“How is that?” asked Yanush, with alarm.
“They say, lord brother, that if your bile is stirred suffocation results. Promise me to listen with patience and quietly, and I will tell something of your Kmita, from which you will know him better than you have up to this moment.”
“Well, I will be patient, only begin.”
“A miracle of God saved me from the hands of that incarnate devil,” said Boguslav; and he began to relate all that had happened in Pilvishki.
It was no smaller miracle that Prince Yanush did not have an attack of asthma, but it might be thought that apoplexy would strike him. He trembled all over, he gnashed his teeth, he covered his eyes with his hand; at last he cried with a hoarse voice,—
“Is that true? Very well! He has forgotten that his little wench is in my hands—”
“Restrain yourself, for God’s sake! Hear on. I acquitted myself with him as beseems a cavalier, and if I have not noted this adventure in my diary, and do not boast of it, I refrain because ’tis a shame that I let myself be tricked by that clown, as if I were a child,—I, of whom Mazarin said that in intrigue and adroitness there was not my equal in the whole court of France. But no more of this! I thought at first that I had killed your Kmita; now I have proof in my hands that he has slipped away.”
“That is nothing! We will find him! We will dig him out! We will get him, even from under the earth! Meanwhile I will give him a sorer blow than if I were to flay him alive.”
“You will give him no blow, but only injure your own health. Listen! in coming hither I noticed some low fellow on a pied horse, who held himself at no great distance from my carriage. I noticed him specially because his horse was pied, and I gave the order at last to summon him. ‘Where art thou going?’ ‘To Kyedani.’ ‘What art thou taking?’ ‘A letter to the prince voevoda.’ I ordered him to give the letter, and as there are no secrets between us I read it. Here it is!”
Then he gave Prince Yanush Kmita’s letter, written from the forest at the time when he was setting out with the Kyemliches.