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
