Like a vast sea the mighty Schwarzwald stretched its forests of pine and its wide wastes of heather around Castle Rittenberg, its surface forever fretted into waves by the wind. Like the sea it seemed measureless, and the lands which lay beyond its borders appeared to the scattered dwellers in its valleys as remote as might appear the continents to the people of far islands.
Like the sea, moreover, the Schwarzwald was peopled by strange beings, of whom alike the peasant folk who dwelt upon its borders, the rude churls whose huts stood here and there in clusters in its less intractable nooks, and the nobles whose castles overtopped the wilderness of trees and bracken, went always in secret dread. In the north lurked the hordes of the Huns, the terrible barbarians who from time to time descended, hardly human, upon the fertile lands which lay beyond the borders of the forest, swarming as they went upon whatever luckless castle lay in their path. The boldest knight might well tremble at the name of the ferocious Huns, and even the army of Charlemagne himself had hardly been able to cope with this foe.
But more near at hand, and more terrible than even the Huns, were the strange creatures who abode in the forest, and who walked invisible at their will, the mysterious beings who lurked in dim recesses, and of whom men spoke only in awe-struck whispers. Even what they were it was not easy to say; and who could tell how they were offended or how to be placated? The nixies of the lakes and streams; the dwarfs and gnomes of cave and mountain; the kobolds, who were more daring and more human in appearance than either, so that haply a man might endanger not only his life but even his soul holding commerce with them, unsuspecting that they were not of his fellow mortals,—all these and many others dwelt in the shadowy recesses, and against these not even the hosts of the Great Emperor would avail.
The wind soughing all day in the pine-trees, and the weird, sweet music of the elfin harps which belated wanderers heard sounding to lure them on into blinder depths of the wood, seemed to sing the same song; but its mystery human ears might not fathom, and scarcely could human will resist its spell. In the tempest the bugles of the Wild Huntsman pealed shrilly through the storm, and the retainers at Castle Rittenberg crossed themselves at the sound almost as openly as did the damsels; but there was less danger in this than in the heavenly sweet strains which beguiled the wayfarer into forgetfulness of home and of dear ones until he joined himself to the soulless folk of the forest, and was heard of no more.
It was music of this sort, more sweet than words might tell, faint on the air as the breath of a sigh or yet again swelling full and strong as a blast from the horns when the hunt is rushing through the wood, that had of late been heard around the castle. Delicious, enervating, seductive and yet pleading, the strange melodies had seemed to surround the towers, as if throngs of invisible musicians floated in the air to bring their heavenly minstrelsy to the Countess Erna.
There had indeed been more than one token that something mysterious was forward in the forest; and although the priest of Rittenberg frowned upon all talk of the wood-spirits and their doings, the folk of the castle whispered under their breath many a wild surmise.
Mayhap it was of these things that the Countess Erna dreamed as one spring morning she sat by her open lattice, albeit she had before her a parchment from which she might be reading. From below arose the noise of horses' hoofs, the cries of grooms and pages, the clatter of spurs upon the stone pavement, and all the sounds that betoken the preparation of a troop to leave the castle. So little did she heed, however, that she seemed not to hear. So motionless was she that the doves which had perched upon the wide window-ledge in perfect fearlessness had ceased to regard her at all, and preened themselves in the sun with soft, full-throated cooings, contrasting oddly with the clamor which arose from below.
The morning sun shone gloriously, casting a flood of light through the room; and although Erna sat withdrawn from the fervor of its direct rays, she seemed to glow in the radiance like a lily golden-hearted. Her hair, yellow as the flax on a fairy's distaff, caught a stray sunbeam which stole through a crevice in the curtain-folds, and scattered the light in a hundred reflections, making of them an aureole about the graceful young head. The eyes, blue as an oker-bell, were now and then raised from the richly illuminated parchment before her, absently regarding the doves as if she saw them not, while the slender hands which held the scroll were only a little warmer in their color than the robe of snowy wool loosely confined at the waist with a golden girdle. As she sat there in the still chamber, withdrawn from the bustle of the courtyard below in mind no less than in place, there was about the countess an atmosphere of peace, of innocence, of purity, one might almost have said of holiness, that he must be dull indeed who could not feel, or who, feeling, failed to reverence.
There was little reverence, however, in the mien of the old dame who came hastily into the chamber, and broke in upon the reading and the dreaming of the Countess Erna with exclamations full of vexation.
"Body of Saint Fridolin!" she cried. "Thou sittest here reading as quietly as if thy suitor, Count Stephen, were a thousand leagues away instead of waiting below to take leave of thee. No wonder that he declares that thou hast not a drop of warm blood in thy body, as his squire reported to my damsel."
"Count Stephen is no suitor of mine," Erna responded calmly, "as no one knoweth better than thou, Aunt Adelaide. He is my guest, however, and I should be loath to fail in aught of courtesy toward him. Why have I not been summoned if he be in truth waiting?"
"Well, if he be not waiting," the old dame replied with a lower voice and some softening of manner, "he is at least ready to set out, and that is much the same thing. It would certainly look more attentive on thy part shouldst thou be in the hall when he comes to take leave rather than to wait to be sent for."
"Doubtless; but I have no wish to be attentive to Count Stephen beyond the claim of any guest."
"But Count Stephen is a member of the family."
"His connection is hardly near enough to count in this matter," Erna answered. "Dear Aunt," she continued, coming closer to the other, and laying a caressing hand lightly upon the old woman's arm, "I am sorry that thou shouldst be disappointed. I did what I could to fulfil thy wish when I bade thee have Count Stephen come here, although what we had heard of him was so little of the sort to make me long for such a guest, because I knew that more than for aught else in the world thou didst long for the perpetuation of the Von Rittenberg name by my becoming his wife. I shrank from the knight from the first moment I saw him, and never could it be that I should be brought to look upon him with favor. Happily he feels the same repugnance to me, so that I am spared the pain of telling him nay; but I cannot fail to be glad at his departure."
The old dame, who was so small and so old that she seemed to have shrivelled away in long centuries, overlooked and forgotten by the Angel of Death, was evidently moved by the caressing air of the countess; but her grievance was too deep and of too long standing to be so lightly passed over, and she could not restrain herself from the further venting of her displeasure.
"Why does he feel cold toward thee?" she demanded. "Hast thou been other than an ice-hill to him since he entered the castle? I sent for Count Stephen to come here to pay his respects to me because he is the only man alive who bears our name; and whatever thou mayst say, he bears it like a brave knight. Thou hast met him as if thou wouldst remind him that while he hath no great possessions thou art chatelaine of the richest domain in the Ober-Schwarzwald."
"Aunt Adelaide!" interrupted Erna, a flush of indignation rising in her clear cheek, "not even thou hast a right to charge me with insulting my guests."
"God's blood!" the other returned. "There spoke thy father, Heaven rest his soul! But thou knowest," she continued, softening her tone, "that I cannot live forever to have care for thee, and that I cannot die easy till thou art well wed. There are strange rumors in the air, too, and who knoweth what the music from the forest that has been heard of late may betoken? And Elsa tells me that there hath been about the place a weird creature in the guise of a man who walketh limpingly. It all bodes some wonderful thing that is to hap, and I would to the saints that Rittenberg had a man to defend it, whatever may befall."
The entrance of a servant who announced that the Count von Rittenberg was now in truth waiting to take leave, interrupted Lady Adelaide, and brought her at once to a request which had been in her shrewd mind ever since she learned that the guest was likely to set off without having made that proffer for the hand of Erna to secure which she had invited him to the castle.
"At least this thou canst do to please me," she said; "thou canst invite him to rest here on his way back from Strasburg, whither he is journeying."
"It will be idle for thy project, Aunt," the countess answered kindly; "but if it will please thee I will do it."
The old aunt looked after the slender maiden as she left the chamber, and sighed. The Lady Adelaide was almost a century old, and she had lived to see one generation after another fall around her like snowflakes that are a moment in the air and then are seen no more. She felt that upon her rather than upon her niece rested the burden of preserving the honor of the house of Von Rittenberg, and she could but feel keenly the failure of her schemes for the perpetuation of the line and the name. She had been accustomed, moreover, to being obeyed. For three generations she had held an important place in the councils of the family, even her imperious grand-nephew, the father of the Countess Erna, having been accustomed to consult her in matters of importance. She was not without a feeling of indignant surprise that her plans should be disregarded, and perhaps this helped her to endure the genuine sorrow which she felt whenever she thought of the possibility of the failure of the family name.
The late count had fallen fighting in the place of honor in the advance guard of the Great Emperor, at the head of the corps of Suabians whose valor inspired in Charlemagne so warm an admiration. So high had Count von Rittenberg stood in the favor of the emperor that a special messenger had been despatched by Charlemagne's order to bear the knight's sword and shield to his family with rich tokens of the royal favor and expressions of sympathy. But not even this great honor could prevent the shock from breaking the heart of his young wife, just recovering from the birth of her first child, the present countess; and Erna was thus left doubly orphaned while yet in her cradle.
During her infancy and girlhood Erna had been under the guardianship of the Lady Adelaide, who seemed to hold the infirmities of age at bay with a success little short of a miracle. The retainers believed her to be in possession of some secret by means of which she preserved her vigor; and many were the uncanny whispers which circulated through the castle concerning her. Father Christopher, the chaplain of the Von Rittenberg household, had more than once set himself to combat these rumors; but the Lady Adelaide herself never exhibited any annoyance if she chanced to hear them hinted at, and indeed seemed not ill-pleased that she should enjoy a reputation which so lifted her above the rest of her fellow mortals.
The marriage of Erna and Count Stephen von Rittenberg was a project which had long occupied the thoughts of the Lady Adelaide. The count belonged to a younger branch of the family which had settled near the Lake of Constance half a century before, and lorded it over a petty colony of boatmen whose settlement was called Schaffhausen from their boat-sheds. There had never been very cordial relations between the two branches, and Count Stephen would never have been sought out by his aged relative had not her desire to perpetuate the Von Rittenberg name overcome her traditional scorn of the "Schaffleute," as the Schaffhausen Von Rittenbergs were contemptuously called by the elder branch. The count had a reputation not of the best, it was unhappily true; but he was at least a Von Rittenberg, and that outweighed all other considerations in the mind of the old matchmaker. She had invited him to visit her, taking care that he should understand that he was to be considered in the light of a possible candidate for the hand of the heiress of Rittenberg, and it was with sincere regret as well as vexation that she saw her scheming come to naught.
From the first the repulsion had been mutual between the countess and her guest. He was by no means insensible to the advantages of the match, which offered him the lordship of the richest holding in all the Schwarzwald, confirmed to the Von Rittenbergs by special decree of Charlemagne himself, but he was a man accustomed to consider his inclinations in all things and first of all things; so that when he found the countess not to his liking, he pushed the affair no further. He was a man to whom life meant sensuous pleasure; and Erna, in her white innocence, her purity and devotion, failed to please him. He found her cold and tediously religious, and instinctively felt that the presence of a wife with her standards of conduct would be a perpetual rebuke to his pleasure-loving life.
On her side Erna shrank from the count without understanding why. The taint of evil was on him, and her pure maidenly sense was offended without comprehending how. She felt in a way degraded by his very presence; the bold, curious looks with which he regarded her affected her like an affront. Her instinctive purity was repelled by the sensual atmosphere which he created wherever he came. She could not have explained even to herself what she felt, but it was impossible for her to endure his presence save by the strongest effort. It was with a feeling of relief that she passed down the long hall to say good-by to him; and even the fact that she had promised her aunt to ask him to return did not at the moment trouble her, since his return seemed too uncertain and remote to weigh against the present departure. The Lady Adelaide, with a diplomacy which was wholly wasted, had herself taken leave of Count Stephen earlier, to the end that her niece might receive his farewell alone.
There was short speech between the guest and his hostess, neither of whom wished to prolong the interview; and hardly ten minutes from the time she had left it, Erna re-entered her chamber. She took up the scroll she had been reading, a copy of the writings of Saint Cuthbert, but paused before she opened it to look out at the train of the departing guest, which was already in motion. She watched it cross the drawbridge and wind down the side of the hill upon which the castle stood; and after it had vanished, with its glitter of armor, flash of helmet, gay flutter of pennant and waving of plumes, into the obscurity of the pine forest below, which swallowed up the troop and hid its further progress from sight, she leaned wistfully upon the window-ledge, buried in thought. She was wondering if she were different from other maidens, that her heart had not been touched, but that she had rather been repelled by the handsome knight who had just left her; and she half doubted whether he had not been right in likening her to a human iceberg.
Suddenly her reverie was broken by the shrill, clear blast of a horn, which arose from the pine wood below, and came soaring upward like the piercingly sweet song of a bird that pours its whole heart out singing and straining its flight toward the blue heaven.
The sound broke in upon her revery as if it were a summons from some of the mysterious powers whose home was in the forest. Often as she had heard a bugle hailing the warder of Rittenberg, it had never happened that there had come with the sound such a thrill as this call brought. Far stretched and weird the great Schwarzwald lay, the warm summer sun seeming to glance from its impenetrable surface, unable to pierce to the depths wherein lurked the wild woodland creatures as the nixies lurked in the lakes; and something that was half a shudder crossed her frame, as the note of that horn called up the thought of all the strange secrets which therein lay hidden. Then, with an effort, she shook off the momentary oppression, and threw her clear glance down into the valley to see whence came the call.