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"No, your majesty," said John, looking him full in the face; "I mean that I have pledged my word to protect the Tyrolese, and help and succor them in their struggle for liberty and for their emperor, and that I will not incur the disgrace of having cheated a whole people and abused their confidence and love in the most revolting manner."
There the enemy had likewise surrendered in the mean time, and the barracks which, until yesterday, had been the quarters of the oppressors of the Tyrolese, the Bavarian soldiers, became now the prisons of the defeated. Escorted by the peasants, the disarmed and defenceless Bavarians were hurried into the barracks, whose doors closed noisily behind them.
While the troopers were employed in making up their trusses, the two adventurers advanced towards the skirt of a wood, on pretence of reconnoitring, and the Tyrolese, who undertook to be our hero's guide, directing him to a path which leads towards Strasburg, they suddenly vanished from the eyes of their companions, who in a few minutes hearing the report of several pistols, which the confederates purposely fired, conjectured that they had fallen in with a party of French, by whom they were made prisoners of war.
While occupied in passing my portmanteau through the prying and unutterably dirty hands of the custom-house officials I was accosted by a man dressed in the garb of a Tyrolese mountaineer short leathern breeches reaching to the knee, gray stockings, heavy hobnailed shoes, a nondescript species of jacket of the roughest frieze, and a battered hat adorned with two or three feathers of the capercailzie and a plume of the royal eagle.
These plumes, which, if taken from a full-grown eagle, frequently measure seven or eight inches in length, are highly prized by the Tyrolese peasants, but still more by the inhabitants of the neighboring Bavarian Highlands, who do not hesitate to expend a month's wages in the purchase of two or three with which to adorn their hats or those of their buxom sweethearts.
"Welcome, my Tyrolese, welcome!" he said, in a deeply-moved voice; "may God and the Holy Virgin grant that no harm result, from your visit to me! You know that I have never ceased to love you, and that when, in the year 1805,I had to bid farewell to Andreas Hofer and the dear Tyrol, my heart almost broke with grief and despair."
"And who is glad to-day to be able to embrace Andreas Hofer again," said the archduke, encircling the Herculean form of the Tyrolese innkeeper with his arms. "But I will shed no tears to-day, Andreas, for I hope the time of tears is over, and you have come to tell me so, to bring me love-greetings from the Tyrolese, and the hope of better times.
"For God's sake, how have we treated you, then?" asked the tax- collector, drawing back from the threatening face of Anthony Wallner toward his bailiffs. "Listen to me, Tyrolese," shouted Anthony Wallner, scornfully, "he asks me how the Bavarians have treated us! Shall I tell it to him once more!" "Yes, yes, Tony, do so," replied the Tyrolese on all sides.
The head gear is that known in this country as the Tyrolese hat, adorned by a chamois beard, which is inserted between the ribbon and the felt. By nightfall, which comes early in the mountains, everybody is back at the "jagdschloss," and dinner is served at five, in a room panelled with wood and decorated with trophies.
Austria, when preparing for war in 1809, could therefore confidently reckon upon a general rising in the Tyrol. A conspiracy was entered into by the whole of the Tyrolese peasantry. Sixty thousand men, on a moderate calculation, were intrusted with the secret, which was sacredly kept, not a single townsman being allowed to participate in it.
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