Oswald had always lived in the city. His manners, his views, his
attachments were all those of a city man. Thus it happened that when he
saw himself suddenly, and as if by magic, transferred to the country,
he was charmed and almost intoxicated with the unspeakable beauty of
the first bright summer days at a beautiful country place. He enjoyed
it more than most men. Everything was so new and yet so strangely
familiar to him, as when we find ourselves in a country which we fancy
we have seen before in a dream. Was the dark blue vault, which rose
higher and higher every day, the same sky which hung so sadly and
mournfully over the ocean of houses in the great city? Were these
sparkling lights the same lonely stars to which he had now and then
glanced up as he came from the opera or from a party? Could a summer
morning really be so rich in splendor, a summer evening really so soft
and almost lascivious? Had he never heard birds sing, that he must now
listen forever to their simple piping? Had he never seen flowers, that
he must stand and gaze at their bright colors and strange forms without
ever being tired? He felt like a person who comes back to life again
after a severe illness. The recent past lay behind him, covered with a
thick veil; but days long since gone by, memories drowned in an ocean
of oblivion, rose once more before his mind's eye like a dazzling,
deceiving Fata Morgana. "Why, there is larkspur!" he cried out one of
those days, full of happy surprise, as he saw the flower blooming
brightly on many a bed of the garden in which he was walking up and
down.
"To be sure," replied Bruno, who accompanied him; "have you never seen
it before?"
"Yes, long since," murmured the young man, bending down and looking
with deep emotion at the fanciful flower. He saw in his memory a little
cozy garden near the town wall, where he played about, gathering small
stones, flowers, and other rarities, and carried them to a beautiful
but pale young woman, who always stroked his head when he came to throw
his burden into her lap, and with a mother's patience never tired to
answer his thousand questions. Then he had brought her such a flower,
too, and the beautiful lady had said: "That is larkspur!" And then she
had gazed so long at the flower that the tears had gathered in her
eyes, and she had taken him passionately and pressed him to her bosom,
and there he must have fallen asleep, tired from playing so long, for
he remembered nothing more. The beautiful young lady he knew was his
mother; she had died before he was five years old. Who has not
experienced it himself, that amid the stir and turmoil of life, where
one image continually crowds out another, and we are forever
tyrannically held fast by the moment, everything gradually fades away,
even what we held dearest upon earth, even the parents to whom we owe
our life! Thus Oswald also had almost forgotten that he had ever had a
mother; now the simple little flower awakened in him forcibly the
memory of the long lost mother. The first weeks which he spent in the
solitude of country life recalled to him the first years of his life,
for he had never since communed so closely, so intimately, with nature,
or beheld her charming face so near by. He remembered now also his
father, who had died two years ago in the same isolation in which he
had lived, and felt for him now that grateful affection, which,
unfortunately, never blooms out fully till those are long gone whom its
fragrance would have rejoiced most. He remembered his father, a strange
pygmy in form, whom the son at eighteen years already overtopped by
more than two feet; an eccentric misanthrope, who was known all over
town as the "Old Candidate," and whose wornout black dress coat, in
which he appeared winter and summer alike, was familiar to every child
in the street. He remembered how the strange, enigmatical man jealously
locked up the rich wealth of his learning and his goodness from all the
world except from his only son, whom he loved with ineffable affection,
whom he nursed and tended with all a mother's tenderness, and for whom
even he, the miser, thought nothing too dear.
These pleasant, and yet also painful recollections passed through
Oswald's mind as he roved about in his leisure hours, wandering alone,
or with his pupils, through the garden, the fields, and the forest, and
daily growing fonder of life in the country. Often he would run down
into the great garden early in the morning before the lessons
commenced, and look into the dew-filled flowers and listen to the song
of the birds, and then it appeared to him marvellous how anybody, how
he himself, had ever been able to live in a city.
It is true that Castle Grenwitz and its surroundings were such as to
excite the admiration of eyes more familiar even than his with
landscape beauties, although the crowds of tourists who every summer
visited the island rarely penetrated so far. If some accidentally
discovered it, they wondered why so charming a place, with so many
points of interest about it, could have been forgotten in the
hand-books for travellers, merely because it lay a few miles from the
great high-road.
The chateau bears, to this day, traces of the wealth and the power of
the old knightly race of the Barons of Grenwitz, who have been
landowners here from time immemorial, and who built the castle for
their own defence, and in defiance of the neighboring barons, towards
the middle of the fourteenth century. The lower story of one of the
wings, with its colossal blocks of stone, dates from that early period;
so does also the big round tower, at the point where the old and the
new castle now meet. The new part was built in the seventeenth century,
in the prevailing style of that day, and looks, with its ornamented
pillars and queer decorations by the side of the plain, massive tower,
like a man of fashion of the time of Louis XIV. by the side of a knight
in armor of the days of Crecy and Poitiers.
All around the chateau and the numerous outbuildings runs an immense
wall, at least twenty feet high, which dates back into even greater
antiquity than the tower; it leaves ample space open, so that even the
enormous building looks but small in the wide circle. This wall has,
however, long since been changed into a peaceful promenade,
overshadowed on high by lofty beeches, walnut-trees, and lindens. The
broad moat which follows it all around is now partly obliterated,
forming a low swamp filled with reeds; and wherever the water has held
its own, it is covered with a green carpet of water-plants, in which
half-wild ducks love to feed and fatten. The wall and the moat had
evidently been intended to afford safe protection not only to the
inhabitants of the castle, but also to the faithful vassals of the
warlike barons, with their wives and children, their herds and their
provisions. Even the farm buildings, which, since the erection of the
new chateau, had been removed to a distant part of the farm, had
originally been enclosed within the wall. In those days there had been
a single passage in the wall, a huge fortified gate under a tower,
which opened upon a drawbridge, and then led to a strong _tete de
pont_. Now the tower had been demolished; the drawbridge refused to
move, and the fortification had long since been changed into a number
of ovens and other useful contrivances. From this principal gate an
avenue of magnificent lime-trees, some of which were several hundred
years old, led to the great portal of the chateau. To the right of the
avenue and in front of the castle was a vast lawn, with a stone basin
in the centre; a naiad stood over it as patroness, but she had long
since lost her head, perhaps from grief that for half a century the
water had refused to come at her bidding.
The remaining space inside of the wall was filled with gardens and
plantations, which dated from the time of the new building, and clearly
enough betrayed the character of that period by the straight walks,
carefully trimmed evergreen hedges, huge pyramids of box, and an
abundance of gods carved in sandstone. Here and there, however, a
spirit of innovation seemed to have been at work. Box-trees had made
desperate efforts to stretch out their crippled branches, and to grow
for a while as nature prompted them; the two sides of a long, stiff
walk had made common cause, and formed, united, an impenetrable
bosquet; and a gardener, who had no taste for the silent language of
yew pyramids and box avenues, had defied all aesthetic rules, and boldly
planted fruit-trees of every kind wherever he had found an open space;
even vegetables were met with, encroaching impudently upon trim beds of
flowers. A sister of the naiad in the courtyard was completely hid
under brambles and briers; but, more easily resigned than the other
goddess, she had preserved her head, and prattled in silent nights
merrily of the good old times.
Thus every generation had for a thousand years contributed something to
the strengthening or beautifying of the old castle, from the giant wall
which belonged to pagan times, to the asparagus beds that had been laid
out this spring. Much had disappeared without leaving a trace; much
also had been preserved; but as even the oldest parts bore the marks of
life, of continued usefulness, there was no sudden break visible, and
the whole produced a most pleasing impression, as if everything was
just as it ought to be. Castle Grenwitz had lost, it is true, its
primitive character, and Oswald hardly thought he was looking upon an
old feudal castle, built by robber-knights, but fancied rather he saw a
peaceful convent of contemplative monks, when he returned in the
evening from a walk with his pupils, and remained standing at a
certain place of the wall, from whence he could look down upon the
grass-covered yard in its dark shade, the garden with its countless
flowers, and the castle itself, whose gray walls shone dimly in the
twilight, while the swallows were flying swiftly to and fro, twittering
merrily in their evening sport.