The couple so skilled in music stopped, and Barbara’s heart beat quicker as she listened to the words which the fair-haired young trooper close beside her was singing in an especially clear voice: 

                   “Cheer up, ye gallant soldiers all! 
                    Be blithe and bold of mind
                    With faith on God we’ll loudly call,
                    Then on our ruler kind. 
                    His name is worthy of our praise,
                    Since to the throne God doth him raise;
                    So we will glorify him, too,
                    And render the obedience due. 
                    Of an imperial race be came,
                    To this broad empire heir;
                    Carolus is his noble name,
                    God-sent its crown to wear. 
                    Mehrer is his just title grand,
                    The sovereign of many a land
                    Which God hath given to his care
                    His name rings on the air!”

[Mehrer—­The increaser, an ancient title of the German emperors]

How much pleasure this song afforded Barbara, although it praised the man whom she thought she hated; and when the third verse began with the words,

                   “So goodly is the life he leads
                    Within this earthly vale,”

oh, how gladly she would have joined in!

That could not be, but she sang with them in her heart, for she had long since caught the tune, and how intently the soldiers would have listened if it had been possible for her to raise her voice as usual!  Amid the singing of all these men her clear, bell-like tones would have risen like the lark soaring from the grain field, and what a storm of applause would have greeted her from these rough throats!

Grief for the lost happiness of pouring forth her feelings in melody seized upon her more deeply than for a long time.  She would fain have glided quietly away to escape the cause of this fresh sorrow.  But Gombert was listening to the young soldier’s song with interest, so Barbara continued to hear the young warrior as, with evident enthusiasm, he sang the verse: 

                   “Patient and tolerant is he,
                    Nor vengeance seeks, nor blood;
                    E’en though he errs, as well may be,
                    His heart is ever good.”

She, too, had deemed this heart so, but now she knew better.  Yet it pleased her that the fair-haired soldier so readily believed the poet and, obeying a hasty impulse, she put her hand into the pouch at her belt to give him a gold piece; but Gombert nudged her, and in his broken Netherland German repeated the verse which he had just heard: 

              “’Tis stern necessity that forced
               The sword into his hand;
               ’Tis not for questions of the faith
               That he doth make his stand.”