this point was of little avail; for at an early
hour on the following morning every one of those who had been present
at the meeting was arrested by a file of soldiers, on a charge of
conspiracy, and marched off to one of the city prisons. The Count St.
Aldenheim was himself the sole exception; and this was a distinction
odious to his generous nature, as it drew upon him a cloud of
suspicion. He was sensible that he would be supposed to owe his
privilege to some discovery or act of treachery, more or less, by which
he had merited the favor of the Landgrave. The fact was, that in the
indulgence shown to the count no motive had influenced the Landgrave
but a politic consideration of the great favor and influence which the
count's brother, the Palsgrave, at this moment enjoyed in the camp of
his own Swedish allies. On this principle of policy, the Landgrave
contented himself with placing St. Aldenheim under a slight military
confinement to his own house, under the guard of a few sentinels posted
in his hall.
For _him_, therefore, under the powerful protection which he
enjoyed elsewhere, there was no great anxiety entertained. But for the
rest, many of whom had no friends, or friends who did them the ill
service of enemies, being in fact regarded as enemies by the Landgrave
and his council, serious fears were entertained by the whole city.
Their situation was evidently critical. The Landgrave had them in his
power. He was notoriously a man of gloomy and malignant passions; had
been educated, as all European princes then were, in the notions of a
plenary and despotic right over the lives of his subjects, in any case
where they lifted their presumptuous thoughts to the height of
controlling the sovereign; and, even in circumstances which to his own
judgment might seem to confer much less discretionary power over the
rights of prisoners, he had been suspected of directing the course of
law and of punishment into channels that would not brook the public
knowledge. Darker dealings were imputed to him in the popular opinion.
Gloomy suspicions were muttered at the fireside, which no man dared
openly to avow; and in the present instance the conduct of the
Landgrave was every way fitted to fall in with the worst of the public
fears. At one time he talked of bringing his prisoners to a trial; at
another, he countermanded the preparations which he had made with that
view. Sometimes he spoke of banishing them in a body; and again he
avowed his intention to deal with their crime as treason. The result of
this moody and capricious tyranny was to inspire the most vague and
gloomy apprehensions into the minds of the prisoners, and to keep their
friends, with the whole city of Klosterheim, in a feverish state of
insecurity.
This state of things lasted for nearly three weeks; but at length a
morning of unexpected pleasure dawned upon the city. The prisoners were
in one night all released. In half an hour the news ran over the town
and the university; multitudes hastened to the college, anxious to
congratulate the prisoners on their deliverance from the double
afflictions of a dungeon and of continual insecurity. Mere curiosity
also prompted some, who took but little interest in the prisoners or
their cause, to inquire into the circumstances of so abrupt and
unexpected an act of grace. One principal court in the college was
filled with those who had come upon this errand of friendly interest or
curiosity. Nothing was to be seen but earnest and delighted faces,
offering or acknowledging congratulation; nothing to be heard but the
language of joy and pleasure--friendly or affectionate, according to
the sex or relation of the speaker. Some were talking of procuring
passports for leaving the town; some anticipating that this course
would not be left to their own choice, but imposed, as the price of his
clemency, by the Landgrave. All, in short, was hubbub and joyous
uproar, when suddenly a file of the city guard, commanded by an
officer, made their way rudely and violently through the crowd,
advancing evidently to the spot where the liberated prisoners were
collected in a group. At that moment the Count St. Aldenheim was
offering his congratulations. The friends to whom he spoke were too
confident in his honor and integrity to have felt even one moment's
misgiving upon the true causes which had sheltered him from the
Landgrave's wrath, and had thus given him a privilege so invidious in
the eyes of those who knew him not, and on that account so hateful in
his own. They knew his unimpeachable fidelity to the cause and
themselves, and were anxiously expressing their sense of it by the
warmth of their salutations at the very moment when the city guard
appeared. The count, on his part, was gayly reminding them to come that
evening and fulfil their engagement to drink his aunt of jovial memory
in her own Johannisberg, when the guard, shouldering aside the crowd,
advanced, and, surrounding the group of students, in an instant laid
the hands of summary arrest each upon the gentleman who stood next him.
The petty officer who commanded made a grasp at one of the most
distinguished in dress, and seized rudely upon the gold chain depending
from his neck. St. Aldenheim, who happened at the moment to be in
conversation with this individual, stung with a sudden indignation at
the ruffian eagerness of the men in thus abusing the privileges of
their office, and unable to control the generous ardor of his nature,
met this brutal outrage with a sudden blow at the officer's face,
levelled with so true an aim, that it stretched him at his length upon
the ground. No terrors of impending vengeance, had they been a thousand
times stronger than they were, could at this moment have availed to
stifle the cry of triumphant pleasure--long, loud, and unfaltering--
which indignant sympathy with the oppressed extorted from the crowd.
The pain and humiliation of the blow, exalted into a maddening
intensity by this popular shout of exultation, quickened the officer's
rage into an apparent frenzy. With white lips, and half suffocated with
the sudden revulsion of passion, natural enough to one who had never
before encountered even a momentary overture at opposition to the
authority with which he was armed, and for the first time in his life
found his own brutalities thrown back resolutely in his teeth, the man
rose, and, by signs rather than the inarticulate sounds which he meant
for words, pointed the violence of his party upon the Count St.
Aldenheim. With halberds bristling around him, the gallant young
nobleman was loudly summoned to surrender; but he protested
indignantly, drawing his sword and placing himself in an attitude of
defence, that he would die a thousand deaths sooner than surrender the
sword of his father, the Palsgrave, a prince of the empire, of
unspotted honor, and most ancient descent, into the hands of a jailer.
"Jailer!" exclaimed the officer, almost howling with passion.
"Why, then, captain of jailers, lieutenant, anspessade, or what you
will. What else than a jailer is he that sits watch upon the prison-
doors of honorable cavaliers?" Another shout of triumph applauded St.
Aldenheim; for the men who discharged the duties of the city guard at
that day, or "petty guard," as it was termed, corresponding in many of
their functions to the modern police, were viewed with contempt by all
parties; and most of all by the military, though in some respects
assimilated to them by discipline and costume. They were industriously
stigmatized as jailers; for which there was the more ground, as their
duties did in reality associate them pretty often with the jailer; and
in other respects they were a dissolute and ferocious body of men,
gathered not out of the citizens, but many foreign deserters, or
wretched runagates from the jail, or from the justice of the provost-
marshal in some distant camp. Not a man, probably, but was liable to be
reclaimed, in some or other quarter of Germany, as a capital
delinquent. Sometimes, even, they were actually detected, claimed, and
given up to the pursuit of justice, when it happened that the subjects
of their criminal acts were weighty enough to sustain an energetic
inquiry. Hence their reputation became worse than scandalous: the
mingled infamy of their calling, and the houseless condition of
wretchedness which had made it worth their acceptance, combined to
overwhelm them with public scorn; and this public abhorrence, which at
any rate awaited them, mere desperation led them too often to
countenance and justify by their conduct.
"Captain of jailers! do your worst, I say," again ejaculated St.
Aldenheim. Spite of his blinding passion, the officer hesitated to
precipitate himself into a personal struggle with the count, and thus,
perhaps, afford his antagonist an occasion for a further triumph. But
loudly and fiercely he urged on his followers to attack him. These
again, not partaking in the personal wrath of their leader, even whilst
pressing more and more closely upon St. Aldenheim, and calling upon him
to surrender, scrupled to inflict a wound, or too marked an outrage,
upon a cavalier whose rank was known to the whole city, and of late
most advantageously known for his own interests, by the conspicuous
immunity which it had procured him from the Landgrave. In vain did the
commanding officer insist, in vain did the count defy; menaces from
neither side availed to urge the guard into any outrage upon the person
of one who might have it in his power to retaliate so severely upon
themselves. They continued obstinately at a stand, simply preventing
his escape, when suddenly the tread of horses' feet arose upon the ear,
and through a long vista were discovered a body of cavalry from the
castle coming up at a charging pace to the main entrance of the
college. Without pulling up on the outside, as hitherto they had always
done, they expressed sufficiently the altered tone of the Landgrave's
feelings towards the old chartered interests of Klosterheim, by
plunging through the great archway of the college-gates; and then
making way at the same furious pace through the assembled crowds, who
broke rapidly away to the right and to the left, they reined up
directly abreast of the city guard and their prisoners.
"Colonel von Aremberg!" said St. Aldenheim, "I perceive your errand. To
a soldier I surrender myself; to this tyrant of dungeons, who has
betrayed more men, and cheated more gibbets of their due, than ever he
said _aves_, I will never lend an ear, though he should bear the
orders of every Landgrave in Germany."
"You do well," replied the colonel; "but for this man, count, he bears
no orders from any Landgrave, nor will ever again bear orders from the
Landgrave of X----. Gentlemen, you are all my prisoners; and you will
accompany me to the castle. Count St. Aldenheim, I am sorry that there
is no longer an exemption for yourself. Please to advance. If it will
be any gratification to you, these men" (pointing to the city guard)
"are prisoners also."
Here was a revolution of fortune that confounded everybody. The
detested guardians of the city jail were themselves to tenant it; or,
by a worse fate still, were to be consigned unpitied, and their case
unjudged, to the dark and pestilent dungeons which lay below the
Landgrave's castle. A few scattered cries of triumph were heard from
the crowd; but they were drowned in a tumult of conflicting feelings.
As human creatures, fallen under the displeasure of a despot with a
judicial power of torture to enforce his investigations, even
_they_ claimed some compassion. But there arose, to call off
attention from these less dignified objects of the public interest, a
long train of gallant cavaliers, restored so capriciously to liberty,
in order, as it seemed, to give the greater poignancy and bitterness to
the instant renewal of their captivity. This was the very frenzy of
despotism in its very moodiest state of excitement. Many began to think
the Landgrave mad. If so, what a dreadful fate might be anticipated for
the sons or representatives of so many noble families, gallant soldiers
the greater part of them, with a nobleman of princely blood at their
head, lying under the displeasure of a gloomy and infuriated tyrant,
with unlimited means of executing the bloodiest suggestions of his
vengeance. Then, in what way had the guardians of the jails come to be
connected with any even imaginary offence? Supposing the Landgrave
insane, his agents were not so; Colonel von Aremberg was a man of
shrewd and penetrating understanding; and this officer had clearly
spoken in the tone of one who, whilst announcing the sentence of
another, sympathizes entirely with the justice and necessity of its
harshness.
Something dropped from the miserable leader of the city guard, in his
first confusion and attempt at self-defence, which rather increased
than explained the mystery. "The Masque! the Masque !" This was the
word which fell at intervals upon the ear of the listening crowd, as he
sometimes directed his words in the way of apology and deprecation to
Colonel von Aremberg, who did not vouchsafe to listen, or of occasional
explanation and discussion, as it was partly kept up between himself
and one of his nearest partners in the imputed transgression. Two or
three there might be seen in the crowd, whose looks avowed some nearer
acquaintance with this mysterious allusion than it would have been safe
to acknowledge. But, for the great body of spectators who accompanied
the prisoners and their escort to the gates of the castle, it was
pretty evident by their inquiring looks, and the fixed expression of
wonder upon their features, that the whole affair, and its
circumstances, were to them equally a subject of mystery for what was
past, and of blind terror for what was to come.