CHAPTER IV
I rushed out into the street, treading as if on air, my cloak floating behind me, my head thrown back, all warnings unheeded in the first overpowering tide of this joy which had come upon me at the darkest hour of all.
I had told myself that I must act, and act at once. But till I had had a moment’s breathing time to realise the extraordinary revelations by which the whole face of the past and of the future was changed to me, I could form no coherent thought, much less could I form plans.
I wanted space for this—space and solitude. And so I hurried along as I have described, looking neither to the right nor to the left, when I was seized upon from behind, and by no means gentle hands brought me first to a standstill, and next threw the folds of my cloak around me in such a fashion as once more to cover my face.
“Are you mad?” said János, with a fiercer display of anger than I had ever known him show to me, though he had marshalled me pretty rigidly through my illness. “I have been following you these five minutes, and all the town stares at your honour. ’Tis lucky you took a side turning just now or you would have been straight into the great place, perhaps into the main guard. If you want to look for death, you can go to the wars like my old master, but ’tis an ill thing to find it in the assassin’s blade, as I thought you had learned by now. Do you forget,” continued János, scolding more vehemently, “that they are all leagued against you in this country? Do you forget how they packed you out of the land last year, and warned you never to return? ’Tis very well to risk one’s life, but ’tis ill to throw it away.”
“Oh, János, true soul,” said I, as soon as I could get air to speak with, for his grasp upon the folds of my cloak was like an iron clamp, “all is changed, all is explained. You saw me last the most miserable of men: you see me now the happiest!”
We had paused in a deserted alley leading into the gardens on the ramparts. As I looked round I saw that the sky had grown darkly overcast, and by János’s pinched face, as well as by the bowing and bending of the trees, that the wind had risen strong and cold. To me it might have been the softest breeze of spring. I drew the man over to a bench all frosted already by tiny flakes which fell persistently, yet sparsely, and there I told him my tale of joy. He listened, blinking and grinning. At length when it was duly borne in upon him that the wife I was seeking was really and actually the Princess of the land, he clasped his hands and cried with a certain savage enthusiasm:
“Oh, that my old master had lived to see the day!” But the next instant the bristling difficulties of the situation began to oppress his aged heart. He pondered with a falling face.
“Then your honour is in even greater danger than I had thought,” said he, “and every second he passes in this town of cut-throats adds to the risk.”
“Even so,” said I, clapping him on the shoulders, my spirits rising higher, it seemed, with every fresh attempt to depress them,—“Even so, my good fellow; and therefore since my wife I mean to have, and since I mean to live to be happy with her, what say you to our carrying her off this very night?”