The captain of the fire-brigade looked at it from a different point of view.
"It is a cowardly trick," he declared. "Women only reckon until they are thirty-five years of age, and these are all old women. A little indiscretion of this kind cannot hurt them. If you breathe on a rusty bit of steel it leaves no mark. We only remove caterpillars from those trees which have flowers or leaves, or which will bear fruit, but on old, dried-up trees we leave them alone. But it is the husbands Gregorics has offended, for it is cowardly to affront people who cannot demand satisfaction from you. And I think I may affirm with safety that Gregorics is now incapable of giving satisfaction."
The next morning István Vozáry (whose wife was one of the nine ladies mentioned in the will) appeared at the lawyer's and informed him that as his wife had never had anything to do with the dead man, she had no intention of accepting the 2000 florins. When this was known in the town, the eight remaining ladies arrived, one after the other, at the lawyer's, in order to make known to him their refusal of the legacy, as they also had nothing to do with Gregorics.
I do not know when Sztolarik had had such a lively time of it as on that day, for it was really amusing to see those wrinkled old dames, toothless and gray-haired, coming to defend their honor.
But it was even livelier for the Gregorics family, for they thus got back the 20,000 florins they had been cheated out of—that is, with the exception of the 2000 florins left to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, for, of course, the Academy accepted the legacy, though it also had had nothing to do with Gregorics. But the Academy (the tenth old woman) was not so conscientious as the other nine.
The joy of the Gregorics soon turned to bitterness, for they could not manage to find out where the Bohemian estates were. Gáspár went off to Prague, but came back after a fruitless search. They were unable to find any papers referring to the estates; not a bill, not a receipt, not a letter was to be found.
"It was incomprehensible, such a thing had never happened before," Boldizsár said.
They were wild with anger, and threatened Matykó and Anna to have them locked up, if they would not tell them where the estates were in Bohemia; and at length they were brought before the Court and examined. Matykó at least must know all about it, for he had travelled everywhere with his master.
So Matykó had to own that his master had never been to Bohemia at all, but had always gone to Szeged or to Kolozsvár, where Gyuri had been at school.
Oh! that sly Pál Gregorics, how he had cheated his relations! Now it was as clear as day why he had turned all his possessions into money, of course he had given it all to that boy. But had he given it him? How could he have trusted hundreds of thousands to a child of that age? Then, where had he put it? to whom had he given it? That was the riddle the Gregorics were trying to solve.