A Bride of the Plains

"Before my parents?" she murmured.

"Why, yes," he said, as he rose from the table now and came up quite close to her, looking down with earnest, love-filled eyes on the stooping figure of this young girl, who held all his earthly happiness in her keeping; "you knew what I meant, Elsa, did you not, when I came back to you the moment that I could, after all these years? It was only my own poverty which kept me from your side all this long while. But you did not think that I had forgotten you, did you, Elsa? – you could not think that. How could a man forget you who has once held you in his arms and kissed those sweet lips of yours? Why, there has not been a day or night that I did not think of you… Night and day while I worked in that land which seemed so far away from home. Homesick I was – very often – and though we all earned good money out there, the work was hard and heavy; but I didn't mind that, for I was making money, and every florin which I put by was like a step which brought me nearer to you."

"Andor!"

The poor girl was almost moaning now, for every word which he spoke was like a knife-thrust straight into her heart.

"Being so far away from home," he continued, speaking slowly and very earnestly now, in a voice that quivered and shook with the depth of the sentiment within him, "being so far away from home would have been like hell to me at times. I don't know what there is, Elsa, about this land of Hungary! how it holds and enchains us! but at times I felt that I must lie down and die if I did not see our maize-fields bordered with the tall sunflowers, our distant, low-lying horizon on which the rising and the setting sun paints such glowing colours. This land of Australia was beautiful too: there were fine fields of corn and vast lands stretching out as far as the eye could reach; but it was not Hungary. There were no white oxen with long, slender horns toiling patiently up the dusty high roads, the storks did not build their nests in the tall acacia trees, nor did the arms of distant wells stretch up toward the sky. It was not Hungary, Elsa! and it would have been hell but for thinking of you. The life of an exile takes all the life out of one. I have heard of some of our Hungarian lads out in America who get so ill with homesickness that they either die or become vicious. But then," he added, with a quick, characteristic return to his habitual light-hearted gaiety, "it isn't everyone who is far from home who has such a bright star as I had to gaze at in my mind.. when it came night time and the lights were put out."

"Andor!" she pleaded.

But he would not let her speak just then. He had not yet told her all that there was to say, and perhaps the innate good-heartedness in him suggested that she was discomposed, that she would prefer to sit quietly and listen whilst she collected her thoughts and got over the surprise of his sudden arrival.

"Do you know, Elsa," he now said gaily, "I chalked up the days – made marks, I mean, in a book which I bought in Fiume the day before we sailed. Seven hundred and thirty days – for I never meant to stay away more than two years; and every evening in my bunk on board ship and afterwards in the farm where I lodged, I scratched out one of the marks and seemed to feel myself getting a little bit nearer and then nearer to you. By the Saints, my dove," he added, with a merry laugh, "but you should have seen me the time I got cheated out of one of those scratches. I had forgotten that accursed twenty-ninth of February last year. I don't think that I have ever sworn so wickedly in my life before. I had to go to Melbourne pretty soon, I tell you, and make confession of it to the kind Pater there. And then."

He paused abruptly. The laughter died upon his lips and the look of gaiety out of his eyes, for Elsa sat more huddled up in herself than before. He could no longer see her face, for that was hidden in her hands, he only saw her bowed shoulders, and that they were shaking as if the girl had yielded at last to a paroxysm of weeping.

"Elsa!" he said quietly, as a puzzled frown appeared between his brows, "Elsa!.. you don't say anything.. you.. you."

He passed his rough hand across his forehead, on which rose heavy beads of perspiration. For the first time in the midst of his joy and of his happiness a hideous doubt had begun to assail him.

A hideous, horrible, poison-giving doubt!

"Elsa!" he pleaded, and his voice grew more intense, as if behind it there was an undercurrent of broken sobs, "Elsa, what is the matter? You are not going to turn your back on me, are you? Look at me, Elsa! look at me! You wouldn't do it, would you.. you wouldn't do it?.. The Lord forgive me, but I love you, Elsa.. I love you fit to kill."

He was babbling like a child, and now he fell on his knees beside that low stool on which she sat hunched up, a miserable bundle of suffering womanhood. He hid his face in her petticoats – those beautiful, starched petticoats that were not to be crumpled – and all at once his manliness broke down in the face of this awful, awful doubt, and he sobbed as if his heart would break.

"Andor! Andor!" she cried, overwhelmed with pity for him, pity for herself, with the misery and the hopelessness of it all. "Andor, I beg of you, pull yourself together. Someone might come.. they must not see you like this."

She put her hand upon his head and passed her cool, white fingers through his hair. The gentle, motherly gesture soothed him: her words brought him back to his senses. Gradually his sobs were stilled; he made a great effort to become quite calm, and with a handkerchief wiped the tears and perspiration from his face.

Then he rose and went back to the table, and sat down on the corner of it as he always liked to do. The workings of his face showed the effort which he made to keep his excitement and those awful fears in check.

"You are quite right, Elsa," he said calmly. "Someone might come, and it would not be a very fine home-coming for Lakatos Andor, would it? to be found crying like an infant into a woman's petticoats. Why, what would they think? That we had quarrelled, perhaps, on this my first day at home. God forgive me, I quite lost myself that time, didn't I? It was foolish," he added, with heartbroken anxiety, "wasn't it, Elsa?"

"Yes, Andor," she said simply.

"It was foolish," he reiterated, still speaking calmly, even though his voice was half-choked with sobs, "it was foolish to think that you would turn your back on a fellow who had just lived these past five years for you."

"It isn't that, Andor," she murmured.

"It isn't that?" he repeated dully, and once more the frown of awful puzzlement appeared between his dark, inquiring eyes. "Then what is it? No, no, Elsa!" he added quickly, seeing that she threw a quick look of pathetic anxiety upon him, "don't be afraid, my dove. I am not going to make a fool of myself again. You.. you are not prepared to marry me just now, perhaps.. not just yet? – is that it?.. You have been angry with me… I am not surprised at that.. you never got my letter.. you thought that I had forgotten you.. and you want to get more used to me now that I am back.. before we are properly tokened… Is that it, Elsa?.. I'll have to wait, eh? – till the spring, perhaps.. till we have known one another better again.. then.. perhaps."

He was speaking jerkily, and always with that burning anxiety lurking in the tone of his voice. But now he suddenly cried out like a poor creature in pain, vehemently, appealingly, longing for one word of comfort, one brief respite from this intolerable misery.

"But you don't speak, Elsa!.. you don't speak… My God, why don't you speak?"

And she replied slowly, monotonously, for now she seemed to have lost even the power of suffering pain. It was all so hopeless, so dreary, so desolate.

"I can never marry you, Andor."

He stared at her almost like one demented, or as if he thought that she, perhaps, had lost her reason.

"I can never marry you," she repeated firmly, "for I am tokened to Erös Béla. My farewell banquet is to-day; to-morrow is my wedding day; the day after I go to my new home. I can never marry you, Andor. It is too late."

She watched him while she spoke, vaguely wondering within her poor, broken heart when that cry of agony would escape his lips. His face had become ghastly in hue, his mouth was wide open as if ready for that cry; his twitching fingers clutched at the neckband of his shirt.

But the cry never came: the wound was too deep and too deadly for outward expression. He said nothing, and gradually his mouth closed and his fingers ceased to twitch. Presently he rose, went to the door, and pulled it open; he stood for a moment under the lintel, his arm leaning against the frame of the door, and the soft September breeze blew against his face and through his hair.

From far away down the village street came the sound of laughter and of singing. The people of Marosfalva were very merry to-day, for it was Kapus Elsa's wedding time and Erös Béla was being lavish with food and wine and music. Nobody guessed that in this one cottage sorrow, deep and lasting, had made a solemn entry and never meant to quit these two loving hearts again.

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 Béla.. why! I thought that since you were dead nothing really mattered, and I might as well do what my mother wished."

"My God!" 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.. Béla 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 assented, 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 God!" 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 amassing 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 passions 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 God 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, Móritz and Jenö and Imre and Jankó 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."

"Béla?" 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 attitude 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 Béla 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 Béla, 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 Béla?"

"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.

"Mother will be here directly," she replied, "won't you see her?"

"Not just yet, I think. I thought of asking Pater Bonifácius if he could give me a bed for a night. Pali bácsi might not be ready for me yet."

"But you will come to my farewell feast?" asked Elsa, with that unconscious cruelty of which good women are so often capable.

"If you wish it, Elsa," he replied.

"I do wish it," she said, "and everyone will be so happy to see you. They would think it strange if you did not come, for everyone will know by then that you have returned."

"Then I will come," he concluded.

He went up to her and held out his hand; she put her own upon it. Of course he did not ask for a kiss; he had no longer a right to that. Somehow, in the last few moments a barrier seemed to have sprung up between him and her which had obliterated all the past. He was a stranger now to her and she to him; that day five years ago was as if it had never been. Béla and her plighted troth to him stood now between Andor and that past which he must forget.

But as he stood now holding her hand, he looked at her earnestly, and her blue eyes, dimmed but serene, met his own gaze without flinching.

"The past, Elsa," he said, "is done with. Henceforth we shall be nothing to one another. You will forget me easily enough… I wish that I had never come back to disturb the peace which I see is rapidly spreading over your life. My only wish now is that with you it should be peace. My heart has already given you up to Béla – but not unconditionally, mind… He must make you happy.. I tell you that he must," he reiterated, almost fiercely. "If he does not, he will have to reckon with me. Heaven help him, I say, if he is ever unkind to you… I shall see it, I shall know it… I shall not leave this village till I am assured that he means to be kind – that he is kind to you, even though my heart should break in remaining a witness to your happiness."

He stooped, and with the innate chivalry peculiar to the Hungarian peasantry, he kissed the small, cold hand which trembled in his grasp: he kissed it as a noble lord would kiss the hand of a princess. Then, without looking on her again, he walked quietly out of the house, and Elsa was alone with yet another bitter-sweet memory to add to her store of regrets.

CHAPTER XIV

"It is true."

By the time that Andor turned the corner of the house into the street, he found that the news of his arrival had already spread through the village like wildfire. Klara Goldstein's ready tongue had been at work this past hour; she had quickly disseminated the news that the wanderer had come home. She did not say that the malice and love of mischief in her had caused her to say nothing to Andor about Elsa's coming wedding. She merely told the first neighbour whom she came across that Lakatos Andor had come back, just as she, for one, had always declared that he would.

Andor's friends had assembled in the street in a trice; here was too glorious an opportunity to shout and to sing and to make merry, to be lightly missed. And Andor had always been popular before. He was doubly so now that he had come back from America or wherever he may have been, and had made a fortune there; he shook one hundred and fifty hands before he could walk as far as the presbytery. The gypsies who had just arrived by train from Arad were not allowed to proceed straight to the schoolroom. They were made to pause in the great open place before the church, made to unpack their instruments then and there, and to strike up the Rákóczy March without more ado, in honour of the finest son of Marosfalva, who had been thought dead by some, and had returned safe and sound to his native corner of the earth.

It was with much difficulty that at last Andor succeeded in effecting his escape and running away from the series of ovations which greeted him when and wherever he was recognized. The women embraced him without further ado, the men worried him to tell them some of his adventures then and there. Above all, everyone wanted to hear how very much more wretched, uncomfortable and God-forsaken the rest of the wide, wide world was in comparison with Hungary in general and the village of Marosfalva in particular.

The heartfelt, if noisy, greetings of his old friends had the effect of soothing Andor's aching heart. The sight of his native village, the scent of the air, the dust of the road acted as a slight compensation for the heavy load of sorrow which otherwise would hopelessly have weighed him down.

With a final wave of his hat he disappeared from the enraptured gaze of his friends into the cool quietude of the presbytery garden. He stood still for a moment behind a huge clump of tall sunflowers and gaudy dahlias to recover his breath and rearrange his coat, which had been mishandled quite a good deal by his friends in the excess of their joy.

From the other side of the low gate came the buzz of animated talk, his own name oft-repeated, cries of surprise and of pleasure, when the news reached some late-comers, and through it all the soft, pathetic murmur of the gipsies' fiddles; they had lapsed from the inspiriting strains of the Rákóczy March to one of the dreamy Magyar love-songs which suited their own languid Oriental temperament far better than the martial music.

But here, in the small presbytery garden, the world seemed to have slipped back an hundred years or more. Perfect peace! the drowsing of flies and wasps, the call of thrushes, the crackling of tiny twigs in the branches of the old acacia tree in the corner! Only the flies and the birds and the flowers seemed to live, and the air was heavy with the pungent odour of the sunflowers.

Andor drew a long breath. He seemed suddenly to wake from a long, long dream. It was just over five years ago that he had stood one morning just like this in this little garden; the late roses had not then ceased to bloom. It was the day before he had to leave Marosfalva in order to become a soldier, and he had come after Mass to say a private good-bye to the kind priest.

Now it seemed as if those five years were just one long dream – the soldiering, the voyage across the sea, the two years in a strange, strange land, all culminating in that awful cataclysm which had for ever robbed him of happiness.