There on the right hand of the square is a more modern safety-guard, and one more in consonance with the advanced civilisation which has arisen since the Heidenthurm was built. This latter guardian is the Wachtstube, Wache, Hauptwache, as it is indiscriminately called—the guardhouse, peopled with half a dozen scrubby-looking soldiers, and a couple of lieutenants, with a white mongrel cur, alternately their plaything and their victim during the weary hours of ennui. The Heidenthurm turns its back upon this outcome of a high civilisation and the Christian religion—what has it in common with the Wachtstube, or the Wachtstube with it? To the left, more houses: that big clumsy building with the Prussian eagle over the doorway is the Rathhaus; therein the Herr Bürgermeister and his belongings live and move and have their being. Filling in the gaps more and more houses, each one a picture, each roof a distracting medley of hills and dales, ups and downs, dormer windows, turrets, chimney-stacks whose irregularity would break the heart of a high-minded architect of modern suburban villas. And here too, last but not least, for those who want accommodation, with mine host bowing and smiling before the door, is that lumbering old structure, the inn of the place—the Gasthof zum Herzoglichen Hause, a building bearing some inexplicable, indefinable, but most indubitable resemblance to Noah’s ark, as pictured to the popular imagination in the toyshop windows.
Our party had proceeded thus far—that is, to the market square—on their way from the station. The countess and one of her cousins only had taken seats in the carriage which had met them. The men, Sara Ford, and the other Fräulein von Lehnberg had walked. The German ladies went into raptures over the place; it was reizend, entzückend, and many other superlative expressions of admiration. Sara asked Falkenberg aside:
‘Is it impossible to go into the old Dom and explore Lotte Buff’s house, and these other quaint old places?’
‘It is, on the contrary, very possible, mein Fräulein. But,’ he added in a lower tone, ‘would you care to go with all these people?’
Sara shrugged her shoulders, smiling a little.
‘I see you would not. I will arrange that you have a good view of whatever you wish to see. Meantime, suppose we go on to my house, where lunch will be ready for us, I expect.’
‘I wonder,’ thought Sara within herself, ‘whether his wife and family are away from home, or whether his wife is just a slave and a Hausfrau, as so many of them appear to be.’
The carriage was now driven past the Hauptwache, up a street leading out of a corner of the square, on to a breezy upland road, from which there was a fine view over the level fields far below to the left, while on the right there were pleasant-looking fir-clad hills, over which a bracing breeze blew.
Herr Falkenberg’s ‘summer-house’ was situated not very far up the said road; it was an old grey grange, standing on a slope at the right hand, surrounded on three sides by what had been a moat, and it was over the remains of a drawbridge that the carriage drove into the grounds. Sara lingered a moment before the grey moss-grown stone archway, trying to make out a half-defaced inscription above it. Herr Falkenberg lingered too, and said:
‘You cannot read that, Miss Ford. I own that it was one of the great attractions of the place to me when I bought it.’