A Bride of the Plains Part 22

She cast a swift, apprehensive glance round the room over his shoulder.

"No, no, not now," she said quickly.

"Why not?"

"Father mightn't like it. I'd have to ask him."

"D----n your father!"

"And that fool, Leopold, is so insanely jealous."

"D----n him too," said the young man quietly.

Whereupon he took the morocco case out of Klara's hand, shut it with a snap and put it back into his pocket.

"What are you doing?" cried Klara in a fright.

"As you see, pretty one, I am putting the bracelet away for future use."

"But . . ." she stammered.

"If I can't put the bracelet on your arm myself," he said decisively, "you shan't have it at all."

"But . . ."

"That is my last word. Let us talk of something else."

"No, no! We won't talk of something else. You said the bracelet was for me."

She cast a languishing look on him through her long upper lashes; she bared her wrist and held it out to him. Leopold and his jealousy might go hang for aught she cared, for she meant to have the bracelet.

The young man, with a fatuous little laugh, brought out the case once more. With his own hands he now fastened the bracelet round Klara Goldstein's wrist. Then--as a matter of course--he kissed her round, brown arm just above the bracelet, and also the red lips through which the words of thanks came quickly tumbling.

Klara did not dare to look across the room. She felt, though she did not see, Leopold's pale eyes watching this little scene with a glow in them of ferocious hate and of almost animal rage.

"I won't stay now, Klara," said the young Count, dropping his voice suddenly to a whisper; "too many of these louts about. When will you be free?"

"Oh, not to-day," she whispered in reply. "After the fair there are sure to be late-comers. And you know Eros Bela has a ball on at the barn and supper afterwards. . . ."

"The very thing," he broke in, in an eager whisper. "While they are all at supper, I'll come in for a drink and a chat. . . . Ten o'clock, eh?"

"Oh, no, no!" she protested feebly. "My father wouldn't like it, he . . ."

"D----n your father, my dear, as I remarked before. And, as a matter of fact, your father is not going to be in the way at all. He goes to Kecskemet by the night train."

"How do you know that?"

"My father told me quite casually that Goldstein was seeing to some business for him at Kecskemet to-morrow. So it was not very difficult to guess that if your father was to be in Kecskemet to-morrow in time to transact business, he would have to travel up by the nine o'clock train this evening in order to get there."

Then, as she made no reply, and a blush of pleasure gradually suffused her dark skin, lending it additional charm and giving to her eyes added brilliancy, he continued, more peremptorily this time:

"At ten o'clock, then--I'll come back. Get rid of as many of these louts by then as you can."

She was only too ready to yield. Not only was she hugely flattered by my lord's attentions, but she found him excessively attractive. He could make himself very agreeable to a woman if he chose, and evidently he chose to do so now. Moreover Klara had found by previous experience that to yield to the young man's varied and varying caprices was always remunerative, and there was that gold watch which he had once vaguely promised her, and which she knew she could get out of him if she had the time and opportunity, as she certainly would have to-night if he came.

Count Feri, seeing that she had all but yielded, was preparing to go.

Her hand was still in his, and he was pressing her slender fingers in token of a pledge for this evening.

"At ten o'clock," he whispered again.

"No, no," she protested once more, but this time he must have known that she only did it for form's sake and really meant to let him have his way. "The neighbours would see you enter, and there might be a whole lot of people in the tap-room at that hour: one never knows. They would know by then that my father had gone away and they would talk such scandal about me. My reputation . . ."

No doubt he felt inclined to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e in his usual manner: "D----n your reputation!" but he thought better of it, and merely said casually:

"I need not come in by the front door, need I?"

"The back door is always locked," she remarked ingenuously. "My father invariably locks it himself the last thing at night."

"But since he is going to Kecskemet . . ." he suggested.

"When he has to be away from home for the night he locks the door from the inside and takes the key away with him."

"Surely there is a duplicate key somewhere? . . ."

"I don't know," she murmured.

"If you don't know, who should?" he remarked, with affected indifference. "Well! I shall have to make myself heard at the back door--that's all!"

"How?"

"Wouldn't you hear me if I knocked?"

"Not if I were in the tap-room and a lot of customers to attend to."

"Well, then, I should hammer away until you did hear me."

"For that old gossip Rezi to hear you," she protested. "Her cottage is not fifty paces away from our back door."

"Then it will have to be the front door, after all," he rejoined philosophically.

"No, no!--the neighbours--and perhaps the tap-room full of people."

"But d----n it, Klara," he exclaimed impatiently, "I have made up my mind to come and spend my last evening with you--and when I have made up my mind to a thing, I am not likely to change it because of a lot of gossiping peasants, because of old Rezi, or the whole lot of them. So if you don't want me to come in by the front door, which is open, or to knock at the back door, which is locked, how am I going to get in?"

"I don't know."

"Well, then, you'll have to find out, my pretty one," he said decisively, "for it has got to be done somehow, or that gold watch we spoke of the other day will have to go to somebody else. And you know when I say a thing I mean it. Eh?"

"There is a duplicate key," she whispered shyly, ". . . to the back door, I mean."