This was the first of that furious driving with which the favourite, in after years, habitually dashed through the country. It was one of the causes of her unpopularity with the peasants; they cursed her and her wild horses. 'Why such haste to do the devil's work?' they muttered; and they cursed the dust which the chariot left, as the hated Grävenitzin thundered through the villages.
CHAPTER XII
THE MOCK COURT
'The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Hamlet.
After their marriage his Highness and the Countess of Urach took up their residence in the castle of Hohen-Tübingen, where Wilhelmine had wandered, a lonely stranger, on the morning of her arrival in Wirtemberg. Now she was the queen of the grim fortress, and, looking upon the fair valley and the distant hills, she would often ponder on the marvellous workings of her destiny.
The court of Wirtemberg naturally held aloof from the unlawful magnificence at Tübingen, and her Ladyship of Urach realised that she must form a circle of her own, so she summoned her family from the north.
Her sister, Emma Sittmann, came from Berlin accompanied by her husband, the merchant's warehouse clerk, who it was said, had been at one time hairdresser to a Countess of Wartensleben, and had been dismissed for his insolence. A cousin came with the Sittmanns, Schütz by name, a shady attorney who had been discredited for sharp practices in various towns, including Vienna, where, however, he still retained business relations of a mysterious and probably reprehensible character. A number of friends and relations, both of Schütz's and Sittmann's, also hastened to Tübingen. Sittmann had been married once before he took Wilhelmine's sister to wife, and of this former union he had two gawky sons, who accompanied their father and stepmother to this land of promise.