‘Shameful! But what is it?’
‘I have doomed them to drive with me and Lemde in the barouche; Fritz rides, and I am sending you first in the pony-phaeton with Herr Falkenberg.’
‘I see nothing so very spiteful in that. Why should your cousins object?’
‘My dear Sara! I believe you live in a dream. Don’t you know that Helene Lehnberg would give her right hand if Falk——Oh, here he is. Good-morning, Herr Falkenberg. I shall not be a moment. How beautifully you are dressed, Sara! Beside you, I feel like a collection of tags of coloured ribbon. You are both ready. Well, shall we go? Herr Falkenberg, I am going to ask you to drive Miss Ford to the station in the pony-phaeton. Herr von Lemde will go with my cousins and me.’
‘I shall be delighted,’ observed Herr Falkenberg; and Sara followed the countess out of the room, lost in wonder as to what she meant by saying that she had done something spiteful to her cousins, and what it was Helene Lehnberg would give her right hand for.
Very soon she was seated beside Falkenberg, and they were driving down the hill, along the Nassau Road to Ems, which was reached before long; past the hotel of the Vier Jahreszeiten, to the station.
There is a wayside railway station on a German line, which station, twenty years ago, was a thing of the future, and which I will here call Lahnburg. It is the scene of the Leiden des jungen Werther—it is the place where Goethe adored, and where the object of his adoration placidly ‘went on cutting bread and butter.’ It was then Goethe’s, Lotte’s, Jerusalem’s home; now it is an out-of-the-way country town which is completely out of the beaten route of the tourist, and which few persons have heard of, and fewer still care to visit.
Leave the train—it is a slow one—all the trains are slow which deign to stop at Lahnburg. At Lahnburg they hurry no one—themselves least of all. Now we are on the asphalted platform of the little station, in the presence of a Prussian, with a blue coat and a fierce moustache, who sternly demands our Gepäckschein. If we have luggage, we meekly give it him, thankful to be so well, if so severely taken care of. If we have none, we mention the fact, and leave him to wonder what sinister motives could have brought us to that spot, and to look at us as if he would place us under arrest, were not his powers so shamefully limited. We leave the station, and take the road leading towards the town.
Along an uninteresting country-road, till we begin to drive up the hill around and upon which the town is built. Up the steep, rugged streets, between the high antique houses, slowly and joltingly lumbering over the stones, in and out, and round about up the hill, till we arrive at the Marktplatz, and behold, surrounding the great cobble-stoned square, all the principal buildings of the town! Pause, Jehu! thou reckless charioteer—pause, that we may fully take into our minds the scene about us. Here we are, in the middle of the square. There, opposite to us, stands the solemn old Dom, built of a warmly-hued, reddish stone. From its midst rises the nucleus of it all—that which is older than Christianity, the seamed, cracked, scarred, black, old Heidenthurm—the ‘heathen-tower,’ remnant of long-past Roman rule. Blasted, black and ruined, but grim and defiant, majestic and undegraded still, in the midst of its wreck, it fronts us, and towers over the town and landscape beneath; for the Dom is built on the very summit of the hill; and before it was, was the Heidenthurm. It watches over the fertile hill-slopes and over the level, poplar-fringed meads at the foot of them, between which the gliding Lahn holds its course. Since that grim old sentinel first took his stand there, what changes have not taken place! The very face of the landscape has altered, while dynasties changed and kings and people rose and fell, and kingdoms and empires flourished and passed away. Varied have been the signs of the heavens above him—more varied far the life-stories, the joys, the sorrows, the raptures, and the agonies of the races which have grown up, have lived and died, married and brought children into the world—while he stood there defiant and unchangeably grim.