"The shadow that fell from the tall sunflowers."
How Klara Goldstein spent that terrible night she never fully realized.
After half an hour or so she dragged herself up from the floor. Full
consciousness had returned to her, and with it the power to feel, to
understand and to fear.
A hideous, awful terror was upon her which seemed to freeze her through
and through; a cold sweat broke out all over her body, and she was
trembling from head to foot. She crawled as far as the narrow little bed
which was in a corner of the room, and just managed to throw herself
upon it, on her back, and there to remain inert, perished with cold,
racked with shivers, her eyes staring upwards into the darkness, her
ears strained to listen to every sound that came from the other side of
the door.
But gradually, as she lay, her senses became more alive; the power to
think coherently, to reason with her fears, asserted itself more and
more over those insane terrors which had paralysed her will and her
heart. She did begin to think--not only of herself and of her miserable
position, but of the man who lay outside--dying or dead.
Yes! That soon became the most insistent thought.
Leopold Hirsch, having done the awful deed, had fled, of course, but his
victim might not be dead, he might be only wounded and dying for want of
succour. Klara--closing her eyes--could almost picture him, groaning
and perhaps trying to drag himself up in a vain endeavour to get help.
Then she rose--wretched, broken, terrified--but nevertheless resolved to
put all selfish fears aside and to ascertain the full extent of the
tragedy which had been enacted outside her door. She lit the
storm-lantern, then, with it in her hand, she went through the tap-room
and opened the front door.
She knew well the risks which she was running, going out like this into
the night, and alone. Any passer-by might see her--ask questions,
suspect her of connivance when she told what it was that she had come
out to seek in the darkness behind her own back door. But to this
knowledge and this small additional fear she resolutely closed her mind.
Drawing the door to behind her, she stepped out on to the verandah and
thence down the few steps into the road below.
A slight breeze had sprung up within the last half-hour, and had
succeeded in chasing away the heavy banks of cloud which had hung over
the sky earlier in the evening.
Even as Klara paused at the foot of the verandah steps in order to
steady herself on her feet, the last filmy veil that hid the face of the
moon glided ethereally by. The moon was on the wane, golden and
mysterious, and now, as she appeared high in the heaven, surrounded by a
halo of prismatic light, she threw a cold radiance on everything around,
picking out every tree and cottage with unfailing sharpness and casting
black, impenetrable shadows which made the light, by contrast, appear
yet more vivid and more clear.
All around leaves and branches rustled with a soft, swishing sound, like
the whisperings of ghosts, and from the plains beyond came that
long-drawn-out murmur of myriads of plume-crowned maize as they bent in
recurring unison to the caress of the wind.
Klara's eyes peered anxiously round. Quickly she extinguished her
lantern, and then remained for a while clinging to the wooden balusters
of the verandah, eyes and ears on the alert like a hunted beast. Two
belated csikós[7] from a neighbouring village were passing down the main
road, singing at the top of their voices, their spurred boots clinking
as they walked. Klara did not move till the murmur of the voices and the
clinking of metal had died away and no other sound of human creature
moving or breathing close by broke the slumbering echoes of the village.
[Footnote 7: Herdsmen in charge of foals.]
Only in the barn, far away, people were singing and laughing and making
merry. Klara could hear the gipsy band, the scraping of the fiddles and
banging of the czimbalom, followed now and then by one of those
outbursts of jollity, of clapping of mugs on wooden tables, of banging
of feet and shouts of laughter which characterize all festive gatherings
in Hungary.
Cautiously now Klara began to creep along the low wall which supported
the balustrade. Her feet made no noise in the soft, sandy earth, her
skirts clung closely to her limbs; at every minute sound she started and
paused, clinging yet closer to the shadow which enveloped her.
Now she came to the corner. There, just in front of her was the
pollarded acacia, behind which the murderer had cowered for an hour--on
the watch. The slowly withering leaves trembled in the breeze and their
soughing sounded eerie in the night, like the sighs of a departing soul.
Further on, some twenty paces away, was old Rézi's cottage. All was dark
and still in and around it. Klara had just a sufficient power of
consciousness left to note this fact with an involuntary little sigh of
relief. The murderer had done his work quickly and silently; his victim
had uttered no cry that would rouse the old gossip from her sleep.
When Klara at last rounded the second corner of the house and came in
full view of the unfenced yard in the rear, she saw that it was flooded
with moonlight. For a moment she closed her eyes, for already she had
perceived that a dark and compact mass lay on the ground within a few
feet of the back door. She wanted strength of purpose and a mighty
appeal to her will before she would dare to look again. When she
reopened her eyes, she saw that the mass lay absolutely still. She crept
forward with trembling limbs and knees that threatened to give way under
her at every moment.
Now she no longer thought of herself; there was but little fear of
anyone passing by this way and seeing her as she gradually crawled
nearer and nearer to that inert mass which lay there on the ground so
rigid and silent. Beyond the yard there were only maize-fields, and a
tall row of sunflowers closed the place in as with a wall. And not a
sound came from old Rézi's cottage.
Klara was quite close to that dark and inert thing at last; she put out
her hand and touched it. The man was lying on his face; just as he had
fallen, no doubt; with a superhuman effort she gathered up all her
strength and lifted those hunched-up shoulders from the ground. Then she
gave a smothered cry; the pallid face of Erös Béla was staring
sightlessly up at the moon.
Indeed, for the moment the poor girl felt as if she must go mad, as if
for ever and ever after this--waking or sleeping--she would see those
glassy eyes, the drooping jaw, that horrible stain which darkened the
throat and breast. For a few seconds, which to her seemed an eternity,
she remained here, crouching beside the dead body of this unfortunate
man, trying in vain in her confused mind to conjecture what had brought
Béla here, instead of the young Count, within the reach of Leopold's
maniacal jealousy and revenge.
But her brain was too numbed for reasoning and for coherent thought. She
had but to accept the facts as they were: that Erös Béla lay here--dead,
that Leopold had murdered him, and that she must save herself at all
costs from being implicated in this awful, awful crime!
At last she contrived to gather up a sufficiency of strength--both
mental and physical--to turn her back upon this terrible scene. She had
struggled up to her feet and was turning to go when her foot knocked
against something hard, and as--quite mechanically--her eyes searched
the ground to see what this something was, she saw that it was the key
of the back door, which had evidently escaped from the dead man's hand
as he fell.
To stoop for it and pick it up--to run for the back door, which was so
close by--to unlock and open it and then to slip through it into the
house was but the work of a few seconds--and now here she was once again
in her room, like the hunted beast back in its lair--panting, quivering,
ready to fall--but safe, at all events.
No one had seen her, of that she felt sure. And now she knew--or thought
she knew--exactly what had happened. Lakatos Andor had been to the
castle; he had seen my lord and got the key away from him. He wanted to
ingratiate himself with my lord and to be able to boast in the future
that he had saved my lord's life, but evidently he did mean to have his
revenge not only on herself--Klara--but also on Erös Béla for the
humiliation which they had put upon Elsa. It was a cruel and a dastardly
trick of revenge, and in her heart Klara had vague hopes already of
getting even with Andor one day. But that would come by and by--at some
future time--when all this terrible tragedy would have been forgotten.
For the present she must once more think of herself. The key was now a
precious possession. She went to hang it up on its accustomed peg. Even
Leopold--if he stayed in the village to brazen the whole thing
out--could not prove anything with regard to that key. Erös Béla might
have been a casual passer-by, strolling about among the maize-fields,
not necessarily intent on visiting Klara at dead of night. The key was
now safely on its peg; who would dare swear that Erös Béla or anyone
else ever had it in his possession?
In fact, the secret rested between five people, of which she--Klara--was
one and the dead man another. Well, the latter could tell no tales, and
she, of course, would say nothing. Already she had determined--even
though her mind was still confused and her faculties still numb--that
ignorance would be the safest stronghold behind which she could entrench
herself.
There remained Leo himself, the young Count, and, of course, Andor.
Which of these three would she have the greatest cause to fear?
There was Leo mad with jealousy, the young Count indifferent, and Andor
with curious and tortuous motives in his heart which surely he would not
wish to disclose.
She had a sufficiency of presence of mind to go out and fetch the
storm-lantern from where she had left it at the foot of the verandah
steps. A passer-by who saw her in the act wished her a merry good-night,
to which she responded in a steady voice. Then she carefully locked the
front door, and finally undressed and went to bed. There was no knowing
whether some belated wayfarer might not presently come on the dead man
lying there in the yard: and having roused the neighbours, the latter
might think of calling on Ignácz Goldstein for spirit or what not. It
was not generally known that Ignácz Goldstein was from home, and if
people thumped loudly and long at her door, she must appear as if she
had just been roused from peaceful sleep.
She felt much more calm and fully alive, above all, to her own danger.
That kind of superstitious, unreasoning terror which had assailed her
awhile ago had almost entirely left her. She seemed more composed, more
sure of herself, now that she had been out in the yard and seen the
whole _mise en scène_ of the tragedy, which before that she had only
vaguely imagined.
But what she felt that she could not do was to lie here alone in the
dark, with only the silvery light of the moon creeping in weirdly
through the dulled panes of the tiny window. So she picked up her black
skirt, and stuffed it into the narrow window embrasure, until not a ray
of light from within could be seen to peep through on the other side.
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 mass 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.