“Do not go back to the camp to-night,” I said, speaking on the impulse of the moment. “The gendarmes are there, and they are waiting for you.”
My meaning was evidently plain, though I had spoken in German; probably the word gendarmes had a familiar ring in her ear, for she now gazed at me with positive terror in her wild, dilated eyes—the terror of a hunted animal which sees the huntsmen closing in on all sides; then, without a word of explanation, excuse, or thanks, she abruptly turned round the horse’s head, and lashing it to its utmost speed, disappeared in the opposite direction.
Several very worthy friends of mine have since pronounced my behavior in this circumstance to have been highly reprehensible: I had sided with the malefactor, and possibly defeated the ends of justice by screening the culprit. Perhaps they are right, and it can only be owing to some vital defect in my moral constitution that I have never succeeded in feeling remorse for this action. On the contrary, it was with a feeling of peculiar satisfaction that I thought that evening of the three brutal gendarmes waiting in vain for the return of the guilty Hinka. I wondered how long they waited, and how many pipes they smoked, and to how many oaths they gave vent on finding that they had waited in vain, and their victim was not going to walk into the trap after all.
[CHAPTER XLIII.]
THE BRUCKENTHALS.
Among the crooked, irregular houses, low-storied and unpretentious, which form the streets of Hermanstadt, there is one which stands out conspicuous from its neighbors, resembling as it does nothing else in the town. This is the Bruckenthal palace, a stately building which might right well be placed by the side of some of the most aristocratic residences at Vienna, and of which even the Grand Canal at Venice need not be ashamed—but here absolutely out of place and incongruous. Looking like a nobleman amid a group of simple burghers, everything about this building has an air thoroughly aristocratic and grand seignior: the broad two-storied façade richly ornamented, the fantastically wrought iron gratings over the lower windows, the double escutcheon hanging above the stately entrance, even the very garret windows looking out of the high-pitched triple roof, have the appearance of old-fashioned picture-frames which only want to be filled up with appropriate rococo figures.
As we step through the roomy porte-cochère into a spacious court, we glance round half expecting to see a swelling porter or gorgeously attired Suisse prepared to challenge our entrance, and instinctively we fumble in our pocket for our card-case; but no one appears, and all is silent as death. Passing over the grass-grown stones which pave the court, we step through a capacious archway into a second court as large as the first, and surrounded in the same manner by the building running round to form another quadrangle. Here apparently are the stables, as a stone-carved horse’s head above a door at the farther end apprises us, and hither we direct our steps in hopes of finding some stable-boy or groom to guide us, and tell us to whom this vast silent palace belongs.
The stable door is ajar, and we push it open, but pause in astonishment on the threshold, met by the stony stare of countless unseeing eyes. A stable it is undoubtedly, as testify the carved stone cribs and partitioned-off stalls—six stalls on the one side, six on the other, roomy and luxurious, fit only for the pampered stud of a monarch or of an English fox-hunter, but which now, deserted of its rightful occupants, has been usurped by a collection of plaster casts and terra-cotta copies of ancient statues. Where majestic Arabs used formerly to be stabled, now stands a naked simpering Venus, and the Dying Gladiator writhes on the flag-stones once pawed by impatient hoofs.
THE BRUCKENTHAL PALACE.[71]