A Bride of the Plains Part 15

CHAPTER XIII

"He must make you happy."

Andor shut the door once more. He did not want the people of the village to see him just now.

He turned back quietly into the room, and went to sit at his usual place, across the corner of the table. Elsa, mechanically, absently, as one whose mind and soul and heart are elsewhere, was smoothing out the creases in her gown made wet by Andor's tears.

"How did it all come about, Elsa?" he asked.

"Well, you know," she replied listlessly, "since Klara Goldstein told you--that everyone here believed that you were dead. I did not believe it myself for a long time, though I did think that if you had lived you would have written to me. Then, as I had no news from you . . . no news . . . and mother always wished me to marry Bela . . . why! I thought that since you were dead nothing really mattered, and I might as well do what my mother wished."

"My G.o.d!" he muttered under his breath.

"We were so poor at home," she continued, in that same listless, apathetic voice, for indeed she seemed to have lost all capacity even for suffering, "and father was so ill . . . he wanted comfort and good food, and mother and I could earn so very little . . . Bela promised mother that nice house in the Kender Road, he promised to give her cows and pigs and chickens. . . . What could I do? It is sinful not to obey your parents . . . and it seemed so selfish of me to nurse thoughts of one whom I thought dead, when I could give my own mother and father all the comforts they wanted just by doing what they wished. . . . I had to think of father and mother, Andor. . . . What could I do?"

"That is so, Elsa," he a.s.sented, speaking very slowly and deliberately.

. . . "That is so, of course . . . I understand . . . I ought to have known . . . to have guessed something of the kind at any rate. . . . My G.o.d!" he added, with renewed vehemence, "but I do seem to have been an accursed fool!--thinking that everything would go on just the same while I was weaving my dreams out there on the other side of the globe. . . .

I ought to have guessed, I suppose, that they wouldn't leave you alone . . . you the prettiest girl in the county. . . ."

"I held out as long as I could. . . . But I felt that if you were dead nothing really mattered."

"My poor little dove," he whispered gently.

Gradually he felt a great calmness descending over him. It was her helplessness that appealed to him, the pathos of her quiet resignation: he felt how mean and unmanly it would be to give way to that rebellious rage which was burning in his veins. Three years under the orders of ofttimes brutal petty officers had taught him a measure of self-restraint; the two further years of hard, unceasing toil under foreign climes, the patient ama.s.sing of florin upon florin to enable him to come back and claim the girl whom he loved, had completed the work of changing an irresponsible, untrammelled child of these Hungarian plains into a strong, well-balanced, well-controlled man of a wider world. His first instinct, when the terrible blow had been struck to all his hopes and all his happiness, had been the wild, unreasoning desire to strike back, and to kill. Had he been left to himself just then and then found himself face to face with the man who had robbed him of Elsa, the semi-civilization of the past five years would have fallen away from him, he would once more have relapsed into the primeval, unfettered state of his earlier manhood. The crude pa.s.sions of these sons of the soil are only feebly held in check by the laws of their land: at times they break through their fetters, and then they are a law unto themselves.

But Andor loved Elsa with a gentler and purer love than usually dwells in the heart of a man of his stamp. He had proved this during the past five years spent in daily, hourly thoughts of her. Now that he found her in trouble, he would not add to her burden by parading his own before her.

Manlike, his first thought had been to kill, his second to seize his love with both arms and to carry her away with him, away from this village, from this land, if need be. After all, she was not yet a wife, and the promise of marriage is not so sacred nor yet so binding as a marriage vow.

He could carry her away, leaving the scandal-mongers to work their way with her and him: he could carry her to that far-off land which he knew already, where work was hard and money plentiful, and no one would have the right to look down on her for what she had done. But seeing her there, looking so helpless and so pathetic, he knew, by that unerring intuition which only comes to a man at such times as this, that such a dream could never be fulfilled. The future was as it was, as no doubt it had been pre-ordained by G.o.d and by Fate: nothing that he could do or say now would have the power to alter it. Tradition, filial duty and perhaps a certain amount of womanly weakness too, were all ranged up against him; but filial duty would fight harder than anything else and would remain the conqueror in the end.

The relentless hand of the Inevitable was already upon him, and because of it, because of that vein of Oriental fatalism which survives in every Hungarian peasant, the tumult in his soul had already subsided, and he was able to speak to Elsa now with absolute gentleness.

"So to-day is your maiden's farewell, is it?" he asked after awhile.

"Yes! It must be getting late," she said, as she rose from the low stool and shook out her many starched skirts, "mother will be back directly to fetch me for the feast."

"It will be in the schoolroom, I suppose," he said indifferently.

"Yes. And some of the lads are coming over presently to fetch father.

They have arranged to carry him all the way. Isn't it good of them?"

"To carry him all the way?" he asked, puzzled.

"Father has not moved for two years," she said simply; "he was stricken with paralysis, you know."

"Ah, yes! Klara told me something about that."

"So in order to give me the pleasure of having father near me at my farewell feast, Moritz and Jeno and Imre and Janko are going to fasten long poles to his chair and carry him to the schoolroom and back. Isn't it good of them? And I think they mean to do the same thing to-morrow and carry him to church. We are going to put his bunda round his shoulders. He has not worn his bunda for two years. . . . It was yesterday, when I took it out in order to mend it, that I found the letter which you wrote me from Fiume. It had slipped between the pocket and the lining and . . ."

"And are you happy, Elsa?" he broke in abruptly.

She hesitated almost imperceptibly for a moment, then she said quietly:

"Yes, Andor. I am fairly happy."

"Bela?" he asked again. "Is he fond of you?"

"I think so."

"You are not sure?"

"Oh, yes!" she said more firmly, "I am quite sure."

"He hasn't taken to drinking, has he? . . . He was a little inclined that way at one time."

"Oh!" she said, with a shrug of her shoulders, "I don't think that he drinks more than other fellows of his age."

She went over to the window and somewhat ostentatiously, he thought, began turning over the contents of her work-box. There was something in her att.i.tude now which worried him, and she seemed more determined than ever not to look him straight in the face.

"Elsa! I shall think the worst if you tell me nothing," he said firmly.

"There is nothing to tell, Andor."

"Yes, there is," he persisted; "there is something about Bela which makes you unhappy and which you won't tell me. . . . Now, listen to me, Elsa, for I mean every word which I am going to say . . . I can bring myself to the point of seeing you married to another man and happy in your new home, even though my own heart will break in the process . . .

but what I could never stand would be to see you married to another man and made unhappy by him. . . . So if you won't tell me what is on your mind with regard to Bela, I will pick a quarrel with him this afternoon, and kill him if I can."

"Don't talk so wildly, Andor," she said, as she turned and faced him, for she was a little frightened at his earnestness and knew that he had it in him to act just as he said he would. "The whole thing is only foolishness on my part, I know."

"Then there is something?" he persisted obstinately.

"Well!" she said, after a little more hesitation, "it's only that he will go hanging about at the Goldsteins' all the time."

"Oh! it's Klara, is it?"

"I can't bear that girl," said Elsa, with sudden vehemence.

He looked at her keenly.

"You are jealous, Elsa," he said. "Is it because you love Bela?"

"I don't like his hanging round Klara," she replied evasively.

He rose from the table, drawing in his breath as he did so, with a curious hissing sound; perhaps the pain which he felt now was harder to bear even than that caused by the first crushing blow. The Inevitable had indeed placed its cruel hand upon his happiness; not all the boundless wealth of his love, of his will and of his daring could ever give Elsa back to him again.

"I had better go now, I suppose," he said.