’Midst the Wild Carpathians

perceived a door leading to a second cellar, broke it open with his axe, and was overjoyed to see by the light of the torch he held in his hand, a whole row of fresh casks. He immediately rushed upon the first of them, and knocking the top in, held the torch over it to see what was flowing out. It was gunpowder! Luckily for him he was drunk, otherwise he would certainly have sent the castle and everything it contained the shortest way to heaven. “That’s not good to drink!” thought he, and broke open the second cask; in that too there was powder, and in the third also, and he swore a terrible oath that if the fourth held the same thing he would hurl the torch into it holus bolus. In the fourth cask, however, there was honey, and shake it as much as he would, he could get nothing else out of it. At last he came upon a six-gallon cask, and, smelling the bung, inhaled a strong odour of spirits, which made him madder than ever, and seizing it by the spigot he raised it bodily from the ground and swallowed long draughts of the strong corn brandy, till over he fell backwards, cask and all. There he wallowed about in the streaming honey; struggled laboriously to his feet again, stumbled a few steps further on, fell down into the gunpowder; rolled backwards and forwards in it for some time, and finally, all candied as he was, scrambled into the courtyard, and there the honey-and-powder-bedaubed form fell prone into the heaps of eiderdown which covered the ground, and sprawled helplessly about till he was covered with plumage from the crown of his head to the soles of his jackboots, and in this plight the grotesquely hideous creature crawled upstairs on all fours in amongst his carousing companions. The man no longer resembled any known beast of the Old or New Worlds. He was black and white all over: white where he was not black, and black where he was not white. Perhaps he had some distant resemblance to a polar bear with a hide of feathers instead of hair, but his roaring was like the roaring of a hippopotamus. It is therefore not surprising that when the Szeklers beheld this strange monster crawling towards them on all fours and bellowing loudly, they should take to their heels in terror, scatter to all points of the compass, and leave the flesh-filled kettle in the lurch. Most of them took the shortest but most dangerous way out of the window, exclaiming⁠—“That is Banfi’s devil! Here comes Banfi’s devil!”

The Szekler, perceiving the success of his involuntary masquerade, sent after the fugitives a still more ghastly howl, took the amphora down from the chain, sat down with it in the middle of the parquetted floor, thrust both hands into it at once like a demon of the woods, and gobbled and roared alternately.

And these savage scenes took place in the very same chamber where, only a few days before, the delicate form of Dame Banfi had appeared among her jasmines and mimosas like a melancholy shade from fairyland which only listens with its soul and speaks with its eyes.

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Meanwhile Denis Banfi, after breaking through the ambush laid for him at Koppad, began, as the noise of the pursuit gradually died away, to look about him in the star-bright night, and picked his way so carefully through woods and over stubble-fields that, at dawn of day, he saw before him the towers of Klausenburg.

Once rid of the terrors of pursuit, anger and revenge began to rage within him. He thought at first that this night attack was simply an audacious conspiracy of his private enemies concocted without the knowledge of the Prince, on the principle that an accomplished act is more easily justifiable than an act that has still to be accomplished. But the attempt had not succeeded, and the escaped lion had both the will and the power to turn upon his pursuers and teach them respect for the laws.

In the plain before the town Banfi’s troops were just going through their morning exercises when their leader came galloping up to them, pale, agitated, unarmed, and without either hat or mantle. His captains hastened towards him, aghast and curious.

“I’ve just escaped from a murderous assault,” said Banfi, with a hoarse voice and a heaving breast; “my enemies have treacherously fallen upon me. I have escaped them, but my wife is in their hands. I recognized the voices of Daczo and Kornis among my pursuers.”

“Yes, and Daczo’s name is embroidered on this saddlecloth,” said Michael Angel.

Banfi appeared much disturbed. His face was dark and troubled, as if neither the future nor the past was quite clear to him.

“I don’t understand it at all,” said he to his captains. “If the attack was by the Prince’s command, I ought to have been served beforehand with a writ, a citation, or, at the very least, a notice of judgment. If however it be only an act of private vengeance, my band is more than sufficient to reach these honest Szeklers. In any case, you will remain under arms before the town while I go up to my castle. In a few hours I shall know whither we have to turn.”

Thereupon Banfi rode into the town, accompanied by Michael Angel. As he turned the corner of his palace, he was obliged to pass over the ground where the house of Dame Saint Pauli had formerly stood. All that remained of it now was a large stone, and Banfi, chancing to look in that direction, saw the mistress of the vanished house sitting on that single stone, and evidently awaiting him. He turned impatiently away, but she arose, curtseyed low, and cried derisively⁠—

“Good morning, your Excellency! Good morning!”

Banfi haughtily rode on without a word. At the palace gate the castellan of Bonczhida awaited him, who, after escaping from the violence of the Szeklers, had