 | CHAP. II. Romance of travel |  |
2. CHAP. II.
“What do you want, Percie?”
He was walking into the room with all the deliberate
politeness of a “gold-stick-in-waiting.”
“I beg pardon, sir, but I was asked to walk up,
and I was not sure whether I was still a gentleman.”
It instantly struck me that it might seem rather
infra dig to the chevalier (my new friend had thus
announced himself) to have had a valet for a second,
and as he immediately after entered the room, having
stepped below to give orders about his horse, I presented
Percie as a gentleman and my friend, and
resumed my observation of the singular apartment
in which I found myself.
The effect on coming first in at the door, was that
of a small and lofty chapel, where the light struggled
in from an unseen aperture above the altar. There
were two windows at the farther extremity, but curtained
so heavily, and set so deeply into the wall,
that I did not at first observe the six richly-carpeted
steps which led up to them, nor the luxuriously cushioned
seats on either side of the casement, within
the niche, for those who would mount thither for
fresh air. The walls were tapestried, but very
several thicknesses of the heavy-piled, small, Turkey
carpets laid loosely over it, was irregular and
sunken. The corners were heaped with various
articles I could not at first distinguish. My host
fortunately gave me an opportunity to gratify my
curiosity by frequent absences under the housekeeper's
apology (odd I thought for a chevalier) of
expediting breakfast; and with the aid of Percie, I
tumbled his chattles about with all necessary freedom.
“That,” said the chevalier, entering, as I turned
out the face of a fresh coloured picture to the light,
“is a capo d'opera of a French artist, who painted
it, as you may say by the gleam of the dagger.”
“A cool light, as a painter would say!”
“He was a cool fellow, sir, and would have handled
a broad sword better than a pencil.”
Percie stepped up while I was examining the
exquisite finish of the picture, and asked very respectfully
if the chevalier would give him the particulars
of the story. It was a full-length portrait
of a young and excessively beautiful girl, of aparently
scarce fifteen, entirely nude, and lying upon
a black velvet couch, with one foot laid on a broken
diadem, and her right hand pressing a wild rose
to her heart.
“It was the fancy, sir,” continued the chevalier,
of a noble of Hungary,
“Is this the lady sir?” asked Percie, in his politest
valet French.
The chevalier hesitated a moment and looked
over his shoulder as if he might be overheard.
“This is she—copied to the minutest shadow of
a hair! He was a bold outlaw, gentlemen, and had
plucked the lady from her father's castle with his
own hand.”
“Against her will?” interrupted Percie, rather
energetically.
“No!” scowled the chevalier, as if his lowering
brows had articulated the word, “by her own will
and connivance; for she loved him.”
Percie drew a long breath, and looked more closely
at the taper limbs and the exquisitely-chiselled
features of the face, which was turned over the
shoulder with a look of timid shame inimitably true
to nature.
“She loved him,” continued our fierce narrator,
who, I almost began to suspect was the outlaw himself,
by the energy with which he enforced the tale,
“and after a moonlight ramble or two with him in
the forest of her father's domain, she fled and became
his wife. You are admiring the hair, sir! It
is as luxuriant and glossy now!”
“If you please, sir, it is the villain himself!” said
Percie in an undertone.
“Bref,” continued the chevalier, either not understanding
English or not heeding the interruption, “an
adventurous painter, one day hunting the picturesque
in the neighbourhood of the outlaw's retreat, surprised
this fair creature bathing in one of the loneliest
mountain-streams in Hungary. His art appeared to
be his first passion, for he hid himself in the trees
and drew her as she stood dallying on the margin of
the small pool in which the brook loitered; and so
busy was he with his own work, or so soft was the
mountain moss under its master's tread, that the
outlaw looked, unperceived the while, over his
shoulder, and fell in love anew with the admirable
counterfeit. She looked like a naiad, sir, new-born
of a dew-drop and a violet.”
I nodded an assent to Percie.
“The sketch, excellent as it seemed, was still unfinished
when the painter, enamoured as he might
well be, of these sweet limbs, glossy with the shining
water, flung down his book and sprang toward her.
The outlaw—”
“Struck him to the heart? Oh heaven!” said
Percie, covering his eyes as if he could see the
murder.
“No! he was a student of the human soul, and
deferred his vengeance.”
Percie looked up and listened, like a man whose
wits were perfectly abroad.
“He was not unwilling since her person had been
seen irretrievably, to know how his shrinking Iminild
(this was her name of melody) would have escaped,
had she been found alone.”
“The painter”—prompted Percie, impatient for
the sequel
“The painter flew over rock and brake, and
sprang into the pool in which she was half immersed;
and my brave girl—”
He hesitated, for he had betrayed himself.
“Ay—she is mine, gentlemen; and I am Yvain,
the outlaw—my brave wife, I say with a single
bound, leaped to the rock where her dress was concealed,
seized a short spear which she used as a staff
in her climbing rambles, and struck it through his
shoulder as he pursued!”
“Bravely done!” I thought aloud.
“Was it not? I came up the next moment, but the
spear stuck in his shoulder, and I could not fall upon
a wounded man. We carried him to our ruined
castle in the mountains, and while my Iminild cured
her own wound, I sent for his paints, and let him
finish his bold beginning with a difference of my own.
You see the picture.”
“Was the painter's love cured with his wound!”
I asked with a smile.
“No, by St. Stephen! He grew ten times more
enamoured as he drew. He was as fierce as a
I could have driven my dagger to his heart a hundred
times for the mutter of his lips and the flash of
his dark eyes as he fed his gaze upon her; but he
finished the picture, and I gave him a fair field. He
chose the broadsword, and hacked away at me like
a man.”
“And the result”—I asked.
“I am here!” replied the outlaw significantly.
Percie leaped upon the carpeted steps, and pushed
back the window for fresh air; and, for myself, I
scarce knew how to act under the roof of a man,
who, though he confessed himself an outlaw and
almost an assassin, was bound to me by the ties of
our own critical adventure, and had confided his
condition to me with so ready a reliance on my
honour. In the midst of my dilemma, while I was
pretending to occupy myself with examining a silver
mounted and peaked saddle, which I found behind
the picture in the corner, a deep and unpleasant
voice announced breakfast.
“Wolfen is rather a grim chamberlain,” said the
chevalier, bowing with the grace and smile of the
softest courtier, “but he will usher you to breakfast
and I am sure you stand in need of it. For myself,
I could eat worse meat than my grandfather with
this appetite.”
Percie gave me a look of inquiry and uneasiness
through the dark corridors of the old house, and
through his underbred politeness of insisting on following
his host, I could see that he was unwilling to
trust the outlaw with the rear; but a massive and
broad door, flung open at the end of the passage, let
in upon us presently the cool and fresh air from a
northern exposure, and, stepping forward quickly to
the threshold, we beheld a picture which changed
the current and colour of our thoughts.
In the bottom of an excavated area, which, as
well as I could judge, must be forty feet below the
level of the court, lay a small and antique garden,
brilliant with the most costly flowers, and cooled by
a fountain gushing from under the foot of a nymph in
marble. The spreading tops of six alleys of lindens
reaching to the level of the street, formed a living
roof to the grot-like depths of the garden, and concealed
it from all view but that of persons descending
like ourselves from the house; while, instead of
walls to shut in this Paradise in the heart of a city,
sharply-inclined slopes of green-sward leaned in
under the branches of the lindens, and completed the
fairy-like enclosure of shade and verdure. As we
descended the rose-laden steps and terraces, I observed,
that, of the immense profusion of flowers in
the area below, nearly all were costly exoticks, whose
pots were set in the earth, and probably brought
and as we rounded the spreading basin of the fountain
which broke the perspective of the alley, a table,
which had been concealed by the marble nymph,
and a skilfully-disposed array of rhododendrons lay
just beneath our feet, while a lady, whose features
I could not fail to remember, smiled up from her
couch of crimson cushions and gave us a graceful
welcome.
The same taste for depth which had been shown
in the room sunk below the windows, and the garden
below the street, was continued in the kind of marble
divan in which we were to breakfast. Four steps
descending from the pavement of the alley introduced
us into a circular excavation, whose marble seats,
covered with cushions of crimson silk, surrounded a
table laden with the substantial viands which are
common to a morning meal in Vienna, and smoking
with coffee, whose aroma (Percie agreed with me)
exceeded even the tube roses in grateful sweetness.
Between the cushions at our backs and the pavements
just above the level of our heads, were piled circles
of thickly-flowering geraniums, which enclosed
us in rings of perfume, and, pouring from the cup of
a sculptured flower, held in the hand of the nymph
a smooth stream like a silver rod supplied a channel
grooved around the centre of the marble table,
through which the bright water, with the impulse of
It was a scene to give memory the lie if it could
have recalled the bloodshed of the morning. The
green light flecked down through the leafy roof upon
the glittering and singing water; a nightingale in a
recess of the garden, gurgled through his wires as if
intoxicated with the congenial twilight of his prison;
the heavy-cupped flowers of the tropics nodded with
the rain of the fountain spray; the distant roll of
wheels in the neighbouring streets came with an
assurance of reality to this dream-land, yet softened
by the unreverberating roof and an air crowded with
flowers and trembling with the pulsations of falling
water; the lowering forehead of the outlaw cleared
uplike a sky of June after a thunder-shower, and his
voice grew gentle and caressing; and the delicate
mistress of all (by birth, Countess Iminild,) a creature
as slight as Psyche, and as white as the lotus,
whose flexile stem served her for a bracelet, welcomed
us with her soft voice and humid eyes, and
saddened by the even of the morning, looked on her
husband with a tenderness that would have assoiled
her of her sins against delicacy, I thought even in the
mind of an angel.
“We live, like truth, here, in the bottom of a well,”
said the countess to Percie, as she gave him his coffee;
“how do you like my whimsical abode, sir?”
“I should like any place where you were, Miladi!”
at me, either in doubt how far he might presume
upon his new character, or suspecting that I should
smile at his gallantry.
The outlaw glanced his eyes over the curling
head of the boy, with one of those just perceptible
smiles which developed, occasionally, in great beauty,
the gentle spirit in his bosom; and Iminild, pleased
with the compliment or the blush, threw off her pensive
mood, and assumed in an instant, the coquettish
air which had attracted my notice as she stepped
before me into the church of St. Etienne.
“You had hard work,” she said to keep up with
your long-legged dragoon yesterday. Monsieur
Percie!”
“Miladi?” he answered, with a look of inquiry.
“Oh, I was behind you, and my legs are not much
longer than yours. How he strided away with his
long spurs, to be sure! Do you remember a smart
young gentleman with a blue cap that walked past
you on the glacis occasionally.”
Ah, with laced boots, like a Hungarian?”
“I see I am ever to be known by my foot,” said
she, putting it out upon the cushion, and turning it
about with naive admiration; “that poor captain of
the imperial guard payed dearly for kissing it, holy
virgin!” and she crossed herself and was silent for a
moment.
“If I might take the freedom, chevalier,” I said,
“pray how came I indebted to your assistance
in this affair?”
“Iminild has partly explained,” he answered.
“She knew, of course, that a challenge would follow
your interference, and it was very easy to know that
an officer of some sort would take a message in the
course of the morning to Le Prince Charles, the
only hotel frequented by the English d'un certain
gens.
I bowed to the compliment.
“Arriving in Vienna late last night, I found Iminild
(who had followed this gentleman and the dragoon
unperceived) in possession of all the circumstances;
and, but for oversleeping myself this morning, I should
have saved your turquoise, mon seigneur!”
“Have you lived here long, Miladi?” asked Percie,
looking up into her eyes with an unconscious
passionateness which made the Countess Iminild
colour slightly, and bite her lips to retain an expression
of pleasure.
“I have not lived long, anywhere, sir!” she
answered half archly, “but I played in this garden
when not much older than you!”
Percie looked confused and pulled up his cravat.
“This house said the chevalier, willing apparently
to spare the countess a painful narration, “is the
property of the old Count Ildefert, my wife's father.
supposes, to a stranger. When Iminild tires of the
forest, she comes here, and I join her if I can find
time. I must to the saddle to-morrow, by St.
Jacques!”
The word had scarce died on his lips when the
door by which we had entered the garden was flung
open, and the measured tread of gens-d'armes resounded
in the corridor. The first man who stood
out upon the upper terrace was the dragoon who
had been second to my opponent.
“Traitor and villain!” muttered the outlaw between
his teeth, “I thought I remembered you! It
is that false comrade Berthold, Iminild!”
Yvain had risen from the table as if but to stretch
his legs; and drawing a pistol from his bosom he
cocked it as he quietly stepped up into the garden.
I saw at a glance that there was no chance for his
escape, and laid my hand on his arm.
“Chevalier!” I said, “surrender and trust to opportunity.
It is madness to resist here.”
“Yvain!” said Iminild, in a low voice, flying to
his side as she comprehended his intention, “leave
me that vengeance, and try the parapet. I,ll kill
him before he sleeps! Quick! Ah, heavens!”
The dragoon had turned at that instant to fly, and
with suddenness of thought the pistol flashed, and
the traitor dropped heavily on the terrace. Springing
stood an instant on the summit of the wall, hesitating
where to jump beyond, and in the next moment
rolled heavily back, stabbed through and through
with a bayonet from the opposite side.
The blood left the lips and cheek of Iminild; but
without a word or a sign of terror, she sprang to
the side of the fallen outlaw and lifted him up against
her knee. The gens-d'armes rushed to the spot, but
the subaltern who commanded them yielded instantly
to my wish that they should retire to the skirts
of the garden; and, sending Percie to the fountain
for water, we bathed the lips and forehead of the
dying man and set him against the sloping parapet.
With one hand grasping the dress of Iminild and the
other clasped in mine, he struggled to speak.
“The cross!” he gasped, “the cross!”
Iminild drew a silver crucifix from her bosom.
“Swear on this,” he said, putting it to my lips and
speaking with terrible energy, “swear that you will
protect her while you live!”
“I swear!”
He shut our hands together convulsively, gasped
slightly as if he would speak again, and, in another
instant sunk, relaxed and lifeless, on the shoulder of
Iminild.
| CHAP. II. Romance of travel | |