The Neuhaus was turned farm: the upper rooms were used as hay-lofts, and in that long, panelled living-room, which had seen Wilhelmine von Grävenitz's strange marriage, a peasant woman cooked, scolding her brood of children. She stared at the Grävenitz.
'Oh yes! this is my husband's farm. What do you want with me? See the house? There is not much to see,' she said suspiciously. A gulden changed her tone.
'Certainly; look if you like,' she said, and followed the sad visitant from room to room, hands on hips, and shrill voice explaining how the rats were so bad in the house that she and her husband would have to leave next month.
'Is there a grave here? a grave surrounded by a stone wall? No? But it was consecrated ground, it cannot have been destroyed?' The Grävenitz spoke quietly, but she could have wept aloud.
Yes, the woman said, there was a bit of walled-off land, but it did not belong to them. There was a gate, and they had not the key. Perhaps there was a grave there; the grass grew so high you could not tell. She led her visitor through the neglected garden which Spring, the glorious gardener, had yet made fair with blossom and the budding lilac. The Grävenitz peered through the bars of the graveyard gate. Ah, thank God! who sends Spring to garnish the graves of the forgotten dead! The tombs were hidden by a fair coronal of waving grasses, and the redthorns above made a baldaquin more beautiful than the work of man's hand.
'Forgotten, yet so peaceful,' she murmured as she turned away.
'Did you speak, lady?' said the peasant woman; but the Grävenitz shook her head.
'Only to myself; only to myself always now,' she answered.
At Tübingen no one paid heed to the traveller, but she did not venture up to the castle. She might have dared it, for none would have remembered her, or recognised in the tall, white-haired woman the beautiful young courtesan who had held mock court in the ancient university castle. She learned that no Duke had resided there for many years, it was entirely given up to the students and their grave professors.
'But the state-rooms? I heard that there were fine apartments in the castle, where princes and their courts held high revel?' she queried of the innkeeper.