At these words her eyes overflowed at once. "Come," she said, and stretched out a slim withered hand; "I see you know me--we are old friends. I have been sadly wanting to see some kind and sympathizing face, once more before I die. It is a long while to have lived only among servants, for indeed I have been used to better company."
She led me across the dark entrance-hall, and through a vaulted passage to a great hall, dimly lighted by a few candles. Two farm-servants and a maid were seated at a heavy stone table, supping, who stared astonished, when they heard a strange voice wishing them good evening. My companion gave a few whispered orders to the maid, and turned to me again.
"The provisions we have in the house are but poor," she said; "everything we want has to be carried for miles through the woods; and I myself require so little. But for one night, Sir, you will not mind bad cookery. This hall, you see, was once a chapel, in old times, when the counts were Catholic; it was then left some time to dust and ruin, until at last Count Henry, our Count Ernest's father, had the altar, the benches, and the pictures taken away, and an eating room arranged. You can still see the niche for the choristers over there, where the floor is raised and boarded. That is the master's table, at which Count Henry used to sup all his life, with the officials about the place--the steward, the forester, and the castellan, (not Monsieur Pierre then), and the bailiff; and at this stone table I supped with the servants; we had crowds of them then. We never spoke a word, and the count seldom asked a question. When he had company staying with him, the table was laid upstairs in the great saloon, as it always was at dinner, when he dined with the countess. I will just light this candelabrum on the master's table; who knows whether I shall live to see it lighted again?"
She placed a heavy five-branched candelabrum of massive silver on the table, which she had laid with a snow-white damask cloth, and shortly after, a supper was served up, that might have been far more frugal still, to appear excellent after my long wanderings. Whilst I ate and drank, the old lady disappeared, and left me to my meditations. The men were already gone. I looked up into a twilight depth of desert space, broken by a few tall pointed windows, through which the moonbeams fell. The cross-vaults of the ceiling were supported by square pillars, fretted all over with antlers; and the same ornament was placed at regular intervals along the walls, with a small tablet under each, recording the date of the shot, and the name of the shooter. What changes had the world not seen, from the days when the first high mass was celebrated here, to the present evening, when a stranger sits alone at a deserted table, counting these dust-worn trophies! I took the candelabrum to light myself along while I went reading the names on the little tablets, reaching about two centuries back.
Counts, and princes, and princely prelates; even a few highborn dames had been pleased to immortalize their luck. Presently I came to a well-known name, beneath a stately antler of fourteen:
"On the 20th of September, Count Ernest shot this mighty stag, (who numbers as many antlers as the young count years,) in the glade by the deer's drought; Anno Domini 183--."
Heavy steps now came sounding along the passages, and two men made their boisterous entrance.
I immediately recognised the respectable pair of the watch-tower by the bridge. The farm-servants may have told them that there was a stranger in the house, and they had shaken themselves out of their drunken sleep, and come to assert their rights as guardians and watchmen. The castellan, Monsieur Pierre, blinking on me with his small yellow much inflamed eyes, measured me from head to foot, with a very comical combination of sleepiness and impudence. He stammered out a few words in a hoarse coarse voice, in very indifferent French, but he was soon talked down by his companion, who walked straight up to me, and in the most brutal tone of official zeal, enquired who I was, and what I wanted?
I drily answered, that I was a friend of Count Ernest's, and had come to see the castle. Upon which straightway a change came over the spirit of the pair. The castellan commenced a series of crouching cat-like obeisances, while the forester contrived to hit on the happiest transition from the most insolent aggressiveness to the respectful bluntness of the honest woodman. I perceived that I was taken for a far more important personage than I was--for an emissary--(no less!)--from the family, come to hold an impromptu inspection of the castle and its condition. The forester, officiously relieving me from the candlestick, forced me into a seat again, and sent a man to the cellar, for a bottle of the best and oldest; while, with a sly kick, or a smothered imprecation, he made an occasional attempt to awaken his drowsy colleague to the full gravity of the situation. However I did not care to be initiated into the details of the administration of woods and buildings, and I felt so much disgusted with the voluble servility of this precious pair of rogues, that I broke off suddenly, as soon as the old lady returned to the hall, and excusing myself with the natural fatigue of a pedestrian, I begged her to light me to my room.
She cast a look of meaning on the two, who were hardly to be prevented from following us upstairs.