Tales from Blackwood Volume Ix Part 13

"I wish them at the bottom of the river; they cost me a Turkish carabine, a brace of diamond watches, as I'll be sworn, from the showy fellow that I levelled at, with the valise behind his courier, scented enough to perfume a forest of brown bears."

"Hang those Hulans," was the answer. "Ever since the Emperor's arrival, they have done nothing but gallop about, putting honester men than themselves in fear of their lives, and cutting up our employment so woefully, that it is impossible to make money enough on the road to give a decent education to one's children. But here comes the captain. We shall now have some news. Speranski never makes his appearance unless something is in the wind."

This dialogue pa.s.sed between two Transylvanian pedlars, if a judgment were to be formed from their blue caps, brown cloaks, and the packs strapped to their shoulders. A narrower inspection might have discovered within those cloaks the little heads of a pair of short scimitars; their trousers would have displayed to the curious the profile of two horse-pistols, and their boots developed a pair of those large-bladed knives which the Hungarian robber uses, alike to slice away the trunks of the britchska, to cut the harness of the horse, the throat of the rider, and carve his own sheep's-milk cheese.

The captain came in, a tall, bold figure, in the dress of an innkeeper.

He flung a purse upon the table, and ordered supper. The pedlars disburdened themselves of their boxes, kindled a fire on a hearth which seemed guiltless of having administered to the wants of mankind for many a wild year; produced from an unsuspected store-house under the floor some dried venison, and the paws of a bear, preserved in the most luxurious style of Hungarian cookery; decorated their table even with some pieces of plate, which, though evidently of different fas.h.i.+ons, gave proof of their having been under n.o.ble roofs, by their armorial bearings and workmans.h.i.+p, though the rest of their history did not lie altogether so much in high life; and in a few minutes the captain, throwing off his innkeeper hat and drab-coloured coat, half sat, half lay down, to a supper worthy of an Emperor, or of a man who generally sups much better--an imperial commissary.

The whole party were forest robbers; the thing must be confessed. But the spirit of the country prevailed even under the rotting roof of "the Ghost's house,"--the ominous name which this old and ruinous, though still stately mansion, had earned among the peasantry. The name did not exactly express the fact; for, when tenanted at all, it was tenanted by anything rather than ghosts; by some dozens of rough, raw-boned, bold, and hard-living fellows--as solid specimens of flesh and blood as had ever sent a shot right in front of the four horses of a courier's cabriolet, or had brought to a full stop, scimitar in hand, the heyducs and cha.s.seurs, the s.h.i.+vering valets and frightened postilions of a court chamberlain, whirling along the Vienna road with six to his britchska.

Etiquette was preserved at this supper. The inferior plunderers waited on the superior. Captain Speranski ate his meal alone, and in solemn silence. The pedlars watched his nod; filled out the successive goblets at a glance, and having performed their office, watched, at a respectful distance, the will of the man of authority. A silver chime announced the hour of ten. One of the pedlars drew aside a fragment of a ragged shawl, which covered one of the most superb _pendules_ of the Palais Royal.

If the Apollo who sat harping in gold upon its stytolate, could have given words to his melodies, he might have told a curious narrative; for he had already seen a good deal of the various world of adventure.

Since his first transit from the magnificent Horlogerie of M. Sismonde, of all earthly watchmakers the most renowned, this Apollo had first sung to the world and his sister muses in the chamber of the unlucky Prince de Soubise. The fates of France had next transferred him, with the Prince's camp-plate, despatches, secret orders, and military chest, into the hands of a regiment of Prussian hussars, at the memorable battle of Rosbach, that modern "battle of the Spurs." But the Prussian colonel was either too much or too little a lover of the arts, to keep Apollo and the Nine all to himself; and the _pendule_ next rang its silver notes over the roulette-table of the most brilliant of Parisian opera-dancers, transferred from the _salle_ of the _Academie_ to the Grand Comedie at Berlin. But roulette, wheel of Plutus as it is, is sometimes the wheel of fortune; and the fair La Pirouette, in spite of the patronage of the court and the nation, found that she must, like generals and monarchs, submit to fate, and part with her brilliant superfluities. The pendule fled from her Parisian mantel-piece, and its chimes were thenceforth to awake the eyelids of the handsomest woman in Hungary, the Countess Lublin nee Joblonsky, memorable for her beauty, her skill at _loto_, and the greatest profusion of rouge since the days of Philip Augustus. Its history now drew to a close. It had scarcely excited the envy of all the countesses of her circle, and, of course, became invaluable to the fair Joblonsky, when it disappeared. A reward of ten times its value was instantly offered. The Princess of Marosin, the arbiter of all elegance, who had once expressed her admiration of its taste, was heard to regret its loss as a specimen of foreign art. The undone proprietor was only still more undone; for of all beauties living or dead, she most hated the Princess, blooming, youthful, and wors.h.i.+pped as she was, to the infinite detriment of all the fading Joblonskys of the creation. But no reward could bring it back. This one source of triumph was irrecoverably gone; and from Presburg to Vienna, all was conjecture, conversation, and consternation. So ended the court history of the _pendule_.

When the repast was fully over, Speranski, pouring out a gla.s.s of Tokay from a bottle which bore the impress of the Black Eagle of the House of Hapsburg, and which had evidently been arrested on its road to the Emperor's table, ordered one of the pedlars to give him the papers, "which," said he, with a smile, "that Turkish courier _mislaid_ where he slept last night." A small packet was handed to him;--he perused it over and over with a vigilant eye, but it was obvious, without any of the results which he expected; for, after a few minutes' pause, during which he examined every part of the case in which they were enclosed, he threw the letters aside. "What," said he, in a disappointed tone, "was to be expected from those opium-eaters? Yet they are shrewd in their generation, and the scandals of the harem, the propitious day for shaving the Sultan's head, the lucky star for combing his ill.u.s.trious beard, or the price of a dagger-hilt, are as good topics as any that pa.s.s in our own diplomacy. Here, Sturnwold, put back this circ.u.mcised nonsense into its case, and send it, do you hear, by one of our _own_ couriers, to the Turkish secretary at Vienna; let it be thrown on his pillow, or tied to his turban, just as you please; but, at all events, we must not do the business like a clumsy cabinet messenger. Now, begone; and you, Heinrich, hand me the Turk's meerschaum."

The bandit brought him a very handsome pipe, which he said would probably be more suited to the Turk's tobacco, of which he had deposited a box upon the table. Speranski took the pipe, but, at his first experiment, he found the neck obstructed. His quick conception ascertained the point at once. Cutting the wood across, he found a long roll of paper within. He glanced over its contents, instantly sprang up, ordered the attendance of half a dozen of "his friends" on horseback, looked to the priming of his pistols, and galloped off through the forest.

On the evening of one of the most sultry days of July, and in one of the most delicious yet most lonely spots of the Carpathian hills, a trampling of hoofs, and a jingling of horse-furniture, and a confusion of loud and dissonant voices, announced that strangers were at hand. The sounds told true, for, gradually emerging from the glade covered with terebinth trees, wild vines that hung their rich and impenetrable folds over elms, hazels, and cypress, like draperies of green and brown silk over the pillars of some Oriental palace, came a long train of sumpter mules, led horses, and Albanian grooms; next came a more formidable group of hors.e.m.e.n, the body-guards of the Hospodar of Moldavia, sent to escort Mohammed Ali Hunkiar, the Moslem amba.s.sador, through the Bannat; and then came, seated on the Persian charger given to him from the stables of the Padishah, the brother of the Sun and father of the Moon, Sultan Selim, the most mighty--a little bitter-visaged old Turk, with the crafty countenance of the hereditary hunchbacks of the great city of the faithful. Nothing could be more luxurious than the hour, the golden sunset; nothing lovelier than its light streaming in a thousand rays, s.h.i.+fts and shapes of inimitable l.u.s.tre through the blooms and foliage of the huge ravine; and nothing less lovely or more luxurious than the little old amba.s.sador, who had earned his elevation from a cobbler's stall to the Divan, by his skill in cutting off heads, and had now earned his appointment to the imperial emba.s.sy, by his dexterity in applying a purse of ten thousand sequins to the conscience of the slipper-bearer to the slipper-bearer of his highness the Vizier.

Nothing could seem less inclined to look at the dark side of things at this moment, or to throw away the enjoyments of this world for the good of Moslem diplomacy, than Mohammed Ali Hunkiar, as he sat and smoked, and stroked his long beard, and inhaled the mingled fumes of his Smyrna pipe, and the air aromatic with a host of flowers. But the Turkish proverb, "The smoker is often blinded by his own smoke," was to find its verification even in the diplomatic hunchback. As he had just reached the highest stone of the pa.s.s, and was looking with the triumph of avarice--or ambition, if it be the n.o.bler name--down the valley checkered with the troop that meandered through paths as devious and as many-coloured as an Indian snake, a shot struck his charger in the forehead; the animal sprang high in the air, fell, and flung the amba.s.sador at once from his seat, his luxury, and a certain dream of clearing ten times the ten thousand sequins which he had disbursed for his place, by a genuine Turkish business of the dagger, before he left the portcullis of Presburg.

All was instant confusion. The shots began to fall thick, though the enemy might have been the beasts of the earth or the fowls of the air, for any evidence that sight could give to the contrary. The whole troop were of one opinion, that they must have fallen into the power of the fiend himself; for the shots poured on them from every quarter at once.

Wherever they turned, they were met by a volley. The cavalry of the Hospodar, though brave as panthers on parade, yet were not used to waste their valour or their time on struggles of this irregular nature. They had bought their own places, and paid the due purchase of a well-fed sinecure; they had bought their own clothes, and felt answerable to themselves for keeping them in preservation worthy of a court; they had bought their own horses, and, like true Greeks, considered that the best return their horses could make was to carry them as safe out of the field as into it. The consequence was, that in the next five minutes the whole escort was seen riding at will in whatever direction the destiny that watches over the guards of sovereign princes might point the safest way. The ravine, the hill, the forest, the river, were all speckled with turbans, like flowers, in full gallop; the muleteers, being of slower movement, took the simpler precaution of turning their mules, baggage and all, up the retired corners of the forest, from which they emerged only to turn them with their lading to their several homes. All was the most picturesque melee for the first half-dozen rounds, all was the most picturesque flight for the next. All was silence thenceforth; broken only by the shot that came dropping through the thickets wherever a lurking turban suddenly seemed to recover its energies, and fly off at full speed. At length even the shots ceased, and all was still and lone.

The forest looked as if it had been unshaken since the deluge; the ravine--calm, rich, and tufted with thicket, shrub, and tree--looked as if it had never heard the hoof of cavalry. The wood-dove came out again, rubbed down its plumage, and cooed in peace to the setting sun; the setting-sun threw a long radiance, that looked like a pyramid of amber, up the pa.s.s. Turban, Turk, skirmish, and clamour, all were gone. One remnant of the time alone remained.

Under a huge cypress, that covered the ground with its draperies, like a funeral pall, lay a charger, and under it a green and scarlet bale. The bale had once been a man, and that man the Turkish amba.s.sador. But his emba.s.sy was over. He had made his last salaam, he had gained his last sequin, he had played his last trick, he had told his last lie. "Dust to dust" was now the history of Mohammed Ali Hunkiar.

The Hall of the Diet at Presburg is one of the wonders of the capital.

The heroes and magnates of Upper Hungary frown in immeasurable magnitude of mustache and majestic longitude of beard on its walls.

The conquerors of the Bannat, the ravagers of Transylvania, the _potentissimi_ of Sclavonia, there gleam in solidity of armour, that at once gives a prodigious idea of both their strength and their terrors.

The famous rivers, figured by all the variety of barbarian genius, pour their pictured torrents over the ceiling. The Draave embraces the Saave, the Grau rushes in fluid glory through the Keisse; and floods that disdain a bridge, and flow a hundred leagues asunder, there interlace each other in streams as smiling and affectionate as if they slept in the same fountain. Entering that hall, every true Hungarian lifts up his hands, and rejoices that he is born in the country of the arts, and, leaving it, compa.s.sionates the fallen honours of Florence and Rome.

Yet in that hall the Emperor Leopold, monarch of fifty provinces, and even sovereign of Hungary, was pacing backwards and forwards without casting a glance on the wonders of the Hungarian hand. Colonel the Baron von Herbert was at the end of the saloon, waiting the Imperial pleasure.

The dialogue, which was renewed and broken off as the Emperor approached or left him, was, of course, one of fragments. The Emperor was in obvious agitation. "It is the most unaccountable thing that I ever heard of," said Leopold. "He had, I understand, a strong escort; his own train were numerous; the roads regularly patroled; every precaution taken; and yet the thing is done in full suns.h.i.+ne. A man is murdered almost under my own eyes, travelling with my pa.s.sport; an amba.s.sador, and above all amba.s.sadors, a Turk."

"But your Majesty," said Von Herbert, "is not now in Vienna. Your Hungarian subjects have peculiar ideas on the subject of human justice; and they would as soon shoot an amba.s.sador, if the idea struck them, as a squirrel."

"But a Turk," said the Emperor, "against whom there could not have existed a shadow of personal pique; who could have roused no jealousy at court; who could have been known, in fact, by n.o.body here; to be killed almost within sight of the city gates, and every paper that he had upon him, every present, every jewel, everything carried off, without the slightest clue to discovery! Baron, I shall begin to doubt the activity of your Pandours."

The Baron's grave countenance flushed at the remark, and he answered with more than even his usual gravity. "Your Majesty must decide. But, whoever has been in fault, allow me to vindicate my regiment. The Pandour patrol were on the spot on the first alarm; but the whole affair was so quickly over, that all their activity was utterly useless. It actually seemed supernatural."

"Has the ground been examined?" asked Leopold.

"Every thicket," answered Von Herbert. "I would stake my troopers, for sagacity and perseverance, against so many blood-hounds; and yet, I must acknowledge to your Majesty that, except for the marks of the horse's hoofs on the ground, the bullets sticking in the trees, and the body of the Turk himself, which had been stripped of every valuable, we might have thought that we had mistaken the place altogether."

"The whole business," said Leopold, "is a mystery; and it must be unravelled." He then broke off, resumed his walk to the end of the hall; then returning, said abruptly--"Look to the affair, Colonel. The Turks have no good opinion of us as it is, and they will now have a fresh pretext, in charging us with the a.s.sa.s.sination of their amba.s.sador. Go, send out your Pandours, offer a hundred ducats for the first man who brings any information of the murder; offer a thousand, if you please, for the murderer himself. Even the crown would not be safe if these things were to be done with impunity. Look to your Pandours more carefully in future."

The Baron, with a vexation which he could not suppress, hastily replied--"Your Majesty does not attribute this outrage to any of my corps?"

"Certainly not to the Baron von Herbert," said the Emperor, with a reconciling smile. "But, my dear Baron, your heroes of the Bannat have no love for a Turk, while they have a very considerable love for his plunder. For an embroidered saddle or a diamond-hilted dagger, they would go as far as most men. In short, you must give those bold barbarians of yours employment, and let their first be to find out the a.s.sa.s.sin."

It was afternoon, and the Wiener Straat was crowded with equipages of the great and fair. The place of this brilliant reunion was the drawing-room of the Princess of Marosin, and the occasion was the celebration of her birthday. Princesses have so many advantages over humbler beauties that they must submit to one calamity, which, in the estimation of many a beauty, is more than a balance for all the gifts of fortune. They must acknowledge their age. The art of printing, combined with the scrutiny of etiquette, prohibits all power of making the years of a princess a secret confided to the bosoms of the privy council. As the hour of her first unclosing the brilliancy of her eyes, in a world which all the court poets profess must be left in darkness without them, so the regular periods by which the bud advances to the bloom, and the bloom matures into ripened loveliness, are registered with an annual activity of verse, prose, and prostration, that precludes all chronological error. Even at the period when the autumnal touch begins to tinge the cheek, and the fair possessor of so much homage would willingly forget the exact number of the years during which she has borne the sceptre, the calculation is continued with fatal accuracy.

Not an hour can be silently subducted from the long arrear of Time; and while, with all the female world beneath her, he suddenly seems to stand still, or even to retrograde, with the unhappy object of regal reckoning he moves mercilessly onward, with full expanded wing carries her from climacteric to climacteric, unrestrained and irrestrainable by all the skill of female oblivion, defies the antagonist dexterity of the toilet, makes coiffeur and cosmetics null and void, and fixes the reluctant and lovely victim of the calendar in the awful elevation of "the world gone by." She is a calendar saint, and, like most of that high sisterhood, has purchased her dignity by martyrdom.

But the Princess of Marosin had no reason to dread the keenest reckoning of rivalry. She was on that day eighteen. Eighteen years before that morning the guns from the grey and war-worn towers of Marosin had announced, through a circuit of one of the loveliest princ.i.p.alities of Upper Hungary, that one of the loveliest beings that even Hungary had ever seen was come from its original skies, or from whatever part of creation handsome princesses visit this sublunar world. As the only descendant of her ill.u.s.trious house, she was the ward of the Emperor, but having the still nearer claims of blood, her marriage now occupied the Imperial care. A crowd of Marshals and Margraves felt that they would make excellent guardians of the Princ.i.p.ality, and offered their generous protection. The lady seemed indifferent to the choice; but Prince Charles of Buntzlau, by all acknowledgment the best dressed Prince in the Empire, at the head of the hussar guard of the Emperor, incalculably rich, and incomparably self-satisfied, had already made up his own mind on the subject, and decided that the Princ.i.p.ality, and the lady annexed, were to be his. The Emperor, too, had given his sanction.

Prince Charles was not the man whom Leopold would have chosen for the President of the Aulic Council, though his claims as a master of the ceremonies were beyond all discussion. But the Imperial policy was not reconcilable with the idea of suffering this important inheritance to fall into the hands of a Hungarian n.o.ble. Hungary, always turbulent, requires coercives, not stimulants; and two hundred thousand ducats a-year, in the hands of one of her das.h.i.+ng captains, would have been sufficient to make another Tekeli. The handsome Prince was evidently not shaped for raising the banner of revolt, or heading the cavaliers of the Ukraine. He was an Austrian in all points, and a new pelisse would have won him from the car of Alexander on the day of his entry into Babylon.

Among the faithful of the empire the Sovereign's nod is politics, religion, and law. The Marshals and Margraves instinctively bowed before the supremacy of the superhuman thing that wore the crown of Charlemagne, and Prince Charles's claim was wors.h.i.+pped by the whole embroidered circle as one of the decisions which it would be court impiety to question, as it was court destiny to fulfil.

Hungary was once the land of kings, and it was still the land of n.o.bles.

Half oriental, half western, the Hungarian is next in magnificence to the Moslem. He gives his last ducat for a shawl, a jewel-hilted sabre, or a gilded cap, which nothing but his fear of being mistaken for a Turk prevents him from turning into a turban. The Princess Juliana of Marosin sat in the centre of a chamber that might have made the cabinet of the favourite Sultana of the Lord of the Infidels. She sat on a low sofa covered with tapestry from Smyrna; her caftan, girdled with the largest emeralds, was made by the fair fingers of the Greek maidens of Saloniki; her hair, long, black, and drooping round her person, in rich sable wreaths, like the branches of a cypress, was surmounted by a crescent which had won many an eye in the jewel mart of Constantinople; and in her hand she waved a fan of peac.o.c.ks' plumes, made by the princ.i.p.al artist to the serail of Teheran. Thus Oriental in her drapery, colours, and costume, she sat in the centre of a chamber, which, for its gloomy carvings, yet singular stateliness of decoration, might have reminded the spectator of some Indian shrine, or subterranean dungeon of the dark spirits enclosing a spirit of light; or, to abandon poetry, and tell the truth in plain speech, the chamber reminded the spectator of the formal, yet lavish splendour of the old kingly times of the land, while its possessor compelled him to feel the fact, that all magnificence is forgotten in the presence of a beautiful woman.

The Princess received the homage of the glittering circle with the complacency of conscious rank, and repaid every bow with one of those sweet smiles, which to a courtier are irresistible evidences of his personal merit; to a lover, are spells that raise him from the lowest depths to the most rapturous alt.i.tudes; and to a woman, cost nothing whatever. But, to an eye which none of these smiles had deprived of all its powers of reading the human countenance, there was in even this creature of birth, beauty, and admiration, some secret anxiety, which, in despite of all conjecture, proved that she was no more than mortal.

There was a wavering of her colour, that bespoke inward perturbation; a paleness followed by a flush that threw the crimson of her gorgeous shawl into the shade; a restless movement of the fingers loaded with gems; a quick turn of the head towards the door, though the most potential flattery was at the moment pouring into the ear at the opposite side. There were times, when a slight expression of scorn upon her fine features escaped her politeness, and gave sign that she agreed with mankind of all ages, in the infinite monotony, dulness, and commonplace of the _elite_ of the earth, the starred and ribboned society of the high places of mankind. But all was peace to the emotion of her features, when the door slowly opened; and after a note of preparation worthy of the arrival of the Great Mogul, the chamberlain announced, "Prince Charles of Buntzlau." Pride and resentment flashed across her physiognomy, like lightning across the serenity of a summer sky. Her cheek grew crimson, as the gallant lover, the affianced husband, came bowing up to her; her brow contracted, and the man would have been wise who had augured from that brow the hazard of taking her hand without first securing her heart. But all was soon over; the lovely lady soon restrained her emotion, with a power which showed her presence of mind. But her cheek would not obey even her determination, it continued alternately glowing and pale; wild thoughts were colouring and blanching that cheek; and the fever of the soul was burning in her restless and dazzling eye. On the birthdays of the great in Hungary, it is the custom that none shall come empty-handed. A brilliant variety of presents already filled the tables and sofas of the apartment. But the Prince's present eclipsed them all; it was a watch from the Horlogerie of the most famous artist of Paris, and a _chef-d'oeuvre_ in point of setting. The Princess looked at it with a disdain which it cost her an effort to conceal. "Prince," said she, "I regret the want of patriotism which sends our n.o.bles to purchase the works of strangers, instead of encouraging the talents of our own country."--"Yes, but your Highness may condescend to reflect," said the lover, "on the utter impossibility of finding anything of this kind tolerable except in Paris." The Princess turned to one of the Bohemians who formed her band of minstrels, and said, "Vladimir, desire the jewel-keeper to bring my Hungarian watch." The Bohemian went on his mission--the jewel-keeper appeared with the watch, and it was instantly declared, by the unanimous admiration of the circle, to be altogether unrivalled in the art. The Prince, chagrined at this discomfiture, asked, with more than the authority of a lover, if the Princess "would do him the honour to mention the artist so deserving of her patronage." She handed the watch over to him. He opened it, and a paper dropped out. On it was written the name of Mohammed Ali Hunkiar.

"The murdered amba.s.sador!" instinctively exclaimed fifty voices.--The Princess rose from her seat, overwhelmed with surprise and alarm. "The Turkish amba.s.sador!" said she; "then this must have been a part of his plunder." The jewel-keeper was summoned to give account of the circ.u.mstances connected with the purchase. His answer was, that "it was no purchase whatever." But he produced a note which he had received along with it. The note was "a request that her Highness would accept so trivial a present on her birthday, from one of her faithful subjects;"

and that, unable to discover the name of the donor, he had accepted it accordingly. Her circle soon after broke up. In a court all things are known; in a province all things known or unknown are an invaluable topic as long as they are new. The story of the Hungarian watch was turned into shapes innumerable. But the result of the investigation which immediately took place, by order of the Princess, was, that it had actually been made by an artist of Buda for the Sultan, by whom it was sent among the presents designed for the Emperor. On the fall of the Turk it had disappeared, like all the rest of his plunder, and had been unheard of until it started into light in the household of the Princess of Marosin.

The little perturbation excited by this incident lasted but till the high and mighty of the circle had withdrawn, to communicate the fact to a dozen other circles, and talk of it until the world was weary alike of the tale and the tellers. But there was a perturbation in the mind of this young and lovely being, which came from a deeper source, and lasted longer than even the delight of her dear five hundred friends, in surmising all the possible modes in which the stately relative of Emperors had contrived to charm into her fair hands the most superb _montre_ under the roofs of the city of Presburg.

Sunset began to shed its quiet gold on the hill-tops round the city--the sounds of day were fading fast--the glittering crowd had left her halls to silence--and as she walked through the suite of magnificent chambers in her gala dress, tissued with emeralds and rubies, and her regal loveliness contrasting with her eye fixed upon the ground, and her slow and meditative step, she might have been taken for the guardian genius of those halls of ancestry, or a new avatar of the tragic muse. Arrived at the balcony, she almost fell into the flowery seat, below which spread a vast and various view of the most fertile plain of Hungary. But the vision on her eye was not of the harvest heavily swelling before her at every wave of the breeze. Her thoughts were of valleys, where the sun never reached their green depths; of forests, where the roebuck fed and sported in scorn of the hunter; of mountains, whose marble spines were covered only with clouds, and whose only echoes were those of the thunder or the eagle. All before her eye was beauty cultured, and calm pleasure. The peasantry were driving their wains homeward loaded with the luxuriance of the Hungarian fields, proverbially rich where they are cultivated at all. Large droves of quiet cattle were speckling the distant pasture, and enjoying the heat and light of evening. The citizens were issuing from the city gates to taste the freshness of the hour, and troops of the n.o.bles attendant on the imperial ceremony, relieved from the labours of etiquette and antechambers, were driving their glittering equipages through the avenues, or caracolling their Ukraine chargers through the meadows. Yet for the living landscape the young gazer had no eyes. The scene on which her spirit dwelt was one of savage majesty and lonely power. A vast pile of rocks, through which a way seemed to have been cloven by the thunderbolt, opened on a glen as desolate as if it had never been trodden by the foot of man. Yet, under the shelter of one of its overhanging cliffs, peeping out from a drapery of heath, lichens, and wild flowers, as rich as a Persian carpet, was seen the outline of a rude building, half cottage, half tower, and resting on the slope beside it, a hunter with his boar-spear fixed upright in the turf--a greyhound beside him, and his whole soul employed in listening to the roar of the Mediterranean, whose waters chafed and swelled at the entrance of the ravine, and spread to the horizon like a gigantic sheet of sanguined steel.

The murmur of the church bells for the evening service at length scattered the vision. The mountain forests vanished, the glen of eternal marble was a garden embroidered with all the cultivation of art, and nothing was left of the whole proud picture but the star that now came, like a bride from her chamber, and stood showering radiance upon her head. That star, too, had gleamed upon the sky of the Croatian ravine, and in her enthusiasm she could almost have addressed it like a friend, or put up a prayer to its shrine as that of a beneficent divinity.

In the strong sensibility of the moment she uttered a few broken aspirations to its brightness, and a wish that she might escape the infinite weariness of life, and, like that star, be a gazer on existence, from a height above the cares and clouds of this world. A sudden movement among the shrubs below caught her ear; she glanced down, and saw, with his countenance turned full on her, as if she were something more than human, the hunter whom her fancy had pictured in the glen!

It was midnight, when twenty individuals, evidently of high rank, had a.s.sembled in an obscure house in one of the suburbs. But it was evident, from the plainness of their dress, that they had some object in concealing their rank; and from the weapons under their cloaks it was equally evident that they had come upon some business, in which either danger was to be guarded against, or violence intended.

For some time there was silence, the only words exchanged were in whispers. At intervals, a low knock at the door, a watchword, and a sign exchanged between the keeper of the entrance and the applicant without, announced a new comer. Still nothing was done; and as the cathedral bells tolled midnight, the anxiety for the arrival of some distinguished stranger, who had unaccountably delayed his coming, grew excessive. It gradually escaped, too, that the Cardinal di Lecco, the Papal Internuncio, was the expected individual.

The signal was given at last; the door opened, and a pale, decrepit Roman ecclesiastic entered. "Are all our friends here?" was his first question. But the answer was by no means a hospitable one. "By what means, Monsignore," said a tall dark-featured personage, advancing to him, "have we the honour of seeing _you_ here? We are upon private business."--"I come by your own invitation," said the ecclesiastic mildly, producing at the same time a letter, which was handed round the circle. "But this letter is to the nuncio of his Holiness; and it was only from him that we desired an answer in person." Then, in a higher tone, and half drawing his sword, an action which was imitated by all, "We must know, reverend signor, who you are, and by what authority you have intruded yourself into this room, or you must prepare to receive the reward due to all spies and traitors." The venerable priest's countenance betrayed the most obvious alarm; surrounded by this conflux of indignant visages, and with twenty swords already flas.h.i.+ng round his head, it required more than usual firmness to contemplate his situation without awe. The single glance which he cast to the door seemed to say how gladly he would have escaped from this specimen of Hungarian deliberation. His perturbation evidently deprived him of defence; he tried to explain the cause of his coming; he searched his dress for some paper, which, by his signs rather than his words, he intimated, would answer for his character. He searched his bosom, all was in vain; his hands became entangled; he made a sudden step to the door, but suspicion was now thoroughly roused. Every sword was flas.h.i.+ng there against his bosom. He tottered back, uttered some indistinct sounds of terror, and fell fainting into a chair.

The question was now how to dispose of him, for that he was not the Cardinal was a matter of personal knowledge to Count Colvellino, the personage who had first addressed him.

The Count, a man of habitual ferocity, proposed that he should be stabbed on the spot--an opinion which met with universal a.s.sent; but the difficulty was, how to dispose of the body. To bury it where they were was impossible for men with no other instruments than their swords; to fling it into the river would inevitably betray the murder by daylight; and even to convey it through the streets, to the river side, might be perilous, from the number of guards and loiterers brought together by the Imperial residence. During the deliberation the old ecclesiastic returned to his senses. By some accident his hand had fallen upon the secret packet which contained his credentials; the discovery acted on him as a cure for all his feebleness; and in his delivery of his mission he even wore an air of dignity. "The length and haste of my journey from Rome," said the venerable man, "may apologise, most n.o.ble lords, for my weakness; but this paper will, I presume, be satisfactory. It is, as you see, the rescript of his Holiness to the Cardinal di Lecco, whose servant and secretary stands before you. The Cardinal, suddenly occupied by the high concerns of the Secreta Concilia, of which he has just been appointed president, has sent me with his signet, his sign-manual, and his instructions, as contained in this cipher, to attend the high deliberations of my most honoured Lords, the Barons of Upper Hungary."

The credentials were delivered. All were authentic. Colvellino sullenly acknowledged that he had been premature in condemning the Papal envoy, who now announced himself as the Father Jiacomo di Estrella, of the Friars Minors of the Capital; and the point at issue was directly entered upon. It was of a nature which justified all their caution. The Emperor Leopold was supposed to have brought with him to the throne some ideas, hostile alike to the ancient feudalism of Hungary, and the supremacy of the Roman See. Revolution was threatening in Europe; and the Barons felt violent suspicions of a revolutionary inroad on their privileges, headed by the possessor of the Imperial Crown. The simple plan of the conspirators on this occasion, was the extinction of the hazard by the extinction of the instrument. Leopold was to be put to death in the moment of his coronation, and the heir of the former royal race of Hungary, a monk in the convent of St Isidore, was to be placed on the vacant throne. The debate lasted long, and a.s.sumed various shapes, in which the Papal Envoy exhibited the complete recovery of his faculties, and showed singular vividness and subtlety in obviating the impediments started to the project of getting rid of Leopold. Still, to overthrow an imperial dynasty, in the very day when its head was in the fulness of power, surrounded by troops, and still more protected by the etiquette that kept all strangers at a distance from the royal person, had difficulties which profoundly perplexed the Barons. But the deed must be done; Colvellino, already obnoxious to suspicion, from his habitual love of blood and violence of life, led the general opinion.

After long deliberation, it was decided that, as poison was slow, and might fail--as the pistol was too public, might miss the mark, and but wound after all--the secure way was the dagger. But how was this to find the Emperor, through a host of attendants, who surrounded him like a Persian monarch, and through ten thousand men-at-arms, covered with iron up to the teeth, and as watchful as wolves? Fra Jiacomo then made his proposal. "To attack the Emperor in his chamber," said he, "would be impossible; and, besides, would be an unmanliness disgraceful to the warlike spirit of the n.o.bles of Hungary." All voices joined in the sentiment. "To attack him in his pa.s.sage through the streets, on the day of the coronation, would be equally impossible, from the number of his guards, and equally dishonourable to the high character of the Hungarian n.o.bles for fidelity to all who trust them." A second plaudit, almost an acclamation, followed the sentiment. Fra Jiacomo now paused, as evidently waiting to collect his thoughts, and asked in the humblest voice, whether it was absolutely necessary that Leopold should die?

"He or we," cried Colvellino, indignant at the delay of the timid old priest. "He or we," echoed all the voices. "I obey," said the Friar, with a sigh, and clasping his trembling hands upon his bosom. "It is not for an old monk, a feeble and simple man like me, my n.o.ble lords, to resist the will of so many destined to lead the land of their fathers.

But let us, if we must be just, also be merciful. Let the victim die at the high altar of the cathedral." A murmur rose at the seeming profanation. The Friar's sallow cheek coloured at this mark of disapproval. He was silent; but Colvellino's impatience spoke. "Let us,"