Siebach looked up at me sharply and seemed about to speak. But he thought better of it, and returned to his breakfast.
"Yes," said Auberthal, quietly. "Something certainly kept me awake. That family ghost of yours, Siebach, I expect—the Stone Rider."
"I heard nothing," returned the Count, stolidly.
But Auberthal was not to be silenced.
"No? That is odd. I heard him distinctly. He stopped outside my door; and something groaned. It gave me a peculiar sensation. What makes him walk, Siebach—I suppose there's a legend?"
"Oh, there are lots of legends," answered Siebach, offhandedly. "One says that the Ritter von Salitz in the thirteenth century caused a statue of himself, on his favourite charger, to be set up in the courtyard of the castle, and when he took prisoners of war, he chained them to the Stone Rider and flogged them to death. When he was about sixty he married for the second time. His wife was very young and very beautiful, and had been betrothed to his eldest son, whom he hated, and banished from the castle. One day he found his son and his wife talking together in the forest. He seized them, had them lashed to the statue, and directed his men to flog them to death, whilst he himself stood by and derided them. However, that was the last atrocity he perpetrated, for he soon after went mad, and died. And his spirit is doomed to ride the stone horse for ever."
"A sufficiently horrible story, at any rate," remarked Auberthal, composedly. "Is the horse in your study the original of the courtyard."
"Yes. It has been most carefully preserved, and handed down from generation to generation."
"No wonder it roams about the castle at night," I said.