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He met the sailor son of the old Apple-Woman returning from his enforced exile; Murtagh tells him of how the postilion frightened the Pope at Rome by his denunciation, a story Borrow had already heard from the postilion himself; the Hungarian at Horncastle narrates how an Armenian once silenced a Moldavian, the same Moldavian whom Borrow had encountered in London; the postilion meets the man in black again.
My future prospects were gloomy enough, and I looked forward and feared; sometimes I felt half disposed to accept the offer of the Armenian, and to commence forthwith, under his superintendence, the translation of the Haik Esop; but the remembrance of the cuffs which I had seen him bestow upon the Moldavian, when glancing over his shoulder into the ledger or whatever it was on which he was employed, immediately drove the inclination from my mind.
It is singular enough that the only Moldavian I have known could not speak. I suppose he was born dumb. Hungarian. A Moldavian born dumb! Excuse me, the thing is impossible, all Moldavians are born talking! I have known a Moldavian who could not speak, but he was not born dumb. His master, an Armenian, snipped off part of his tongue at Adrianople. He drove him mad with his jabber.
It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's that it flourished. For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be destined to be put by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.
What was I to do? I looked wildly around, till my eyes rested on the Moldavian clerk, who was writing away in his ledger with particular vehemence. Not knowing well what to do or to say, I thought I might as well ask the Moldavian clerk when the Armenian had departed, and when he thought he would return.
I was turning away with the intention of leaving the room; at this moment, however, the head of the Moldavian clerk became visible, and I observed a letter in his hand, which he had inserted in the desk at the same time with his head; this he extended towards me, making at the same time a side-long motion with his head, as much as to say that it contained something which interested me.
The Moldavian clerk replied with his usual guttural, and, opening his desk, ensconced his head therein. ‘It does not much matter,’ said I; ‘I suppose I shall find him at home after ’Change; it does not much matter, I can return.’
After this he was better for a time, and though his eyesight had become so weak that he was unable to read at night, he could walk, go upstairs, and lie flat in bed. In October he was seized with what he called Moldavian fever, a disease which came, he said, from the swamps of the Danube, and ravaged the Odessa district and the steppes; and again he became dangerously ill.
Neither age, sex, nor station afforded any protection against these furies, who perpetrated barbarities the details of which would exceed belief. The reader of German literature will call to mind the anecdote, in Jean Paul's Levana, of a Moldavian woman who in one day slew seven men with her own hand, and the same evening was delivered of a child.
It is true it mattered little to me when he departed, seeing that he was gone, and it was evident that he would not be back soon; but I knew not what to do, and in pure helplessness thought I might as well ask; so I went up to the Moldavian clerk, and asked him when the Armenian had departed, and whether he had been gone two days or three.
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