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.”