“Prut,” said the Baron, “methought the abbot would have had enough of the blood of old days in his veins to have taught thee what is fitting for a knight to know; art not afeared?”
“Nay,” said Otto, with a smile, “I am not afeared.”
“There at least thou showest thyself a Vuelph,” said the grim Baron. But perhaps Otto’s thought of fear and Baron Conrad’s thought of fear were two very different matters.
The afternoon had passed by the time they had reached the end of their journey. Up the steep, stony path they rode to the drawbridge and the great gaping gateway of Drachenhausen, where wall and tower and battlement looked darker and more forbidding than ever in the gray twilight of the coming night. Little Otto looked up with great, wondering, awe-struck eyes at this grim new home of his.
The next moment they clattered over the drawbridge that spanned the narrow black gulph between the roadway and the wall, and the next were past the echoing arch of the great gateway and in the gray gloaming of the paved court-yard within.
Otto looked around upon the many faces gathered there to catch the first sight of the little baron; hard, rugged faces, seamed and weather-beaten; very different from those of the gentle brethren among whom he had lived, and it seemed strange to him that there was none there whom he should know.
As he climbed the steep, stony steps to the door of the Baron’s house, old Ursela came running down to meet him. She flung her withered arms around him and hugged him close to her. “My little child,” she cried, and then fell to sobbing as though her heart would break.
“Here is someone knoweth me,” thought the little boy.
His new home was all very strange and wonderful to Otto; the armors, the trophies, the flags, the long galleries with their ranges of rooms, the great hall below with its vaulted roof and its great fireplace of grotesquely carved stone, and all the strange people with their lives and thoughts so different from what he had been used to know.
And it was a wonderful thing to explore all the strange places in the dark old castle; places where it seemed to Otto no one could have ever been before.