A Bride of the Plains Part 36

She had placed the storm-lantern in the corner, and this she left alight. It threw a feeble, yellowish glimmer round the room; after a few moments, when her eyes were accustomed to this semi-gloom, she found that she could see every familiar object quite distinctly; even the shadows did not seem impenetrable, nor could ghosts lurk in the unseen portions of the tiny room.

Of course there was no hope of sleep--Klara knew well the moment that she looked on the dead man's face, that she would always see it before her--to the end of her days. She saw it now, quite distinctly--especially when she closed her eyes; the moonlit yard, the shadow that fell from the tall sunflowers, and the huddled, dark ma.s.s on the ground, with the turned-up face and the sightless eyes. But she was not afraid; she only felt bitterly resentful against Andor, who, she firmly believed, had played her an odious trick.

She almost felt sorry for Leopold, who had only sinned because of his great love for her.

CHAPTER XXVIII

"We shall hear of another tragedy by and by."

And so in Marosfalva there was no wedding on the festival day of S.

Michael and All Angels; instead of that, on the day following, there was a solemn Ma.s.s for the dead in the small village church, which was full to overflowing on that great occasion.

Eros Bela had been found--out in the open--murdered by an unknown hand.

Feher Karoly and his brother, who lived down the Fekete Road, had taken a cut across the last maize-field--the one situated immediately behind the inn kept by Ignacz Goldstein, and they had come across Bela's body, lying in the yard, with face upturned and eyes staring up sightlessly at the brilliant blue sky overhead.

It was then close on eight o'clock in the morning. The dancing in the barn had been kept up till then, even though the two most important personages of the festive gathering were not there to join in the fun.

The bridegroom had not been seen since his brief appearance an hour or two before supper, and Elsa had only just sat through the meal, trying to seem cheerful, but obviously hardly able to restrain her tears. After supper, when her partner sought her for the csardas, she was nowhere to be found. Kapus Irma--appealed to--said that the girl was fussy and full of nerves--for all the world like a born lady. She certainly wasn't very well, had complained of headache, and been allowed by her mother to go home quietly and turn into bed.

"She has another two jolly days to look forward to," Irma neni had added complacently. "Perhaps it is as well that she should get some rest to-night."

Ah, well! it was a queer wedding, and no mistake! The queerest that had ever been in Marosfalva within memory of man. A bride more p.r.o.ne to tears than to laughter! A bridegroom surly, discontented, and paying marked attentions to the low-down Jewess over at the inn under his future wife's very nose!

It was quite one thing for a man to a.s.sert his own independence, and to show his bride at the outset on whose feet the highest-heeled boots would be, but quite another to flout the customs of the countryside and all its proprieties.

When, after supper, good and abundant wine had loosened all tongues, adverse comments on the absent bridegroom flowed pretty freely. This should have been the merriest time of the evening--the merriest time, in fact, of all the three festive days--the time when one was allowed to chaff the bride and to make her blush, to slap the lucky bridegroom on the back and generally to allow full play to that exuberance of spirits which is always bubbling up to the surface out of a Magyar peasant's heart.

No doubt that Bela's conduct had upset Elsa and generally cast a gloom over the festive evening. But the young people were not on that account going to be done out of their dancing; the older ones might sit round and gossip and throw up their hands and sigh, but that was no reason why the gipsies should play a melancholy dirge.

A csardas it must be, and of the liveliest! And after that another and yet another. Would it not be an awful pity to waste Eros Bela's money, even though he was not here to enjoy its fruits? So dancing was kept up till close on eight o'clock in the morning--till the sun was high up in the heavens and the bell of the village church tolled for early Ma.s.s.

Until then the gipsies sc.r.a.ped their fiddles and banged their czimbalom almost uninterruptedly; hundreds of sad and gay folk-songs were sung in chorus in the intervals of dancing the national dance. Cotton petticoats of many hues fluttered, leather boots--both red and black--clinked and stamped until the morning.

Then it was that the merry company at last broke up, and that Feher Karoly and his brother took the short cut behind the inn, and found the bridegroom--at whose expense they had just danced and feasted--lying stark and stiff under the clear September sun.

They informed the mayor, who at once put himself in communication with the gendarmerie of Arad: but long before the police came, the news of the terrible discovery was all over the village, and there was no thought of sleep or rest after that.

Worried to death, perspiring and puzzled, the police officers hastily sent down from Arad had vainly tried to make head or tail of the ma.s.s of conflicting accounts which were poured into their ears in a continuous stream of loud-voiced chatter for hours at a stretch: and G.o.d only knows what judicial blunders might have been committed before the culprit was finally brought to punishment if the latter had not, once for all, himself delivered over the key of the mystery.

Leopold Hirsch had hanged himself to one of the beams in his own back shop. His a.s.sistant found him there--dead--later in the day.

As--by previous arrangement--the whole village was likely to be at Elsa Kapus' wedding, there would not have been much use in keeping the shop open. So the a.s.sistant had been given a holiday, but he came to the shop toward midday, when the whole village was full of the terrible news and half the population out in the street gossiping and commenting on it--marvelling why his employer had not yet been seen outside his doors.

The discovery--which the a.s.sistant at once communicated to the police--solved the riddle of Eros Bela's death. With a sigh of relief the police officers adjourned from the mayor's parlour, where they had been holding their preliminary inquiries, to the castle, where it was their duty to report the occurrence to my lord the Count.

At the castle of course everyone was greatly surprised: the n.o.ble Countess raised her aristocratic eyebrows and declared her abhorrence of hearing of these horrors. The Count took the opportunity of cursing the peasantry for a quarrelsome, worrying lot, and offered the police officers a snack and a gla.s.s of wine. He was hardly sorry for the loss of his bailiff, as Eros Bela had been rather tiresome of late--b.u.mptious and none too sober--and his lordship anyhow had resolved to dispense with his services after he was married. So the death really caused him very little inconvenience.

Young Count Feri knew nothing, of course. He was not likely to allow himself or his name to be mixed up with a village scandal: he shuddered once or twice when the thought flashed through his mind how narrowly he had escaped Eros Bela's fate, and to his credit be it said he had every intention of showing Lakatos Andor--who undoubtedly had saved his life by giving him timely warning--a substantial meed of grat.i.tude.

Of Klara Goldstein little or nothing was seen or heard. The police officers had certainly gone to the inn in the course of the morning and had stayed there close on half an hour: but as no one had been allowed to go into the tap-room during that time, the occurrences there remained a matter of conjecture. After the officers went away Klara locked the front door after them and remained practically shut up in the house, only going in the evening as far as the post, but refusing to speak to anyone and going past with head erect and a proud, careless air which deceived no one.

"She'll sing her tune in a minor key by and by, when Ignacz Goldstein comes home," said the gossips complacently.

"Those Jews are mighty hard on their daughters," commented the older folk, "if any scandal falls upon them. Ignacz is a hard man and over-ready with his stick."

"I shouldn't be surprised," was the universal conclusion, "if we should hear of another tragedy by and by."

"In any case, Klara can't stay in the village," decided the bevy of young girls who talked the matter over among themselves, and were none too sorry that the smart, handsome Jewess--who had such a way with the men--should be comfortably out of the way.

But everyone went to the Ma.s.s for the dead on the day following that which should have been such a merry wedding feast; and everyone joined in the Requiem and prayed fervently for the repose of the soul of the murdered man.

He lay in state in the centre of the aisle, with four tall candles at each corner of the draped catafalque; a few bunches of white and purple asters clumsily tied together by inexperienced hands were laid upon the coffin.

Pater Bonifacius preached a beautiful sermon about the swift and unexpected approach of Death when he is least expected. He also said some very nice things about the dead man, and there was hardly a dry eye in the church while he spoke.

In the remote corner of a pew, squeezed between a pillar and her mother, Elsa knelt and prayed. Those who watched her--and there were many--declared that not only did she never stop crying for a moment during Ma.s.s, but that her eyes were swollen and her cheeks puffy from having cried all the night and all the day before.

After Ma.s.s she must have slipped out by the little door which gave on the presbytery garden. It was quite close to the pillar against which she had been leaning, and no doubt the Pater had given her permission to go out that way. From the presbytery garden she could skirt the fields and round the top of the village, and thus get home and give all her friends the slip.

This, no doubt, she had done, for no one saw her the whole of that day, nor the next, which was the day of the funeral, and an occasion of wonderful pomp and ceremony. Bela's brother had arrived in the meanwhile from Arad, where he was the manager of an important grain store, and he it was who gave all directions and all the money necessary that his brother should have obsequies befitting his rank and wealth.

The church was beautifully decorated: there were huge bunches of white flowers upon the altar, and eight village lads carried the dead man to his last resting-place; and no less than thirty Ma.s.ses were ordered to be said within the next year for the repose of the soul of one who in life had enjoyed so much prosperity and consideration.

And in the tiny graveyard situated among the maize-fields to the north of Marosfalva, and which is the local Jewish burial ground, the suicide was quietly laid to rest. There was no religious service, for there was no minister of his religion present; an undertaker came down from Arad and saw to it all; there was no concourse of people, no singing, no flowers. Ignacz Goldstein--home the day before from Kecskemet--alone followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from the village to the field.

It was the shop a.s.sistant who had seen to it all. He had gone up to Arad and seen a married sister of his late master's--Sara Rosen, whose husband kept a second-hand clothes shop there, and who gave full instructions to an undertaker whilst declaring herself unable--owing to delicate health--to attend the funeral herself.

The undertaker had provided a cart and a couple of oxen and two men to lift the coffin in and out. They came late on the Thursday evening, at about eight o'clock, and drew up at the back of the late Leopold Hirsch's shop. No one was about and the night was dark.

Slowly the cart, creaking on its wheels and axles, wound its way through some maize stubble, up a soft, sandy road to the enclosed little bit of ground which the local Jews have reserved for themselves.

And the mysterious veil which divides the present from the past fell quickly over this act of the village tragedy, as it had done with pomp and circ.u.mstance after the banquet which followed the laying to rest of the murdered man.

CHAPTER XXIX

"Some day."

A week went by after the funeral before Elsa saw Andor again. She had not purposely avoided him, any more than she had avoided everyone else: but unlike most girls of her cla.s.s and of her nationality she had felt a great desire to be alone during the most acute period of this life's crisis through which she was pa.s.sing just now.

At first on that never-to-be-forgotten morning when she woke to her wedding-day--her white veil and wreath of artificial white roses lying conspicuously on the top of the chest of drawers, so that her eyes were bound to alight on them the moment they opened--and saw her mother standing beside her bed, dishevelled, pale, and obviously labouring under some terrible excitement, she had been conscious as of an awful blow on the head, a physical sensation of numbness and of pain.

Even before she had had time to formulate a question she knew that some terrible calamity had occurred. In jerky phrases, broken by moans and interjections, the mother had blurted out the news: Eros Bela was dead--he had been found just now--murdered outside Klara Goldstein's door--there would be no wedding--Elsa was a widow before she had been a bride. Half the village was inclined to believe that Ignacz Goldstein had done the deed in a moment of angry pa.s.sion, finding Bela sneaking round his daughter's door when he himself was going away from home--others boldly accused Andor.