"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.