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Updated: June 27, 2025
He was far too jealous of her, and however kindly the young woman might treat him, he felt that it was deception, every bit of it, and did not trust her. Besides, he feared that Valentine Kalondai might be among the crowds which flocked from every quarter toward Eperies. Barbara Pirka was charged to remain at home, and on no account quit the house till they all returned.
While Valentine was wrangling in the loft with Simplex, who swore by hook and by crook that he had been trumpeting all night long for the benefit of the witches, and had scarcely had more than forty winks, Pirka took off Michal's blue dress which made her look like a saint, and arrayed her in the purple one. When Valentine saw her in this he declared that she now looked just like a queen.
The morning light found her at the Girjo kopanitscha. Here the wife of the kopanitschar of Hamar kept house alone. Her husband, after capturing Janko, had turned her out of doors, and then enlisted in the county militia. What else, then, could his wife do but turn witch? She had already began her novitiate in the school of Barbara Pirka.
Conspicuous among the itinerant gypsies and peddlers was a woman who offered for sale long thongs fastened to the end of a stick, and was particularly importunate with Simplex. "Come Mr. Trumpeter, won't you buy a thong made out of the skin flayed from the robbers' backs?" Simplex at once recognized the voice; it was Pirka the witch. "What are these thongs of human skin good for?"
Soon after the last dog had quite ceased howling a man's step was heard approaching the door of the bedroom. Pirka murmured an incantation in the gipsy tongue over Michal, which might have been a blessing for all that Michal knew to the contrary. Then the old woman withdrew. Immediately afterward Henry came in.
Barbara Pirka no longer recognized Henry, though they had often torn each other's hair out in the good old times. The woman remarked that Michal's clothing was wet through, and that her shoes had suffered from her wanderings through the mountains. "Would madam like to change her clothes?" asked the old woman obsequiously.
On the fifth morning, as she was turning the windlass in order to draw water from the kitchen well, the words escaped her: "Oh, that the devil would bring Pirka hither!" Scarcely had she said it, when she perceived that the windlass began to turn round of its own accord, and from out of the ascending bucket rose the bristly, angular form of Barbara Pirka.
Let no one maintain after this that a hangman can't behave handsomely! Next morning Michal requested Barbara Pirka to give her an answer to her second question, viz., What a woman must do who loves another than her husband? "Alas, pet! that is not a very easy question to answer. The loves must first be looked up.
And now she had another scrap of paper in her hand, on which was also written the word, Valentine! "Well, and how has my little lady been amusing herself all this time?" asked Pirka, stroking pretty Michal's hands. "Has she not been wishing that her Pirka was with her again?" Michal could not deny that she had.
A great light had suddenly sprung up in the sky. "Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Barbara Pirka, "that certainly would be a crazy sun which rose in the west! What you see there is the morning sheen of hell. The house of the headsman is burning. A pretty dawn that certainly!"
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