Rodvard; “I will not say I disbelieve you, madame; yet I cannot see how this is valuable in our present necessity. The thing’s done. Now we have to ask how matters can be bettered, and how to carry word to my good friend, Dr. Remigorius, so that we can elude the body of this pursuit.”
The widow looked at him steadily and though he was new to this Blue Star, he felt surprise that he could make out nothing at all behind her eyes, no thought whatever. “Ser Bergelin,” she said, “you will one day learn that before you can escape the world’s despairs, you must first escape the world’s self. But now you have been sent to me for help, and helped you shall be. With what I know of mask-making, I can so alter your appearance that it will not be hard to pass a relaxed watch. But will your doctor provide security?”
“Assuredly,” said Rodvard, (too quickly, Lalette thought), (and it was so, for he remembered the moment when he surprised the doctor’s mind, his carelessness of what happened to Lalette.)
Dame Domijaiek gave a trifling sigh. “You will be safe here for the time. But there is a condition to my aid. I believe in a rule more certain than yours of witchcraft, demoiselle; and will ask that while you are under my roof, you will banish from your mind every thought of evil and horror and revenge, even toward those who have wronged you. It is a protection I ask for me and my son, though you will not believe it.”
III
By this time it was clear to both Rodvard and Lalette that as the boy had said, they were certainly in the house of a follower of the Prophet of Mancherei. Though they did not speak of it, the thought gave them both an inner qualm, not over being found there, but at the thought of what might be done to their inner selves by one of these insidious probers in secret thoughts, who had so misused their own Prophet. But a mouse cannot choose the smell of the hole he hides in; they glanced at each other, and gave the widow their word, as she had asked. The boy Laduis returned. It was thought better that the pair be somewhat disguised again, in case of visitors. Lalette kept the Kjermanash furs; Rodvard at first donned the garb of an executioner, but the girl not liking him in that, took the gear of a hunter-guide from the Ragged Mountains instead.
It was a morning of nervous attent, through which they heard feet come and go in the apartment overhead. Between the promise to the widow and their own feelings, there was hardly anything that could be said of what they wished to say, so they spent the time listening to the lad, who told them tales of his imagined people behind the masks. It would be about the noon-glass when a man knocked, who said he was the butler of the Baroness Stampalia to look at a costume; coming so quickly to the door that Rodvard and Lalette were without time to don head-masks, and sought refuge in the bedroom. This was as well; the butler examined attentively everything in the outer room.
Not long later the widow returned, narrowing her eyes over the tale of the Stampalia butler. “She has her own dressmaker. Could he have been a spy?” Then to the couple; “You see, you obeyed my injunction as to thought, and were protected.”
Rodvard would have made a point of this, but Dame Domijaiek gave him no time, turning to Lalette, with; “Touching your mother, my dear, I think you have not to be troubled. I have not seen her myself, but the gossip is that Count Cleudi has most generously sent her a present of money, which is an evidence of the working of the God of love, though the instrument may not be what we would desire.”
Rodvard, whom this style of discourse filled with a discomfort he could not readily assay, asked about Remigorius. The dame had visited his shop; she produced a chit from the doctor which confirmed all Rodvard’s discomforts on the matter of Lalette, for it commanded him in guarded words to come at once, and without her. Lalette did not understand when he showed her the paper, but she said he must clearly go. Dame Domijaiek added her voice to the same purport, saying that if Rodvard were needed to go elsewhere, Lalette would be the safer there for hiding alone.