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 horsemen, the body-guards of the Hospodar of Moldavia, sent to escort Mohammed Ali Hunkiar, the Moslem ambassador, 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, shifts and shapes of inimitable lustre through the blooms and foliage of the huge ravine; and nothing less lovely or more luxurious than the little old ambassador, who had earned his elevation from a cobble stall to the Divan, by his skill in cutting off heads, and had now earned his appointment to the imperial embassy, 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 pass, and was looking with the triumph of avarice—or ambition, if it be the nobler 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 ambassador 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 mêlée 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 pass. 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 ambassador. But his embassy 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, compassionates 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 sunshine. A man is murdered almost under my own eyes, travelling with my passport; an ambassador, and above all ambassadors, 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 ambassador, 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 nobody 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.”