From a hill which overlooks the smiling little town of Eisenach, frowns
the grim old castle of the Wartburg. It is a gloomy-looking place, with
its vast chambers, and long, winding corridors of stone; and yet, that
it has held at least one bit of brightness, all would agree who had
ever seen the smile of Katrina, the caretaker’s little daughter.
It was Katrina’s chief delight to stand at her father’s side when he
unlocked the huge iron portals, and admitted visitors into the castle
court; while not a few of these would stop and say some pleasant word
to the child, or else stroke her golden hair in passing.
To many persons the life of this nine-year-old girl might perhaps seem
very dull; but in Katrina’s happy nature was the spirit of contentment.
However, she had one keen desire,--it was to see inside the ancient
castle. And sometimes, when there were visitors going in, she would beg
her father to take her with him, but he always shook his head, saying:
“No, my child, the chill air of the Wartburg is not for such a tender
plant as thou.”
So she would wait outside, she and the sunbeams together, until her
father’s rounds were finished.
It was a simple, wholesome life that Katrina led, even though it was
within the walls of one of the most noted of all the ancient castles.
Her parents, good, honest folk, were poor, and realized that their
child would have to face the sterner side of life. She was, they
said, already too dreamful and imaginative, so they taught her to be
practical, and, as far as possible, hid the romance of the castle from
her view.
But by degrees much that was weird, as well as romantic, began to weave
itself about the child’s more practical existence like bright threads
woven into gray. And little by little, through a means singularly
strange, she came to be familiar with many of the legends and historic
tales relating to this old Thuringian fortress.
Now, living, as she did, far up on this lonely hilltop, Katrina had few
companions. But there was one who had been her playmate always, and
that was Fritz Albrecht, of Eisenach, the toymaker’s son.
Fritz, to be sure, was five years older than Katrina, but this only
served to make the lad feel responsible as her protector. When a very
little boy, his mother had read to him tales of knighthood and valour;
and now, even though the mother he had loved so dearly had been taken
from him, the seeds of chivalry she had sown in his heart promised to
be fruitful.
It was a quaint little house in which Fritz and his father lived, and
where the latter had his workshop. But quainter still was the house
that faced them across the narrow street paved with cobblestones, and
on which Fritz was accustomed to look daily.
From his frequent visits to it, the boy knew every room in this old
house with its queer gables and red-tiled roof. But never would he
forget the day, not long before she died, when his mother had taken him
into a certain small room over the entrance, and, holding his chubby
hand in hers, had said, in her gentle fashion:
“My little Fritz, thou art in the room which sheltered the great
Martin Luther when he was a lad scarcely older than thyself. Ponder
well what I am telling thee, and when thou art older thou must learn
about the splendid work that Luther did. And there,” the mother added,
as she pointed to the portrait of a sweet-faced woman, “is the good
Widow Cotta. It was she who heard little Martin Luther singing in the
streets, and, out of the goodness of her mother-heart, for she had
children of her own, took him in and gave him a home here with her own
family.”
That was all his mother had told him about Martin Luther, but it
aroused in Fritz a desire to know more about the boy who had earned the
money to go to school by singing carols in these same streets where
he, Fritz, walked every day.
For many months, as he passed some of the more ancient-looking houses,
Fritz would often stop and gaze up at the windows with their tiny
panes, saying, as he did so:
“I wonder if the people who lived here long ago heard him singing, and
if they threw money to him out of these same windows.”
Very often he had talked about it to Katrina, and she never tired of
listening.
“Some day I’ll take thee there, Katrina, indeed I will, and show thee
the very bed little Martin Luther slept in.”
“Yes,” was Katrina’s answer, eagerness shining in her big blue eyes.
“I want to go and see it all, and,” she added, thoughtfully, “when I’m
grown to be a woman like my own, dear _mütterchen_, I’m going to give
money to every little boy I can. It might help them to be great, too,
some day. The people who gave little Martin Luther money didn’t know
what a great man he was going to be. But,” she added, after a moment’s
pause, “maybe it was the home the good Frau Cotta gave him more than
the money that helped to make him great.”
The two children, as they talked together, were seated on a bench in
the castle courtyard. It was a beautiful summer evening, and Fritz had
begged Katrina to come outside and see the splendid colours of the
sunset: for this boy of fourteen years was even then an artist in his
heart.
For a long while they had been sitting there, their faces toward the
western sky, when suddenly both gave a start, while into Katrina’s eyes
came a look of wonder. But Fritz laid a calming hand on hers.
“It’s the voice, Katrina, the same voice we heard that other evening!
Have no fear; dost thou not remember what it told us?”