“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 ragged and dusty, and
the floor, though there were 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 chattels about with all necessary freedom.

“That,” said the chevalier, entering, as I turned out
the face of a fresh colored 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 broadsword 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 apparently 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 bold outlaw, who loved the only daughter 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 neighborhood 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, enamored 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 lminild
(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
enamored as he drew. He was as fierce as a welk
hawk, and as willing to quarrel for his prey. 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 honor. 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,

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I could eat worse meat than my grandfather with this
appetite.”

Percie gave me a look of inquiry and uneasiness
when he found we were to follow the rough domestic
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 color 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 exotics, whose
pots were set in the earth, and probably brought
away from the sunshine only when in high bloom;
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 its descent,
made a swift revolution and disappeared.

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 lofty 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 neighboring 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
up like 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 crea
ture 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 event 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!”
he answered, blushing and stealing his eyes across 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 paid 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 color
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 Hdefert, my wife's father.
He has long ceased to visit Vienna, and has left it, he
supposes, to a stranger. When Iminild tires of the
forest, she comes here, and I join her if I can flud
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.

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