"It is too late."
And now there he was, as of old, sitting, as was his wont, on the corner
of the table, his two strong hands firmly grasping Elsa's wrists. She
held him a little at arm's length, frightened still at the suddenness of
his apparition here--on this day--the day of her farewell feast.
When first he drew her to him, she had breathed his name--softly panting
with excitement, "Andor!"
The blood had rushed to her cheeks, and then flowed back to her heart,
leaving her pale as a lily. She did not look at him any more after that
first glance, but held her head bent, and her eyes fixed to the ground.
Slowly the tears trickled down her cheeks one by one.
But he did not take his glowing, laughing eyes away from her, though he,
too, was speechless after that first cry of joy:
"Elsa!"
He held her wrists and in a happy, irresponsible way was swinging her
arms out and in, all the while that he was drinking in the joy of seeing
her again.
Surely she was even more beautiful than she had ever been before. He did
not notice that she was dressed as for a feast, he did not heed that she
held her head down and that heavy tears fell from her eyes. He had
caught the one swift look from her blue eyes when she first recognized
him: he had seen the blush upon her cheeks then; the look and the blush
had told him all that he wanted to know, for they had revealed her soul
to him. Manlike, he looked no further. Happiness is such a natural thing
for wretched humanity to desire, that it is so much easier to believe in
it than in misery when it comes.
At last he contrived to say a few words.
"Elsa! how are you, my dove?" he said naïvely.
"I am quite well, thank you, Andor," she murmured through her tears.
Then she tried to draw her wrists out of his tenacious clutch.
"May I not kiss you, Elsa?" he asked, with a light, happy laugh--the
laugh of a man sure of himself, and sure of the love which will yield
him the kiss.
"If you like, Andor," she replied.
She could not have denied him the kiss, not just then, at any rate, not
even though every time that his warm lips found her eyes, her cheeks,
her neck, she felt such a pain in her heart that surely she thought that
she must die of it.
After that he let her wrists go, and she went to sit on a low stool,
some little distance away from him. Her cheeks were glowing now, and it
was no use trying to disguise her tears. Andor saw them, of course, but
he did not seem upset by them: he knew that girls were so different to
men, so much more sensitive and tender: and so now he was only chiding
himself for his roughness.
"I ought to have prepared you for my coming, Elsa," he said. "I am
afraid it has upset you."
"No, no, Andor, it's nothing," she protested.
"I did want to surprise you," he continued naïvely. "Not that I ever
really doubted you, Elsa, even though you never wrote to me. I thought
letters do get astray sometimes, and I was not going to let any
accursed post spoil my happiness."
"No, of course not, Andor."
"You did not write to me, did you, Elsa?" he asked.
"No, Andor. I did not write."
"But you had my letter? . . . I mean the one which I wrote to you before
I sailed for Australia."
"The postman," she murmured, "gave it to father when it came. Then the
next day father was stricken with paralysis; he never gave it to me.
Only last night . . ."
"My God," he broke in excitedly, "and yet you remained true to me all
this while, even though you did not know if I was alive or dead! Holy
Mother of God, what have I done to deserve such happiness?"
Then as she did not speak--for indeed the words in her throat were
choked by her tears--he continued talking volubly, like a man who is
intoxicated with the wine of joy:
"Oh! I never doubted you, Elsa! But I had planned my home-coming to be a
surprise to you. It was not a question of keeping faith, of course,
because you were never tokened to me, therefore I just wanted to read in
your dear eyes exactly what would come into them in the first moment of
surprise . . . whether it would be joy or annoyance, love or
indifference. And I was not deceived, Elsa, for when you first saw me
such a look came into your eyes as I would not exchange for all the
angels' glances in Paradise."
Elsa sighed heavily. She felt so oppressed that she thought her heart
must burst. Andor's happiness, his confidence made the hideous truth
itself so much more terrible to reveal. And now he went on in the same
merry, voluble way.
"I went first to Goldstein's this morning. I thought Klara would tell me
some of the village gossip to while away the time before I dared present
myself here. I didn't want Pali bácsi or anybody to see me before I had
come to you. I didn't want anybody to speak to me before I had kissed
you. The Jews I didn't mind, of course. So I got Klara to walk with me
by a round-about way through the fields as far as this house; then I lay
in wait for a while, until I saw Irma néni go out. I wanted you all to
myself at once . . . with no one by to intercept the look which you
would give me when first you recognized me."
"And . . . did Klara tell you anything?" she murmured under her breath.
"She told me of uncle Pali's illness," he said, more quietly, "and how
he seemed to have fretted about me lately . . . and that everyone here
thought that I was dead."
"Yes. What else?"
"Nothing else much," he replied, "for you may be sure I would not do
more than just mention your sweet name before that Jewess."
"And . . . when you mentioned my name . . . did she say anything?"
"No. She laughed rather funnily, I thought. But of course I would not
take any notice. She had always been rather jealous of you. And now that
I am a rich man . . ."
"Yes, Andor?"
"When I say a rich man," he said, with a careless shrug of his broad
shoulders, "I only mean comparatively, of course. I have saved three
thousand crowns"--(about £120)--"not quite as much as I should have
liked; but things are dear out there, and there was my passage home and
clothes to pay for. Still! three thousand crowns are enough to pay down
as a guarantee for a really good farm, and if Klara Goldstein spoke the
truth, and Pali bácsi is really so well disposed toward me, why, I need
not be altogether ashamed to present myself before your parents. Need I,
my dove?"
"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.