“If you disobey the priest, my good fellow,” I interposed, “you’ll see what he says to you, and I’ll take care that he knows of it.”
Instead of replying, they left the room and fastened the door behind them. I didn’t care now what they did. All was well in the matter that had troubled me. Mademoiselle was unharmed and they might do with me as they pleased. I could trust myself to get out of any trouble when once I was in communication with my agents in Vienna.
All was well with her and the world was once more a place to smile in.
Then I began to piece things together and to figure out how such a change could have been effected. Mademoiselle herself had found the means of doing it all. I recalled her phrase about charming away the anger of the people at Poabja, and the way in which she had cantered on fearlessly when Karasch and I had counselled the other route to avoid passing through the town. She must have had a strong reason for her confidence. Brave as she certainly was, she would not have faced such a risk voluntarily unless she had had good grounds to know she would pass the ordeal successfully.
Who was she? What influence was she, a Serb of Belgrade, likely to have in that out-of-the-way Bosnian village? On whom was that influence exercised? The man said she had confessed to her witchcraft and asked for the priest that she might repent and be shriven. The priest it was who had ordered my release, and the priest it must be, therefore, through whom she had been able to clear herself.
How? It was an easy inference that he knew her and that she had made the pretended confession so as to get face to face with him. But why had she told me nothing about him? “I have nothing to fear in Poabja,” she had said; but not a word of the priest. And then I thought I could see the reason. She did not wish him to tell me who she was.
Had I known of him she knew I should have sought him out first, or have sent for him, and the secret would have been out before she could have cautioned him to say nothing. Rather than that, she had risked entering the place and facing the crowd. Yet she had offered once to tell me about herself. At that point the apparent inconsistency beat me; and the only guess I could make was that she had anticipated getting to the priest without any such trouble as that which had befallen us.
I was more than content to lie there thinking in this way. It pleased me to let my fancy run at random about her. I cared nothing who she was. To me she was just Mademoiselle; and I wanted to know no more. She had come into my life to stay; and nothing that she could be, and nothing she could ever do, would alter that all-supreme fact for me.
Two days before I had never seen her. Forty-eight hours! But they had been forty-eight hours of comradeship; and forty-eight years could not blot out all that those hours had held for me, when I had been in succession the peasant Burgwan, the brigand, and then the trusted comrade and friend.
What had they held for her? I would have given much to know. Daring, imperious, rebellious, yielding, solicitous, and at last utterly content to trust as she had been in turn; what feelings lay beneath the surface? How was I to read that conversation on the hillside? Why was she so resolute that our parting was to spell permanent separation; that I must not go to Belgrade, and must never seek to see her again?