Roumanian Stories, Translated from the Original Roumanian. Anonymous

Natrut, who watches the maize-fields.”

      “Aren’t you coming this way?”

      “Yes, here I come.”

      And the figure of a man became visible among the maize.

      “May I ask, brother Gheorghe, where we are at this moment? I have missed my way in the storm.”

      “Where do you want to go to?”

      “To Upper Popeshti.”

      “Eh! To Pocovnicu Iordache.”

      “That’s it.”

      “In that case you have not missed your road. You’ll have some trouble to get to Popeshti—you are only at Haculeshti here.”

      “At Haculeshti?” I said joyfully. “Then I am close to Manjoala’s Inn.”

      “Look there; we are at the back of the stables.”

      “Come and show me the way so that I don’t just go and break my neck.”

      I had been wandering about for four hours. A few steps brought us to the inn. Mistress Marghioala’s room was lit up and shadows moved across the curtain. Who knew what other, wiser traveller had enjoyed that bed! I should have to rest content with some bench by the kitchen fire. But what luck! As I knocked some one heard me. The old maidservant hurried to open to me. As I entered I stumbled over something soft on the threshold. The kid! Did you ever! It was my hostess’ kid! It, too, entered the room and went and lay down comfortably under the bed.

      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.

      “She was the devil, listen to me.”

      “She may have been,” I replied, “but if that is so, then the devil, it seems, leads to the good.”

      “At first it seems to be good, to catch one, but later one sees where it leads one.”

      “How do you know all this?”

      “That’s not your business,” replied the old man, “that’s another story!”