What was I to say? Did the woman know I had returned, or had she got up very early? The bed was made.
“Mistress Marghioala!” So much I was able to say.
Wishing to thank God that I had escaped with my life, I started to raise my right hand to my head.
The lady quickly seized my hand and pulling it down, drew me with all her strength into her arms.
I can still see that room. What a bed! What curtains! What walls! What a ceiling! All white as milk. And the lamp-shade, and all those crochet things of every kind and shape! And the warmth, like being under a hen’s wing, and a smell of apples and quinces!
I should have stayed a long time at Manjoala’s Inn if my father-in-law, Pocovnicu Iordache, God forgive him, had not fetched me away by force. Three times I fled from him before the marriage, and returned to the inn, until the old man, who at all cost wanted me for a son-in-law, set men to catch me and take me gagged to a little monastery in the mountains. Forty days of fasting, genuflexions and prayers. I left it quite repentant. I got engaged and I married.
Only lately, one clear winter’s night, while my father-in-law and I were sitting talking together, as is the custom of the country, in front of a flagon of wine, we heard from a prefect, who arrived from the town where he had been making some purchases, that during the day there had been a big fire at Haculeshti. Manjoala’s Inn had been burnt to the ground, burying poor Mistress Marghioala, who thus met her end under a gigantic funeral pyre.
“And so at the last the sorceress was thrown on the bonfire!” said my father-in-law, laughing.
And I began to tell the above story for at least the hundredth time. Pocovnicu maintained, among other things, that the lady put a charm into the lining of my cap, and that the kid and the cat were one and the same.
“May be,” I said.