Wringing my hand in his enthusiasm, the good fellow cried excitedly, "Oh, Gaston, Gaston! How lucky it was that I brought you here! How angry the old hag will be!"
I must confess to a feeling of embarrassment at discovering so much merit in myself, which had hitherto escaped my observation.
"So the Count has passed a comfortable night, Sperver?" I continued.
"Very comfortable," he replied.
"That is welcome news. Let's go down-stairs."
We once more crossed the little courtyard, and I was able to obtain a better view of our means of egress, whose ramparts attained to a prodigious height,—continuing along the edge of the rock to the very bottom of the valley. It was a flight of precipices, so to speak, shelving one below another into the dizzy depths beneath. On looking down, I became giddy, and recoiling to the middle of the landing, I hastened down the passageway which led to the Castle.
Sperver and I had already traversed several broad corridors, when a wide-open door blocked our passage. I glanced in and saw, at the top of a double ladder, the little gnome Knapwurst, whose grotesque physiognomy had struck me the night before. The hall itself attracted my attention by its imposing aspect. It was a storehouse for the archives of Nideck, a high, dark, dusty apartment, with long Gothic windows reaching from the ceiling to within three feet of the floor.
There were to be found, ranged along the broad shelves by the careful abbots of olden times, not only all the documents, title-deeds, and genealogical trees of the families of Nideck, establishing their rights, alliances, and relations with the most illustrious nobles of Germany, but also the chronicles of the Black Forest, the collected remnants of the old Minnesingers, and the great folios from the presses of Gutenberg and Faust, no less venerable on account of their origin and the enduring solidity of their binding. The deep shadows of the alcoves, draping the cold walls with their grayish gloom, reminded you of the ancient cloisters of the Middle Ages; and in the midst of it all sat the dwarf at the top of his ladder, with a huge, red-edged volume lying open on his bony knees, his head buried to the ears in a fur cap; gray-eyed, flat-nosed, the corners of his mouth drawn down by long years of thought, with stooping shoulders and wasted limbs; a fitting famulus—the rat, as Sperver called him—to this last refuge of the learning of Nideck.
That which gave to the place a unique interest, however, was the line of family portraits that covered one whole side of the ancient library. There they were, knights and ladies, from Hugh the Wolf down to Count Hermann, the present owner; from the crude daubs of barbarous days to the perfect work of the best painters of our own time. My attention was naturally centred upon this part of the room. Hugh I., with a bald head, seemed watching you from his frame as a wolf glares at the traveller whom a sudden turn in the forest path discloses to view. His gray, blood-shot eyes, bristling beard, and large, hairy ears, gave him an air of singular ferocity.
Next to him, like the lamb next the savage beast, was a young woman, with a gentle, sad expression, her hands clasped on her breast, her long, silken tresses of fair hair parted over the forehead and falling in thick waves about her face, which they encircled with a golden aureole. I was struck with her resemblance to Odile of Nideck. Nothing could have been more delicate and charming than this old painting on wood, a little stiff in its outline, but charmingly simple and ingenuous.