With ready garrulity and in the broadest Tyrolean patois, which had frequently to be explained by him to his North-German questioner, he answered all questions put to him. The Herr who lived in the castle had been for many years an object of curiosity, of admiration, and of superstitious fear to all the country-people about, and to Hansel himself no less than to the rest. They whispered many a queer thing about him and his castle among the peasants in the common room of the inn; and there were terrible ghost-stories told of the old castle. Everything--the whispers and the stories--was faithfully detailed by Hansel. He was in his element, and Delmar's skilful questions and repeated glasses of wine combined to keep him there.
The worthy postmaster's story was no connected narrative, and he often diverged to expatiate upon other themes; but Delmar always managed to bring him back to Castle Reifenstein and Herr von Heydeck, so that the breaks in his account were gradually filled up and the strangers had at last a distinct picture of the life and character of Herr von Heydeck. Only the picture, it is true, which existed in the fantastic brains of Hansel and the Tausens peasantry, and which perhaps resembled but little the original. Truth and fiction, fact, and fable begotten of superstition, were mingled in the postmaster's account in a wonderful mosaic, as was plain to be seen; but nevertheless it possessed the greatest interest for Leo and his friends.
Many many years before, as Hansel related, the old castle had belonged to a Count Menotti, who had leased it to a peasant, for the Count never came to Tausens himself. He lived at Riva on the Lake of Garda, and cared nothing for his Tyrolean estate except to see that the rent was paid punctually; of course his tenant had no interest in preserving the huge pile in good order. Large portions of the gigantic walls fell down from the rocks into the valley below, and one of the three towers which Hansel could remember, as a boy, still standing, crumbled to ruins; but the main building where the tenant lived, and in which he had his barns granaries and cattle-stalls, was still standing. Its massive masonry had defied decay.
Although there were valuable forests meadows and pasturelands belonging to the castle, besides some fertile cultivated fields, the tenant paid only a small rent; and very naturally, for the Count could hardly have found another tenant.
In fine all was not right at the castle; strange things happened there and stranger sights were seen. It was haunted! There were very few old peasants in Tausens who had not, at some time, had a scare 'up there.' From the ruined part could often be heard, far down in the valley, shrieks and groans and wild laughter.
Even by day few of those who lived in the valley willingly went near the dreadful old pile, and by night no one could be induced to go there. Old Stoffel, the tenant, could not persuade either man or maid to sleep there, although he offered them the highest wages and assured them that the ghost would do no good Christian any harm. No one would believe him; and so he and his three sons and his two daughters had to live by themselves in the haunted castle. He had to pay high for day-labourers. In the brightest sunshine no one liked to enter the castle, and the bravest fellow would not have taken any money to go inside either of the great round towers.
Old Stoffel was afraid of these towers himself. Not of the ghosts, he said with a laugh, but of the stones that might fall from their crumbling walls. Still the people in Tausens knew better; they did not believe him; they were sure he had been frightened by the ghost there, and would not confess it for fear of getting no men to work for him.
Old Stoffel was a wild daring fellow who feared neither God nor the devil. Indeed, many people thought he had made a bargain with the Evil One. He never went to church, but frequented the tavern, where he drank up all his gains. He made his children work for him: he never did anything himself, and although he was a very old man, he spent his time in going from tavern to tavern until he died. One morning he was found dead on the road from Tausens to the castle,--his corpse was perfectly blue.
The postmaster remembered well that Dr. Putzer said that the old man had had a stroke, but no one in Tausens believed it, for the doctor was as great a blasphemer and tippler and as bad a Christian then as he is at present. Stoffel's time was up, and the devil had wrung his neck, which was why his corpse was blue,--every Christian knew that.
After the old man's death the Count could find no tenant for the castle, for no one could be found to pay rent for it. Stoffel's sons, although they could work, had not sense enough to know how to manage, and the daughters were not much better. They stayed all together at the castle, however, although Count Menotti never got much rent out of them. He tried to sell the estate, and offered it for almost a nominal price, but who wanted to buy a haunted old nest on a misty mountain in the Tyrol?