"Many people know of our existence, but treachery is unknown here. The artificial barrier which exists between the frontiers of the two countries has made the people about here very reserved. No one meddles in a stranger's affairs, and every one instinctively keeps secret what he knows. No intelligence from here ever reaches Vienna, Ofen, or Stamboul. And why should they inform against me? I am in nobody's way, and do no harm; I grow fruit on my bit of desert land, which has no master. God the Lord and the royal Danube gave it to me, and I thank them for it daily. I thank Thee, my God! I thank Thee, my King!
"I hardly know if I have any religion; it is twelve years since I saw a priest or a church. Noémi knows nothing about it. I have taught her to read and write: I tell her of God, and Jesus, and Moses, as I knew them. Of the good, all-merciful, omnipresent God—of Jesus, sublime in His sufferings, and divine in His humanity—and of Moses, that leader of a people to liberty, who preferred to wander hungry and thirsty in the wilderness rather than exchange freedom for the flesh-pots of slavery—Moses who preached goodness and brotherly love—of these as I picture them to myself. But of the relentless God of vengeance, the God of the chosen people—a God calling for sacrifices, and dwelling in temples—of that privileged Christ asking for blind faith, laying heavy burdens on our shoulders, followed by a crowd of worshipers—and of the avaricious, revengeful, selfish Moses of whom books and preachers tell—of these she knows nothing.
"Now you know who we are, and what we are doing here, you shall learn with what we are threatened by this man.
"He is the son of the man for whom my husband stood surety, who drove him to suicide, on whose account we have fled from human society into the desert. He was a boy of thirteen when we lost our all, and the blow fell on him also, for his father had forsaken him.
"Indeed, I do not wonder that the son has turned out such a wretch. Abandoned by his own father, thrust out like a beggar into the world, cast on the compassion of strangers, deceived and robbed by the one on whom his childish trust was placed, branded in his earliest youth as the son of a rogue, is it surprising if he was forced to become what he is?
"And yet I hardly know what to think of him; but what I do know is enough. The people who come to the island can tell a great deal about him. Not long after his father had escaped, he also started from Turkey, saying he was going to look for his father. Some maintained that he had found him, others that he had never been able to trace him. According to one report he robbed his own father and squandered the money he stole, but no one knows for certain. From him nothing can be learned, for he tells nothing but lies. As to where he has been, and what he has done, he relates romances, in whose invention he is so well versed, and which he presents so skillfully, that he staggers even those who have actual knowledge of the facts, and makes them doubt the testimony of their own eyes. You see him here to-day and there to-morrow. In Turkey, Wallachia, Poland, and Hungary he has been met. In all these countries he is by way of knowing every person of distinction. Whomsoever he meets he takes in, and whoever has once been deceived by him may be sure it will happen again. He speaks ten languages, and whatever countryman he pretends to be, he is accepted as such. He appears now as a merchant, then a soldier, again as a seafaring man; to-day a Turk, to-morrow a Greek. He once came out as a Polish count, then as the betrothed of a Russian princess, and again as a quack doctor, who cured all maladies with his pills. What his real profession may be no one knows. But one thing is certain, he is a paid spy. Whether in the service of the Turks, Austrians, or Russians, who can tell? Perhaps he is in the pay of all three and more besides—he serves each, and betrays all. Every year he comes several times to this island. He comes in a boat from the Turkish shore, and goes in the same boat from here to the Hungarian bank. Of what he does there I have no idea; but I am inclined to believe that he inflicts the torture of his presence on me for his own amusement. I know, too, that he is an epicure and a sensualist: he finds good food here, and a blooming young girl whom he loves to tease by calling her his bride. Noémi hates him; she has no idea how well founded is her abhorrence.
"Yet I do not think that Theodor Krisstyan visits this island only for these reasons; it must have other secrets unknown to me. He is a paid spy, and has a bad heart besides; he is rotten to the core, and ripe for any villainy. He knows that I and my daughter have only usurped the island, and that by law I have no claim to it, and by the possession of this secret he lays us under contribution, vexes and torments us both.
"He threatens that if we do not give him what he wants, he will inform against us both in Austria and Turkey, and as soon as these governments know that a new piece of land has been formed in the midst of the Danube, which is not included in any treaty, a dispute about its jurisdiction will commence between the countries, and until its conclusion all the inhabitants will be warned off, as happened in the case of Allion Castle and the Cserna River.
"It would only cost this man a word to annihilate all that I have brought to perfection by my twelve years' labor; to turn this Eden, where we are so happy, back into a wilderness, and thrust us out anew, homeless, into the world. Yes, and more still. We have not only to fear discovery by the imperial officials, but discovery by the priest. If the archbishops, the patriarchs, archimandrite, and deans learned that a girl is growing up here who has never seen a church since she was baptized, they would take her away by force and put her in a convent. Now, sir, do you understand those sighs which kept you awake?"
Timar gazed at the full disk of the moon, which was beginning to sink behind the poplars. "Why," thought he to himself, "am I not a man of influence?"