On his second visit he let drop a few Polish terms which made the shopkeeper prick up his ears. As Masilewski learned more and more of the new rôle he was to play he gradually revealed that he was himself a great continental expert. Later he informed the shopkeeper of a huge sale of famous libraries that was about to be held in Hamburg and invited the London dealer to accompany him. The priestly man was too much interested and beguiled to refuse a man who could speak his own language and loved his own subject.
On the trip to Hamburg the London bookseller told, after skillful questioning, that he had once been a priest, that he had lived in Warsaw, that a love affair had driven him from the church—in short, that he was Father Gratian.
Masilewski waited until he got his man safely on the continent and then, knowing the extradition agreements in force between Austria and the various German states, placed his man under arrest, not without a feeling of pain and regret. Father Gratian, like one relieved of a strange weight, immediately accompanied Masilewski to Cracow and faced his accusers without denying the facts. He could offer no extenuation save that nature had not ordained him to be a priest and “the devil had been too strong for his weak flesh.” He confessed his part in the whole transaction and even added that he had given the unfortunate nun drugs to bereave her of her reason. He made every attempt to shield the abbess, but she, too, face to face with the authority of the empire and the church, refused to deny or extenuate.
For once the courts were more merciful than their victims. Mother Zitta was sentenced to expulsion from the order, imprisonment for five years and exile from the empire. Father Gratian was likewise expelled from the church, which he had long deserted, put to prison for ten years and exiled.
XII
THE RETURN OF JIMMIE GLASS
In the early spring of 1915, Charles L. Glass, long employed as an auditor by the Erie Railroad and living in Jersey City, was grievously ill. In May, when he had recovered to the point of convalescence, it was decided he should go to the country to recuperate. For several years he and his family had been spending their vacations in the little hamlet of Greeley, five miles from Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, in the pleasant hill country. So Glass bundled his wife and three small children to a train and shortly arrived at Greeley and the Frazer farm, where he had arranged for rooms and board. This on May eleventh.
The Frazer farmhouse was one of those country establishments which take boarders for the season. Before it ran the main road leading to the larger towns along the line. Beside and behind it were fields, and beyond the road began the tangle of wild woods and hilly ground rising up to the wrinkle of mountains.
Breakfast done, the children were dressed for play, and Mrs. Glass started for the post office, about two hundred yards up the road, to mail some post cards to her parents, noting the safe arrival of the family. She called to her eldest child, Jimmie, but he shook his head and went out into the field beside the house, interested in a hired man who was plowing in the far corner. The elder girl went with her up the road. The baby was romping indoors. Glass himself sat on the porch watching his son. The little boy, just past four years old, was running about in the young green of the field.
Charles Glass got up from the porch and went inside for a glass of water. He stayed there a minute or two. When he came out he saw his wife and little girl coming back down the road from the post office. They had been gone from the house not more than ten minutes.