"There will be the spoil of the cities and the ransom of the prisoners!" said Nigel.
"The spoil of Stockholm?" the Jesuit inquired with a smile. "Now as to yourself, General. Will you stay here and take your chance of a command under Wallenstein, or join Tilly?"
"I would be where there is work to do!" said Nigel. "And Wallenstein may not name me!"
"You would have made a good regular had you been trained early," said the Father approvingly. "But some day woman will come into your life and divide it into the camps of love and duty."
For an instant a flush came into Nigel's cheeks and passed. Had she not come sooner than the Jesuit expected?
The interview ended, Nigel proffered a formal request to the War Department to be allowed to join General Tilly. As the permission did not depend upon the War Department so much as upon the Emperor, not upon the Emperor so much as Father Lamormain, still a few days elapsed before he could set out. Couriers were expected. Negotiations had been begun with Wallenstein with as much ceremony as if he had been a crowned head.
To any man less genuinely a man of action, this compulsory and to himself excusable dawdling in the very neighbourhood of the Archduchess, would have been a delightful interlude between the stern acts of war. Such a man would have had the capacity for idleness in some measure, and some knowledge how to enjoy it rather than employ it. He would, far more quickly than Nigel, have found a way to enjoy it, and to enjoy it in company with some beloved fair, or perhaps with several.
Nigel's love was a possession. The Archduchess, mysterious combination of Stephanie and Ottilie, had the whole of his heart for her encampment. There was no little citadel or outward tower which her forces did not occupy. But as yet the exaltation of his love did not manifest itself in any outward signs. He neither talked more, as many lovers do, nor was more silent, as some are wont to be, nor manifested exceeding nor profuse gentleness, a manner unbecoming in a soldier. If any at Vienna had known him well, they might have thought him more self-contained than usual. He felt that he must needs keep a close-knitted grip upon himself, for he told himself that, if he should come within arm's length of the object of his worship, his will would be as the green withes that bound Samson, and his lips would incontinently profane the image of the goddess, as they had once before done when she had appeared under the humbler of her guises. That the Archduchess, on her side, might be as fully and completely woman as he was man, did not realise itself to him. It was not possible that it should. So that he did not picture her as beating her wings against the palace cage, whose wires were the servant spies, stifling or trying to stifle in her generous heart the desire to give of her womanhood with lavishness to him whom her imagination had crowned and enthroned in a vision of perfect man.