CHAPTER VII

"They are Jews and we are Hungarians."

But what of Elsa during this time? What of the sorrow, the alternating hope and despair of those weary, weary months? She did not say much, she hardly ever cried, but even her mother – hard and unemotional as she was – respected the girl's secret for awhile, after the news was brought into the cottage that Andor was really dead.

Erös Béla had brought the news, and Elsa, on hearing it thus blurted out in Béla's rough, cruel fashion, had turned deathly pale, ere she contrived to run out of the room and hide herself away in a corner, where she had cried till she had made herself sick and faint.

"Have you been blind all these years, Irma néni?" Erös Béla had said with his habitual sneer, when Irma threw up her bony hands in hopeless puzzlement at her daughter's behaviour. "Did you not know that Elsa has been in love with Andor all along?"

"No," said Irma in her quiet, matter-of-fact tone, "I did not know it. Did you?"

"Of course I did," he replied dryly; "but I have also known for the past six months that Andor was dead."

"You knew it?" exclaimed Irma with obvious incredulity.

"I have told you so, haven't I?" he retorted, "and I am not in the habit of lying."

"But how did you come to know it?"

"When he did not return last September I marvelled what had happened; I wonder no one else did. Then, when Lakatos Pál first became ill – long even before he confided in Pater Bonifácius – I made inquiries at the War Office and found out the truth."

"Whatever made you do that?" asked Irma, with a shrug of the shoulders. "Andor wasn't anything to you."

"Perhaps not," replied Béla curtly; "but, you see, I was afraid that Pali bácsi would die and that Andor would come back and find himself a rich man. I should have lost Elsa then, so I was in a hurry to know."

Irma once more shrugged her shoulders in her habitual careless, shiftless way – shelving, as it were, the whole responsibility of her life, her fate, and her daughter upon some other power than her own will. She cared nothing about these intrigues of Béla's or of anyone else; she only wanted Elsa to make a rich marriage, so that she – the mother – might have a happy, comfortable, above all leisurely, old age.

But she had enough common sense to see that Elsa laboured under the weight of a very great sorrow, and while the girl was in such a condition of grief it would be worse than useless to worry her with suggestions of matrimony. Girls had been known to do desperate things if they were overharassed, and Kapus Irma was no fool; she knew what she wanted, and her instinct, coupled with her greed and cupidity, showed her the best way to get it.

So she left Elsa severely alone for a time, left her to pursue her household duties, to look after her father, to wash and iron the finery of the more genteel inhabitants of Marosfalva – the schoolmistress' blouses, Pater Bonifácius' surplices. Erös Béla continued in his unemotional attentions to her – he was more sure of success than ever. His words of courtship were the drops of water that were ultimately destined to wear away a stone.

Elsa, lulled into security by her mother's placidity and Béla's apparent simple friendship, hardly was conscious of the precise moment when the siege against her passive resistance was once more resumed. It was all so gradual, so kind, so persuasive: and she had so little to look forward to in the future. What did it matter what became of her? – whom she married or where her home would be? She saw more of Erös Béla than she did of anyone else, for Erös Béla was undoubtedly Irma's most favoured competitor. Elsa knew that he was of violent temperament, dictatorial and rough; she knew that he was fond of drink, and of the society of Klara Goldstein, the Jewess, but she really did not care.

She had kept her promise to Andor, she had waited for him until she knew that he never, never could come back; now she might as well obey her mother and put herself right with God, since she cared so little what became of her.

And the beauty of Marosfalva was tokened to Erös Béla in the spring of the following year, and presently it was given out that the wedding would take place on the feast of Holy Michael and All Angels at the end of September. Congratulations poured in upon the happy pair, rejoicings were held in every house of note in the village. Everyone was pleased at the marriage, pleased that the noted beauty would still have her home in Marosfalva, pleased that Erös Béla's wealth would all remain in the place.

And Elsa received these congratulations and attended these rejoicings with unvarying equanimity and cheerfulness. There was nothing morbid or self-centred in the girl's attitude. People who did not know – and no one really did – and who saw her at mass on Sundays or walking arm-in-arm with Béla in the afternoons would say that she was perfectly happy. Not a radiant bride certainly, not a typical Hungarian menyecske whose laughter echoes from end to end of the village, whose merry voice rings all the day, and whose pretty bare feet trot briskly up and down from her cottage to the river, or to the church, or to a neighbour's house, but an equable, contented bride, a fitting wife for a person of such high consideration as was Erös Béla.

Her manner to him was always equally pleasant, and though the young pair did not exchange very loving glances – at any rate not in public – yet they were never known to quarrel, which was really quite remarkable, seeing that Béla's temper had not improved of late.

He was giving way to drink more than he used to, and there were some ugly rumours about my lord the Count's dissatisfaction with his erstwhile highly-valued bailiff. Many people said that Béla would get his dismissal presently if he did not mend his ways; but then he very likely wouldn't care if he did get dismissed, he was a rich man and could give his full time to cultivating his own land.

This afternoon, while he was talking with Irma and sullenly watching his future wife, he appeared to be quite sober, until a moment ago when unreasoning rage seized hold of him and he shouted to Elsa in a rough and peremptory manner. After that, his face, which usually was quite pallid, became hotly flushed, and his one seeing eye had a restless, quivering look in it.

Nor did Elsa's placid gentleness help to cool his temper. When he shouted to her she turned and faced him, and said with a pleasant – if somewhat vague smile:

"Yes, Béla, what is it you want?"

"What is it I want?" he muttered, as he sank back into his chair, and resting his elbows on the table he buried his chin in his hands and looked across at the girl with a glowering and sullen look; "what is it I want?" he reiterated roughly. "I want to know what has been the matter with you these last two days?"

"Nothing has been the matter with me," she replied quietly, "nothing unusual, certainly. Why do you ask?"

"Because for the last two days you have been going about with a face on you fit for a funeral, rather than for a wedding. What is it? Let's have it."

"Nothing, Béla. What should it be?"

"I tell you there is something," he rejoined obstinately, "and what's more I can make a pretty shrewd guess what it is, eh?"

"I don't know what you mean," she said simply.

"I mean that the noted beauty of Marosfalva does me the honour of being jealous. Isn't that it, now? Oh! I know well enough, you needn't be ashamed of it, jealousy does your love for me credit, and flatters me, I assure you."

"I don't know what you mean, Béla," she reiterated more firmly. "I am neither jealous nor ashamed."

"Not ashamed?" he jeered. "Oho! look at your flaming cheeks! Irma néni, haven't you a mirror? Let her see how she is blushing."

"I don't see why she should be jealous," interposed Irma crossly, "nor why you should be for ever teasing her. I am sure she has no cause to be ashamed of anything, or of being jealous of anyone."

"But I tell you that she is jealous of Klara Goldstein!" he maintained.

"What nonsense!" protested the mother, while the blush quickly fled from the young girl's cheeks, leaving them clear and bloodless.

"I tell you she is," he persisted, with wrathful doggedness; "she has been sullen and moody these last two days, ever since I insisted that Klara Goldstein shall be asked to-morrow to the farewell banquet and the dance."

"Well, I didn't see myself why you wanted that Jewess to come," said Irma dryly.

"That's nobody's business," he retorted. "I pay for the entertainment, don't I?"

"You certainly do," she rejoined calmly. "We couldn't possibly afford to give Elsa her maiden's farewell, and if you didn't pay for the supper and the gipsies, and the hire of the schoolroom, why, then, you and Elsa would have to be married without a proper send-off, that's all."

"And a nice thing it would have been! Whoever heard of a girl on this side of the Maros being married without her farewell to maidenhood. I am paying for the supper and for everything because I want my bride's farewell to be finer and grander than anything that has ever been seen for many kilomètres round. I have stinted nothing – begrudged nothing. I have given an ox, two pigs and a calf to be slaughtered for the occasion. I have given chickens and sausages and some of the finest flour the countryside can produce. As for the wine.. well! all I can say is that there is none better in my lord's own cellar. I have given all that willingly. I did it because I liked it. But," he added, and once again the look of self-satisfaction and sufficiency gave way to his more habitual sinister expression, "if I pay for the feast, I decide who shall be invited to eat it."

Irma apparently had nothing to say in response. She shrugged her shoulders and continued to stir the stew in her pot. Elsa said nothing either; obedient to the command of her future lord, she had faced him and listened to him attentively and respectfully all the while that he spoke, nor did her face betray anything of what went on within her soul, anything of its revolt or of its wounded pride, while the storm of wrath and of sneers thus passed unheeded over her head.

But Béla, having worked himself up into a fit of obstinate rage, was not content with Elsa's passive obedience. There had from the first crept into his half-educated but untutored and undisciplined mind the knowledge that though Elsa was tokened to him, though she was submissive, and gentle and even-tempered, her heart did not belong to him. He knew but little about love, believed in it still less: in that part of the world a good many men are still saturated with the Oriental conception of a woman's place in the world, and even in the innermost recesses of their mind with the Oriental disbelief in a woman's soul; but in common with all such men he had a burning desire to possess every aspiration and to know every thought of the woman whom he had chosen for his wife.

Therefore now, when in response to his rage and to his bombast Elsa had only silence for him – a silence which he knew must hide her real thoughts, he suddenly lost all sense of proportion and of prudence; for the moment he felt as if he could hate this woman whom he had wooed and won despite her resistance, and in the teeth of strenuous rivalry; he was seized with a purely savage desire to wound her, to see her cry, to make her unhappy – anything, in fact, to rouse her from this irritating apathy.

"I suppose," he said at last, making a great effort to recover his outward self-control, "I suppose that you object to my asking Klara Goldstein to come to your farewell feast?"

Thus directly appealed to by her lover, Elsa gave a direct reply.

"Yes, I do," she said.

"May I ask why?"

"A girl's farewell on the eve of her wedding-day," she replied quietly, "is intended to be a farewell to her girl friends. Klara Goldstein was never a friend of mine."

"She belongs to this village, anyway, doesn't she?" he queried, still trying to speak calmly. He had risen to his feet and stood with squared shoulders, legs wide apart, and hands buried in the pockets of his tightly-fitting trousers. An ugly, ill-tempered, masterful man, who showed in every line of his attitude that he meant to be supreme lord in his own household.

"Klara Goldstein belongs to this village," he reiterated with forced suavity, "she is my friend, is she not?"

"She may be your friend, Béla," rejoined Elsa gently, "and she certainly belongs to this village; but she is not one of us. She is a Jewess, not a Hungarian, like we all are."

"What has her religion to do with it?" he retorted.

"It isn't her religion, Béla," persisted the girl, with obstinacy at least as firm as his own; "you know that quite well. Though it is an awful thing to think that they crucified our Lord."

"Well! that is a good long while ago," he sneered; "and in any case Klara and Ignácz Goldstein had nothing to do with it."

"No, I know. Therefore I said that religion had nothing to do with it. I can't explain it exactly, Béla, but don't we all feel alike about that? Hungarians are Hungarians, and Jews are Jews, and there's no getting away from that. They are different to us, somehow. I can't say how, but they are different. They don't speak as we do, they don't think as we do, their Sunday is Saturday, and their New Year's day is in September. Jewesses can't dance the csárdás and Jews have a contempt for our gipsy music and our songs. They are Jews and we are Hungarians. It is altogether different."

He shrugged his shoulders, unable apparently to gainsay this unanswerable argument. After all, he too was a Hungarian, and proud of that fact, and like all Hungarians at heart, he had an unexplainable contempt for the Jews. But all the same, he was not going to give in to a woman in any kind of disagreement, least of all on a point on which he had set his heart. So now he shifted his ground back to his original dictum.