Too Rich: A Romance

by Adolf Streckfuss

A couple of years had passed, when one day, how long since the postmaster could not exactly say, but nearly thirty years he should think, a grand gentleman with his beautiful wife had driven to Tausens. They stopped at the old Oberwieser's, the postmaster's father's,--the inn had not then been named the Post. The stranger was Herr von Heydeck, who had bought the castle of Count Menotti and had come to inspect it.

Hansel was then a young fellow about eighteen years old, and he had been bidden by his father to show the strangers up to the castle. He did not like to do it, but there was no joking with the old Oberwieser, and so he obeyed.

On the way he told Herr von Heydeck and the handsome lady-wife about the ghosts in the castle, and how the devil had wrung old Stoffel's neck when his time was up, and they both laughed,--the lady laughed most. She often paused on the way up and looked around. She thought the country lovely, and when they had reached the summit of the rocks and saw the view from the balcony of the main building of the castle, she was enchanted. The whole castle must be repaired and newly furnished, she said, and then it would be a delightful place to invite one's friends to in summer-time.

In a few days the old place was turned inside out; an architect arrived with numbers of workmen, and they all went to work. They began rebuilding in the middle of May, and by the middle of July everything was finished, and the whole castle splendidly furnished ready for the master and mistress, who were not slow in making their appearance, with quantities of servants and numerous guests, mostly officers. There were but a couple of ladies among them.

And now began such a life in the castle as no one in Tausens had ever seen before; no emperor and empress could have lived more splendidly. Every evening almost all the windows in the old pile blazed with light, and down from the rocks came floating the sounds of revelry and wild dance-music. In the old baronial hall there was singing and playing and dancing and feasting and carousing until deep into the night.

In the mean time nothing was heard of the ghost,--the devil was probably highly content with the goings on, for they were surely far from correct. Why the mistress and the couple of ladies went about in the evenings with their shoulders all bare and never minded the men, but danced and jested with them.

The mistress outdid them all: she was the gayest, and was always friendly and kind to her guests, and to the servants, and even to the country-people, to every one except to her husband; he must have felt very uncomfortable in the splendid castle, and he went alone among the mountains as often as he could.

Madame, too, often made excursions with her guests, to the waterfalls in the Rothwald valley, to the lake on the Frauenalm, and to other beautiful places, but she never went with her husband. She was a capital mountain-climber, but she was always accompanied by one of the other gentlemen, most often of all by Count Menotti, a younger brother of the former possessor of the castle. The Count and madame were always together, so that even the villagers talked about it. Whether they were right in declaring that there was sinful intercourse between the Count and the lady the postmaster did not know: he had never seen anything wrong, but there was plenty of malicious gossip about them, when one day there came to Tausens a travelling merchant, who said he had known madame before her marriage to Herr von Heydeck.

In a gossip over a can of wine he told of how the Count, although a married man, had been madame's lover for a long time, and that she had married Herr von Heydeck because it was the only way in which to avoid public scandal. And certainly all was not right between madame and the Count and Herr von Heydeck, for the latter's face would grow gloomier than ever when he chanced on his walks to meet his wife with Count Menotti. He avoided them as far as he could; accompanied by a guide only, he explored the loneliest parts of the country, and while madame was making merry with her guests he was collecting all kinds of herbs butterflies ugly worms, and even venomous snakes and vipers, which he would bring home to a room he had had arranged for himself in the castle.

This wild life lasted for four weeks, and then every one departed,--leaving however a theme for gossip in Tausens during the whole ensuing winter. Nothing else was talked of in the inn parlour among the gentlemen, or in the common room among the peasants. The postmaster, a young fellow at the time, had to serve the gentlemen who came in the evening to drink their wine at the inn, and he heard all they had to say among themselves. Of all the gentlemen there was only one. Dr. Putzer, who had ever been to the castle while its possessors were there, and he had gone only because one of the ladies had been slightly ill and there was no other physician to be had. Herr von Heydeck had received him very politely, but madame had hardly looked at him, and so he hated her, and had all sorts of bad stories to tell of her.