My loud whispers were unheeded or unheard; thus I was obliged to follow, lest by some clownish blunder he might compromise us all.
"Quick--conceal yourself!" said I; "for, whoever these are, they come this way; and, if they discover us, we are both as dead men."
Perceiving that the room was hung with arras, I raised it at the foot and let it drop over my person, while standing flat against the wall, in a position which, to say the least of it, was very constrained, unpleasant, and dusty.
"Lord preserve us, and keep us! I'll be catched noo, like a rat in a girnel!" cried Dandy in great tribulation, as he ran three or four times round the room in search of a similar nook, overturning a chair or two in the dark; and, becoming more bewildered as he heard the approaching footsteps, he made a sudden dive below a large and stately bed which stood close to the wall, on one side of the chamber; and there he was barely ensconced, when all the gildings of its canopy, and of the corniced ceiling and furniture, glittered, as the two servants entered with their lights, and, placing them on the table, withdrew, retiring backwards before the little old man with a reverence which, together with his whole peculiar bearing (for I could overlook and overhear all through a hole in the decayed hangings), told me he was Tilly--the great, the ferocious, the terrible Tilly--the soldier-Jesuit--the demon-general of the Emperor Ferdinand!
"You may go," said he, to the servants, and they retired.
Leaning on the arm of the tall cavalier, and on his gold-headed cane, he crossed the waxed floor with a step rendered somewhat unsteady by age, and reached a large stuffed chair, then, seating himself, he drew several long breaths, during which the officer remained respectfully silent, with his plumed beaver in his right hand, and his left resting in the polished bowl-hilt of his long toledo.
Figure to yourself a little, lean old man, past his seventieth year, and made more aged in aspect by the asceticism of a youth passed in a Jesuit college, and by the wounds and toils of war; a thin face and high narrow forehead, alternately clouded by thought, and knit by irritability; fierce, deep eyes, like those of a rattlesnake, the hooked nose of his Spanish mother, the tiger-like mouth of his Walloon father, with a lanky cat-like mustache to show that he was a soldier, and the small remains of a tonsure to declare that he was yet a priest. A lean, bent body, encased in a leather doublet rusted over by the constant use of ill-conditioned armour; meagre thighs and crooked knees, cased in wide calfskin boots, having enormous jinglespurs; a long sword, a little mantle, a high ruff, a broad-brimmed hat of brown felt with a steeple crown, garnished by a red feather stuck into the gold image of Madonna, which, with his magnificent diamond ring, he afterwards bequeathed to our Lady of Oetingen. Such was John de Tserclä, the Count de Tilly, generalissimo of Ferdinand II. and of the troops of the Catholic League, so celebrated for his valour and cunning, his generosity to Catholics, his ferocity to Protestants--his aversion to women, to wine, and to all human weaknesses--save the fear of ghosts!
