Doruntine Read Free

back?”
    Still she stared at him with those eyes in whose depths gaped a desperate void.
    â€œYou told your mother that it was your brother Constantine, didn’t you?”
    Again her look assented. Stres searched her eyes for some sign of madness, but could read nothing in their emptiness.
    â€œI think you must have heard that Constantine left this world three years ago,” he said in the same faint voice. He felt tears well up within him before they suddenly filled her eyes. But hers were tears unlike any others, half-visible, half-impalpable. Her face, bathed by those tears, seemed even more remote. What’s happening to me? her eyes seemed to say. Why don’t you believe me?
    He turned slowly to his deputy and to the other woman standing near the mother’s bed and motioned to them to leave. Then he leaned toward the young woman again and stroked her hand.
    â€œHow did you get here, Doruntine? How didyou manage that long journey?”
    It seemed to him that something strained to fill those immeasurably enlarged eyes.
    Stres left an hour later. He looked pale, and without turning his head or speaking a word to anyone, he made his way to the door. His deputy, following behind, was tempted several times to ask whether Doruntine had said anything new, but he did not dare.
    As they passed the church, Stres seemed about to enter the cemetery, but changed his mind at the last minute.
    His deputy could feel the glances of curious onlookers as they walked along.
    â€œIt’s not an easy case,” Stres said without looking at his deputy. “I expect there will be quite a lot of talk about it. Just to anticipate any eventuality, I think we would do well to send a report to the Prince’s chancellery.”
    I believe it useful to bring to your attention events that occurred at dawn on this October eleventh in the noble house of Vranaj and whose consequences may be unpredictable.
    On the morning of October 11, Lady Vranaj, who as everyone knows has been living alone since the death of her nine sons on the battlefield, was found in a state of profound distress, along with her daughter, Doruntine, who, by her own account, had arrived the night before, accompaniedby her brother Constantine, who died three years ago when her other brothers died.
    Having repaired to the site and tried to speak with the two unfortunate women, I concluded that neither showed any sign of mental irresponsibility, though what they now claim, whether directly or indirectly, is completely baffling and incredible. It is as well to note at this point that they had given each other this shock, the daughter by telling her mother that she had been brought home by her brother Constantine, the mother by informing her daughter that Constantine, with all her brothers, had long since departed this world.
    I tried to discuss the matter with Doruntine, and what I managed to glean from her, in her distress, may be summarized more or less as follows:
    One night not long ago (she does not recall the exact date), in the small city of central Europe in which she had been living with her husband since her marriage, she was told that a traveler was asking for her. On going out, she saw the horseman who had just arrived and who seemed to her to be Constantine, although the dust of the long journey had rendered him almost unrecognizable. But when the traveler, still in the saddle, said that he was indeed Constantine, and that he had come to take her to her mother as he had promised before her marriage, she was reassured. (Here we must recall the stir caused at the time by Doruntine’s engagement to a man from a land so far away, the opposition of the other brothers and especially the mother, who did not want to send her daughter so far off, Constantine’s insistence that the marriage take place, and finally his solemn promise, his
bessa
, that he would bring her back himself whenever their mother yearned for her daughter’s