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 ardour 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 honour, 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 honourable 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.