Book 1 — CHAPTER V I COME TO SCHLOSS REGENSTEIN

The copy of a letter written soon after my arrival in Germany to my old friend and correspondent, Rocca, tells at least what I wished my associates at Rome to know of my journey and its surroundings. It is couched in the style much affected by the virtuosi of the day; and although I have come to be ashamed enough of such literary vanities, I allow the letter to stand that it may be a true chronicle of at least one person—myself.

“... Pardon indeed, my honored Rocca, that I now write you in mere Italian, and not in Latin. But my books have not yet arrived from Augsburg, and while it is indeed possible I could write in the classic tongue without the immortal illustrations of pure Latinity before me, I fear I might lapse into some monkish idiom unless I could refer to my Cicero and Statius. However, I do not intend to imitate Agrippina and Trajan (not to name Cæsar) and recite my deeds in formal commentaries, but simply to declare that your friend is in good health, and so far as a banished man may be, in good spirits.

“Here I am, then, in my mountain eyrie, snug as an eagle above intruding ken. Conceive me too as sovereign lord over all human creatures about me, possessed of right of pit and gallows, and expected to prove my princely blood by administering frequent floggings with my own hand, and accounted not a little lacking in spirit if I fail to crowd my overlarge dungeons with many victims of my capricious displeasure. In short, within my little kingdom I find that I am possessed of all the absolute tyranny of the Grand Turk or the Great Prince of Muscovy.

“The tale of my journey over the Alps to Augsburg and Erfurt, I must omit, knowing you have had your surfeit of stories of travellers. I will simply remark that the inns had even as many hungry fleas as I had feared (excelling even their ferocious comrades of Naples), the cookery was bad, the folk we met, even of the better sort, were oafish: and Andrea and his underlings have had their heads repeatedly broken (and have retorted in kind) in brawls with sheep-pated inn servants. Indeed, when I look on my poor Andrea and observe his hang-dog countenance as he goes among these Northerners, I feel that for him the expiation of his sins in purgatory has begun already.

“Shortly after leaving Erfurt we had our first real adventure. We ran upon a band of armed villains led by a fellow styled a ‘Ritter’ (i.e. with some pretence to coat-armor) in the act and article of rifling the wagons of certain Halle merchants who were sadly watching the plundering with their arms strapped behind them. Modesty forbids me to tell of my own feats in combat; nevertheless, Andrea afterward proclaimed that I laid about me like a veritable Orlando. In any case, we dispersed the rascals, rescued the merchants, and I pinked the Ritter through the shoulder. Afterwards when we trussed him up to carry onward to Nordhausen and to summary justice, the fellow professed no sorrow for his misdeeds, but asserted his rights to plunder along that highway. ‘From time immemorial his family had possessed the right to plunder every cart which broke its axle upon the road betwixt certain limits, and assuredly that cart had so broken its axle. Besides, every Ritter now and then made his horse “bite off the purses of travellers.”’

“All this gave me a taste of the country I was entering. From Nordhausen, as I fared northward, the country became ever more wild and rocky. Not sublime like the Alps; not softly sensuous like the south of our dear Italy; but one green hill after another, each a little higher, each a little steeper than its predecessor, until at last you wind in and out the mountains, following the line of some green rushing brook, while high above, the great ridges of pointed pines rise line upon line, like the spear points of a serried army.

“So we plunged into the Harz, over hill and dale, past castles and brown-thatched hamlets. Sometimes a red-roofed village, with its peaked parish spire would loom before us; sometimes a little chapel upon a soaring crag. The country folk were haler and brawnier than the lowlanders we were quitting. We met a great flock of black sheep, with a grizzled, blue-coated shepherd, filling all the roadway and crowding us nigh across the wall. We passed five ox-teams pulling great creaking loads of hay, so high that the latter seemed to dwarf both the double yoke and the sturdy driver who was guiding the whole vast mass with a deft touch of his goad. Again there was the melodious tinkling of fifty cow-bells, as the long herd came plodding down the pine-hung way.

“And as we wound deeper into the mountains, past one red-roofed village after another, and saw the sturdy forms of the men, straight as the firs above them; saw the blond, clear beauty of the farmer maids, with their long, fair hair wound round their heads like shining wreaths, I confess the blood began to stir within me, and despite the remembrance of Rome and Florence and Venice and the rest, I began to find the upland air all spring and sparkle, and to think the German speech less harsh; yes, even to say under breath, ‘I will never mourn that my father sprang from this North.’

“After we passed Hasselfelde and entered upon the last stage of the journey, the country grew yet wilder. Over a clearing we saw the red coat of a startled deer go flashing through the pine stumps. A wolfish wood-cutter stopped and looked at us hard as we approached, as if wondering whether he had not best scamper up the hillside out of reach of our arquebuses. We crossed a roaring torrent by a rough timber bridge that swayed uncannily under our horses. Then at a sudden turn in the rocks we came face to face with half a score of men on big lumbering steeds, and clad in black and very nondescript armor. They bore halberds big enough to fell oxen, and Andrea—our vanguard,—had his firelock ready in a trice, ere I could call out ‘hold!’ But the foremost rider, a mighty man, too big for his tall roan horse, came straight on, and his grizzled mustaches, his wolf-white teeth, and the long scar over his forehead, I remembered from boyhood days right well.

“‘Adolf!’ I cried.

“By some magic instantly the whole band reined in, and the ten giants leaping down with direful clatter began to bend and scrape.

“‘Your Countly Grace! Your Countly Grace!’ they all chanted together, and Adolf then begun to shuffle up to me, seizing my hand, kissing it in a slobbering way. Next he must needs tell in harshest mountain German, how he had always sworn that I would come back like a Regensteiner to the old schloss; that he had received my advance messenger; that he had kept the schloss true and fast even as my fathers had loved it; that there was a great boar in the Tannenwald waiting my hunting; that the dogs were in excellent fettle; that he had in the dungeon two poachers whom he was sure I would enjoy hanging, or perhaps I preferred breaking them on the wheel; and that—

“But here I shook off his bearlike embraces, and in what German I had, I thanked him for his faithfulness, assured him and his followers that I would try by my gratitude to merit their loyalty, and that I would be delighted with their escort onward to Schloss Regenstein. So then we rode forward, Andrea still casting one anxious eye upon our new companions and the other upon his well-primed arquebuse.

“How we passed the town of Blankenburg I quite forgot, and indeed I thought of little save that I was returning to the castle of my father’s fathers. I knew that Adolf and his company were taking mental account of their new lord; of his Milanese hosiery, his Florentine mantle, his Venice corselet, and his Bologna bonnet. More quizzical, too, I knew they were of my smooth chin and smooth white hands, so unlike their mighty spades: but I was resolved to teach them in due time they had a true lord to rule over them, and kept my peace, and thus we fared toward the castle.

“There it rose on its green crest above the foothills, with its gaunt battlements and towers; and I meditated, as I neared it, on all the iron-handed, flinty-hearted ritters, my forbears, who had ridden forth under its gates to fight their feuds, lift their neighbors’ cattle, and strip the Magdeburg caravans, even as had the rascal I had lately captured. Hardly two generations since, and to be Graf von Regenstein had been to fear the Devil only a little and God not at all, and to be the wildest lance in all Saxony. Yet here was I,—lineal heir of those men,—returning to my ancestral home, with its dungeons, portcullis, sally-ports, its cavernous halls adorned with wolf-heads, bearskins, and dingy armor! But, lo! my head was filled with the tinkling of languishing Tuscan sonnets, and as we trudged up the hill I fell to musing how one might describe the peaceful landscape in the Doric of Theocritus,—true language surely for such an idyll! A cursing in fiercest dialect, from Adolf, as his horse stumbled, recalled me in a trice from ancient Sicily to present Harzland. I glanced upward. We were almost beneath the fortress.

“No smug, smooth-stuccoed palazzo was Schloss Regenstein, fashioned after Messere Bramante’s clever ideas filched from Vitruvius. Hard and harsh reared the castle, one great jagged mass of walls, battlements, gable roof and uncouth peak-capped donjons,—an inchoate thing, like the savage icebergs which sailors say course the northern seas. At first it seemed a single shapeless creation, wrought out of unhewn rock by the primeval giants and kobolds. Then as my awe of it began a little to wane, the thing took on a certain order. I could distinguish the steep winding way of hard round cobbles, the narrow drawbridge over the dizzy moat, the portcullis hanging its spikes like the welcoming upper fangs of a hungry monster. Behind that were walls—gray and sheer save for ominous loopholes. Within these walls, others still higher and more precipitous. Above these were standing what appeared to be portions of a vast rambling house with numerous arch-topped windows; again above this house—Ossa piled on Pelion—were three round towers of prodigious size, and from the tallest whipped a banner—my own green standard with the three white boars’ heads. Upon the tower to the left dangled something black that was swinging slowly—a skeleton hung in chains.

“I was just meditating whether I should take this fell sight as an omen, when suddenly our approach seemed to have been observed in the castle above. Instantly all the windows above the battlement were crowded with faces, and right before me I saw no grim-visaged cross-bowmen, but flaxen curls and rosy faces,—a score of eager children, shouting their ‘Gruss!’ to their strange lord and master. And then—boom! boom! boom! three clouds of culverin smoke blew across the gate. I entered the castle,—not the Conte di Palaestro, but the Graf von Regenstein returning to his own.

“I passed my hand across my forehead, saying inwardly ‘At last I am in the North.’”

“There is a precept, my dear Rocca, ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do.’ An excellent rule, removing a thousand absurdities; and its reverse is also excellent. ‘When absent from Rome, conform yourself to your country.’ Not indeed that I would advise imitating the rites and banquets of the fabled anthropophagi or of other utterly outlandish speaking-animals, but I esteem it both unwisdom and discourteous for the newcomer from one land to another to refuse to adapt himself to the honest habits of his hosts, assuming both have the names of decent folk and Christians. Therefore I think I quite scandalized Andrea by the way in which I drained a great horn of atrocious Harz-brewed ale which the fat and worthy seneschal’s wife brought me when I leaped down in the castle court. And from that time on I strove diligently to appear, if not a right German, at least a compliant guest. Much do I fear I have offended the loyal folk around me; as when I so far forgot myself as to curse the heavy feather beds they had heaped up for me in the state chamber, and to adjure Andrea by all the saints to bring me my comfortable travelling pallet. Likewise the next morning I trod on Adolf’s toes most sorely when I hinted my displeasure at suffering so many swine to root around the castle yard, delving in innumerable dunghills.

“‘But your Grace—may I humbly present to you—the honest pigs have rooted in these dunghills since Regenstein was a castle. ’Twere depriving them of an established privilege—an undoubted right. Whither shall they go?’

“‘To the sty or the field where God intended them. If I am king here, I will change their evil privilege, will-you, nill-you.’

“‘It shall be done, your Grace,’ grumbled the bear; but under his mustachios he kept muttering, ‘Oh, these Welschland (Italian) customs! What a lord we have over us! Liebe Gott! To remove the pigs!’

“But these are mere incidents. I can hardly call myself at home as yet, or master of my castle and destinies until my books have come from Augsburg. I have found some chambers in the fortress which can be fitted up very tolerably after Andrea has arranged my tapestries from Paris. I have had as yet time simply to assure myself that Regenstein is a very Emperor of strongholds. I promise myself a thousand interesting nights diverting myself with the tales of raids, forays, ghosts, goblins, witches, romances, fair and foul, in short, of adventures of every conceivable sort which every soul in the castle is eager to pour out to me whenever I deign my august ear to listen: so if I can only find paper enough in this place I can readily vie with Messere Boccaccio’s tales in the Decamerone. I have explored all the nooks and crannies of this vast pile of stone I call my mansion. Adolf has displayed for my admiration the long passage hewn in the living rock leading down to the privy sally-port; the numerous store chambers embedded likewise in the rocky bowels of the mountain. He has taken me out upon the topmost tower, by dizzy ladders over scaffoldings whence the rooks and daws fled noisily, and showed me the whole broad countryside spread out like a map of foreign seas: far to the east over the low hills he showed me the spires of the famed abbey church of Quedlenburg; to the west the nestling village of Heimburg, ‘your Grace’s own peculiar domain land,’ as he explained; to north the wide flat plain with the turrets of Halberstadt dim in the distance; and to south the whole wide green hill-land of the Harz, growing bolder and bolder as the eye followed the contours into the distance.

“‘Noble landscape,’ quoth I, in reply to his obvious demand for praise; ‘and well may my fathers have loved it. But this town to southward, with its castle upon a rock, rising like a worthy peer to Regenstein—what is its name? I have forgotten.’

“‘Blankenburg, your Grace, both town and castle.’

“‘A castle of the Duke of Brunswick, or of a fellow noble like myself?’

“‘Of the free and immediate Counts of Blankenburg, your Grace; even of your own condition.’

“‘Close neighbors we are, I vow, unless there is abundant love between us.’

“Adolf gave a great horse laugh.

“‘Ei; by St. Martin there were lively times in your Grace’s grandfather’s day—Graf Ludwig’s, I mean! Feud all the year long,—cutting down of beech trees, houghing of cattle, a good many peasants slaughtered, once a merry passage at arms in which we lost six stout men and they eight. But all is quiet now. The present Graf loves his beer and his hunt too well for long quarrels; and again, the Duke of Brunswick might interfere. Your Grace has nothing to dread. Besides, we have these.’ He pointed significantly to ‘Wake-up’ and ‘Roaring-Mol’—two bell-mouthed wall-pieces that grinned harmlessly over the parapet.

“‘We shall not use them. I am entirely satisfied to have a nobleman of old family for neighbor. And has he no wife and family?’

“‘The Graf von Blankenburg,’ replied Adolf, as if under some constraint, ‘is a very peculiar lord. Your Grace will learn his habits later. His son Moritz is a most worthy young ritter, and his unmarried daughter, my Lady Ilsa, is reported pious and comely.’

“‘My Lady Ilsa,’ cried I with a laugh. ‘Excellent; I see the beginnings of a pleasant adventure already!’

“But here the blowing of a horn warned me of the visit of a Hamburg pedlar to the castle to chaffer for pins and ribbons with the maids, and I made haste to indite this letter that he might start it on its southward journey. Salute Madonna Marianna for me, and tell her I stand in no danger of this ‘pious and comely’ Graf’s daughter, and I pray you also to commend me to all my many friends at Rome.”