"After that, happiness will begin."
Pater Bonifácius' kindliness, his gentle philosophy and unquestioning
faith exercised a soothing influence over Elsa's spirits. The one moment
of rebellion against Fate and against God, before the arrival of the old
priest, had been the first and the last.
There is a goodly vein of Oriental fatalism still lurking in the
Hungarians: "God has willed it!" comes readily enough to their lips.
Though this unsophisticated child of the plains suffered none the less
than would her more highly-cultured sisters in the West, yet she was
more resigned--in her humble way, more philosophical--accepting the
inevitable with an aching heart, mayhap, but with a firm determination
to make the best of the few shreds of happiness which were left to her.
Elsa had promised before God and before the whole village that she would
marry Erös Béla on the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, and after
that single thought of rebellion, she knew that on the following Tuesday
this would have to be just as surely as the day follows the night and
the night the day.
Even that selfsame evening, after the Pater had gone and before she went
to bed, she made her final preparations for the next three days, which
were the turning-points of her life. To-morrow her farewell banquet: a
huge feast in the big schoolroom, hired expressly for the occasion.
Fifty people would sit down to that, they were the most intimate
friends of the contracting parties, hers and Béla's, and her mother's.
It is the rule that the bride's parents provide this entertainment, but
Kapus Benkó and his wife had not the means for it, and Erös Béla,
insisting upon a sumptuous feast, was ready enough to pay for this
gratification of his own vanity.
After the banquet, dancing would begin and would be kept up half the
night. Then the next morning was the wedding-day. The wedding Mass in
the morning, then the breakfast, more dancing, more revelling, more
jollification, also kept up throughout the night. For it is only on the
day following, that the bridegroom goes to fetch his bride out of her
home, to conduct her to his own with all the pomp and circumstance which
his wealth allows. So many carts, so many oxen, so many friends in the
carts, and so many gipsies to make music while the procession slowly
passes up the village street.
All that was, of course, already arranged for. The banquet for to-morrow
was prepared, the ox roasted whole, the pigs and the capons stuffed.
Erös Béla had provided everything, and provided most lavishly. Fifty
persons would sit down to the farewell banquet, and more like two
hundred to the wedding-breakfast; the village was agog with excitement,
gipsies from Arad had been engaged, my lord the Count and the Countess
were coming to the wedding Mass! . . . how could one feeble, weak,
ignorant girl set her will against this torrent?
Elsa, conscious of her helplessness, set to with aching heart, but
unwavering determination to put the past entirely behind her.
What was the good of thinking, since Fate had already arranged
everything?
She went to bed directly after the Pater went away, because there was
no more candle in the house, and because her mother kept calling
querulously to her; and having stretched her young limbs out upon the
hard paillasse, she slept quite peacefully, because she was young and
healthy and did not suffer from nerves, and because sorrow had made her
very weary.
And the next morning, the dawn of the first of those all-important three
days, found her busy, alert, quite calm outwardly, even though her
cheeks had lost something of their rosy hue, and her blue eyes had a
glitter in them which suggested unshed tears.
There was a lot to do, of course: the invalid to get ready, the mother's
dressing to see to, so that she should not look slovenly in her
appearance, and call forth some of those stinging remarks from Béla
which had the power to wound the susceptibilities of his fiancée.
Irma was captious and in a tearful humour, bemoaning the fact that she
was too poor to pay for her only daughter's farewell repast.
"Whoever heard of a bridegroom paying for his fiancée's farewell?" she
said. "You will despise your poor parents now, Elsa."
It was certainly an unusual thing under the circumstances; the maiden's
farewell to the friends of her girlhood, to their parents and
belongings, is a great event in this part of the world in connection
with the wedding festivities themselves, of which it is the precursor.
The parents of the bride invariably provide the entertainment, and do so
in accordance with their means.
But Erös Béla was a proud man in the county: he would not hear of any
festival attendant upon his marriage being less than gorgeous and
dazzling before the eyes of the whole countryside. He chose to pay the
piper, so that he might call the tune, and though Elsa--wounded in her
own pride--did her best to protest, she was overruled by her mother, who
was only too thankful to see this expensive burden taken from off her
shoulders.
Kapus Irma was a proud mother to-day, for as Elsa finally stood before
her, arrayed in all her finery for the coming feast, she fully justified
her right to be styled "the beauty of the county."
A picture she looked from the top of her small head, with its smooth
covering of fair hair, yellow as the ripening corn, to the tips of her
small, arched feet, encased in the traditional boots of bright crimson
leather.
Her fair hair was plaited closely from the crown of her head and tied up
with strands of red, white and green ribbons, nor did the hard line of
the hair drawn tightly away from the face mar the charm of its round
girlishness. It gave it its own peculiar character--semi-oriental, with
just a remaining _soupçon_ of that mysterious ancestry whose traditions
are lost in the far-off mountains of Thibet.
The tight-fitting black corslet spanned the girlish figure, and made it
look all the more slender as it seemed to rise out of the outstanding
billows of numberless starched petticoats. Necklace and earrings made of
beads of solid gold--a present from Béla to his fiancée--gave a touch of
barbaric splendour to this dainty apparition, whilst her bare shoulders
and breast, her sturdy young arms and shapely, if toil-worn, hands made
her look as luscious a morsel of fresh girlhood as ever gladdened the
heart of man.
Irma surveyed her daughter from head to foot with growing satisfaction.
Then, with a gesture of unwonted impulse, she took the young girl by the
shoulders and, drawing her closely to her own bony chest, she imprinted
two sounding kisses on the fresh, pale cheeks.
"There," she said lustily, "your mother's kiss ought to put some colour
in those cheeks. Heigho, child!" she added with a sigh, as she wiped a
solitary tear with the back of her hand, "I don't wonder you are pale
and frightened. It is a serious step for a girl to take. I know how I
felt when your father came and took me out of my mother's house! But for
you it is so easy: you are leaving a poor, miserable home for the finest
house this side of the Maros and a life of toil and trouble for one of
ease! To-day you are still a maid, to-morrow you will be a married
woman, and the day after that your husband will fetch you with six carts
and forty-eight oxen and a gipsy band and all his friends to escort you
to your new home, just as every married woman in the country is fetched
from her parents' home the day after she has spoken her marriage vows.
After that your happiness will begin: you will soon forget the wretched
life you have had to lead for years, helping me to put maize into a
helpless invalid's mouth."
"I shall never forget my home, dear mother," said Elsa earnestly, "and
every fillér which I earned and which helped to make my poor father
comfortable was a source of happiness to me."
"Hm!" grunted the mother dryly, "you have not looked these past two
years as if those sources of happiness agreed with you."
"I shall look quite happy in the future, mother," retorted Elsa
cheerily; "especially when I have seen you and father installed in that
nice house in the Kender Road, with your garden and your cows and your
pigs and a maid to wait on you."
"Yes," said Irma naïvely, "Béla promised me all that if I gave you to
him: and I think that he is honest and will keep to his promise."
Then, as Elsa was silent, she continued fussily:
"There, now, I think I had better go over to the schoolroom and see that
everything is going on all right. I don't altogether trust Ilona and her
parsimonious ways. Such airs she gives herself, too! I must go and show
her that, whatever Béla may have told her, I am the hostess at the
banquet to-day, and mean to have things done as I like and not as she
may choose to direct. . . . Now mind you don't allow your father to
disarrange his clothes. Móritz and the others will be here by about
eleven, and then you can arrange the bunda round him after they have
fixed the carrying-poles to his chair. We sit down to eat at twelve
o'clock, and I will come back to fetch you a quarter of an hour before
that, so that you may walk down the street and enter the banqueting
place in the company of your mother, as it is fitting that you should
do. And don't let anyone see you before then: for that is not proper.
When you fix the bunda round your father's shoulders, make all the men
go out of the house before you enter the room. Do you understand?"
"Yes, mother."
"You know how particular Béla is that everything should be done in
orderly and customary style, don't you?"
"Yes, mother," replied Elsa, without the slightest touch of irony; "I
know how much he always talks about propriety."
"Though you are not his wife," continued Irma volubly, "and won't be
until to-morrow, you must begin to-day to obey him in all things. And
you must try and be civil to Klara Goldstein, and not make Béla angry by
putting on grand, stiff airs with the woman."
"I will do my best, mother dear," said Elsa, with a quick short sigh.
"Good-bye, then," concluded Irma, as she finally turned toward the door,
"don't crumple your petticoats when you sit down, and don't go too near
the hearth, there is some grease upon it from this morning's breakfast.
Don't let anyone see you and wait quietly for my return."
Having delivered herself of these admonitions, which she felt were
incumbent upon her in her interesting capacity as the mother of an
important bride, Irma at last sailed out of the door. Elsa--obedient to
her mother and to convention, did not remain standing beneath the lintel
as she would have loved to do on this beautiful summer morning, but drew
back into the stuffy room, lest prying eyes should catch sight of the
heroine of the day before her state entry into the banqueting hall.
With a weary little sigh she set about thinking what she could do to
kill the next two hours before Móritz and Jenö and those other kind lads
came to take her father away. With the door shut the room was very dark:
only a small modicum of light penetrated through the solitary, tiny
window. Elsa drew a chair close beside it and brought out her mending
basket and work-box. But before settling down she went back into the
sleeping-room to see that the invalid was not needing her.
Of course he always needed her, and more especially to-day, one of the
last that she would spend under his roof. He was not tearful about her
departure--his senses were too blunt now to feel the grief of
separation--he only felt pleasantly excited, because he had been told
that Móritz and Jenö and the others were coming over presently and that
they meant to carry him in his chair, just as he was, so that he could
be present at his daughter's "maiden's farewell." This had greatly
elated him: he was looking forward to the rich food and the luscious
wine which his rich future son-in-law was providing for his guests.
And now, when Elsa came to him, dressed in all her pretty finery, he
loved to look on her, and his dulled eyes glowed with an enthusiasm
which had lain atrophied in him these past two years.
He was like a child now with a pretty doll, and Elsa, delighted at the
pleasure which she was giving him, turned about and around, allowed him
to examine her beautiful petticoats, to look at her new red boots and to
touch with his lifeless fingers the beads of solid gold which her fiancé
had given her.
Suddenly, while she was thus displaying her finery for the benefit of
her paralytic father, she heard the loud bang of the cottage door.
Someone had entered, someone with a heavy footstep which resounded
through the thin partition between the two rooms.
She thought it must be one of the young men, perhaps, with the poles for
the carrying-chair; and she wondered vaguely why he had come so early.
She explained to the invalid that an unexpected visitor had come, and
that she must go and see what he wanted; and then, half ashamed that
someone should see her contrary to her mother's express orders and to
all the proprieties, she went to the door and opened it.
The visitor had not closed the outer door when he had entered, and thus
a gleam of brilliant September daylight shot straight into the narrow
room; it revealed the tall figure of a man dressed in town clothes, who
stood there for all the world as if he had a perfect right to do so, and
who looked straight on Elsa as she appeared before him in the narrow
frame of the inner door.
His face was in full light. She recognized him in the instant.
But she could not utter his name, she could not speak; her heart began
to beat so fast that she felt that she must choke.
The next moment his arms were round her, he kicked the outer door to
with his foot, and then he dragged her further into the room; he called
her name, and all the while he was laughing--laughing with the glee of a
man who feels himself to be supremely happy.