The Pride of Jennico by Egerton Castle — Read

I HAD questioned János on our homeward way concerning my new acquaintances; but the fellow was so ill-disposed by nature to external gossip, so wholly occupied with the minute fulfilment of his daily task, which was to watch over the well-being and safety of his master, that he had gathered no acquaintance with affairs outside his province. With the head factor, however, whom I sent for immediately after supper, I was more fortunate. This man, Karl Schultz, is Saxon-born, and consequently one of the few of my numerous dependants with whom I can hold converse here. It was but natural that among the peasantry the advent of strangers, evidently of wealth and distinction, should have created some stir, and it is Schultz's business, among many other things, to know what the peasantry talk about; although in this more contented part of the world this sort of knowledge is not of such importance as among our neighbours the Poles.

Schultz, therefore, was aware of the arrival of the ladies, likewise of the rumour of smallpox, which had, so he informed me, not only driven all the servants out of the Castle of Schreckendorf, but spread something like a panic over the country-side. Tidings had also come to his ears that two gentlemen-one of them suffering from the dreadful malady (doubtless the poor Chamberlain)-had been abandoned in their carriage by their postillions and servants at the small village of Kittlitz, some forty miles from here, just over the Lusatian border. He corroborated, in fact, greatly to my joy, all that I had been told; for I had had an uneasy fear upon me, now and again, as I marched home in the evening chill, that I had been too ready to lend credence to a romantic and improbable story.