"We shall hear of another tragedy by and by."
And so in Marosfalva there was no wedding on the festival day of S.
Michael and All Angels; instead of that, on the day following, there was
a solemn Mass for the dead in the small village church, which was full
to overflowing on that great occasion.
Erös Béla had been found--out in the open--murdered by an unknown hand.
Fehér Károly and his brother, who lived down the Fekete Road, had taken
a cut across the last maize-field--the one situated immediately behind
the inn kept by Ignácz Goldstein, and they had come across Béla's body,
lying in the yard, with face upturned and eyes staring up sightlessly at
the brilliant blue sky overhead.
It was then close on eight o'clock in the morning. The dancing in the
barn had been kept up till then, even though the two most important
personages of the festive gathering were not there to join in the fun.
The bridegroom had not been seen since his brief appearance an hour or
two before supper, and Elsa had only just sat through the meal, trying
to seem cheerful, but obviously hardly able to restrain her tears. After
supper, when her partner sought her for the csárdás, she was nowhere to
be found. Kapus Irma--appealed to--said that the girl was fussy and full
of nerves--for all the world like a born lady. She certainly wasn't very
well, had complained of headache, and been allowed by her mother to go
home quietly and turn into bed.
"She has another two jolly days to look forward to," Irma néni had added
complacently. "Perhaps it is as well that she should get some rest
to-night."
Ah, well! it was a queer wedding, and no mistake! The queerest that had
ever been in Marosfalva within memory of man. A bride more prone to
tears than to laughter! A bridegroom surly, discontented, and paying
marked attentions to the low-down Jewess over at the inn under his
future wife's very nose!
It was quite one thing for a man to assert his own independence, and to
show his bride at the outset on whose feet the highest-heeled boots
would be, but quite another to flout the customs of the countryside and
all its proprieties.
When, after supper, good and abundant wine had loosened all tongues,
adverse comments on the absent bridegroom flowed pretty freely. This
should have been the merriest time of the evening--the merriest time, in
fact, of all the three festive days--the time when one was allowed to
chaff the bride and to make her blush, to slap the lucky bridegroom on
the back and generally to allow full play to that exuberance of spirits
which is always bubbling up to the surface out of a Magyar peasant's
heart.
No doubt that Béla's conduct had upset Elsa and generally cast a gloom
over the festive evening. But the young people were not on that account
going to be done out of their dancing; the older ones might sit round
and gossip and throw up their hands and sigh, but that was no reason why
the gipsies should play a melancholy dirge.
A csárdás it must be, and of the liveliest! And after that another and
yet another. Would it not be an awful pity to waste Erös Béla's money,
even though he was not here to enjoy its fruits? So dancing was kept up
till close on eight o'clock in the morning--till the sun was high up in
the heavens and the bell of the village church tolled for early Mass.
Until then the gipsies scraped their fiddles and banged their czimbalom
almost uninterruptedly; hundreds of sad and gay folk-songs were sung in
chorus in the intervals of dancing the national dance. Cotton petticoats
of many hues fluttered, leather boots--both red and black--clinked and
stamped until the morning.
Then it was that the merry company at last broke up, and that Fehér
Károly and his brother took the short cut behind the inn, and found the
bridegroom--at whose expense they had just danced and feasted--lying
stark and stiff under the clear September sun.
They informed the mayor, who at once put himself in communication with
the gendarmerie of Arad: but long before the police came, the news of
the terrible discovery was all over the village, and there was no
thought of sleep or rest after that.
Worried to death, perspiring and puzzled, the police officers hastily
sent down from Arad had vainly tried to make head or tail of the mass of
conflicting accounts which were poured into their ears in a continuous
stream of loud-voiced chatter for hours at a stretch: and God only knows
what judicial blunders might have been committed before the culprit was
finally brought to punishment if the latter had not, once for all,
himself delivered over the key of the mystery.
Leopold Hirsch had hanged himself to one of the beams in his own back
shop. His assistant found him there--dead--later in the day.
As--by previous arrangement--the whole village was likely to be at Elsa
Kapus' wedding, there would not have been much use in keeping the shop
open. So the assistant had been given a holiday, but he came to the
shop toward midday, when the whole village was full of the terrible news
and half the population out in the street gossiping and commenting on
it--marvelling why his employer had not yet been seen outside his doors.
The discovery--which the assistant at once communicated to the
police--solved the riddle of Erös Béla's death. With a sigh of relief
the police officers adjourned from the mayor's parlour, where they had
been holding their preliminary inquiries, to the castle, where it was
their duty to report the occurrence to my lord the Count.
At the castle of course everyone was greatly surprised: the noble
Countess raised her aristocratic eyebrows and declared her abhorrence of
hearing of these horrors. The Count took the opportunity of cursing the
peasantry for a quarrelsome, worrying lot, and offered the police
officers a snack and a glass of wine. He was hardly sorry for the loss
of his bailiff, as Erös Béla had been rather tiresome of late--bumptious
and none too sober--and his lordship anyhow had resolved to dispense
with his services after he was married. So the death really caused him
very little inconvenience.
Young Count Feri knew nothing, of course. He was not likely to allow
himself or his name to be mixed up with a village scandal: he shuddered
once or twice when the thought flashed through his mind how narrowly he
had escaped Erös Béla's fate, and to his credit be it said he had every
intention of showing Lakatos Andor--who undoubtedly had saved his life
by giving him timely warning--a substantial meed of gratitude.
Of Klara Goldstein little or nothing was seen or heard. The police
officers had certainly gone to the inn in the course of the morning and
had stayed there close on half an hour: but as no one had been allowed
to go into the tap-room during that time, the occurrences there remained
a matter of conjecture. After the officers went away Klara locked the
front door after them and remained practically shut up in the house,
only going in the evening as far as the post, but refusing to speak to
anyone and going past with head erect and a proud, careless air which
deceived no one.
"She'll sing her tune in a minor key by and by, when Ignácz Goldstein
comes home," said the gossips complacently.
"Those Jews are mighty hard on their daughters," commented the older
folk, "if any scandal falls upon them. Ignácz is a hard man and
over-ready with his stick."
"I shouldn't be surprised," was the universal conclusion, "if we should
hear of another tragedy by and by."
"In any case, Klara can't stay in the village," decided the bevy of
young girls who talked the matter over among themselves, and were none
too sorry that the smart, handsome Jewess--who had such a way with the
men--should be comfortably out of the way.
But everyone went to the Mass for the dead on the day following that
which should have been such a merry wedding feast; and everyone joined
in the Requiem and prayed fervently for the repose of the soul of the
murdered man.
He lay in state in the centre of the aisle, with four tall candles at
each corner of the draped catafalque; a few bunches of white and purple
asters clumsily tied together by inexperienced hands were laid upon the
coffin.
Pater Bonifácius preached a beautiful sermon about the swift and
unexpected approach of Death when he is least expected. He also said
some very nice things about the dead man, and there was hardly a dry
eye in the church while he spoke.
In the remote corner of a pew, squeezed between a pillar and her mother,
Elsa knelt and prayed. Those who watched her--and there were
many--declared that not only did she never stop crying for a moment
during Mass, but that her eyes were swollen and her cheeks puffy from
having cried all the night and all the day before.
After Mass she must have slipped out by the little door which gave on
the presbytery garden. It was quite close to the pillar against which
she had been leaning, and no doubt the Pater had given her permission to
go out that way. From the presbytery garden she could skirt the fields
and round the top of the village, and thus get home and give all her
friends the slip.
This, no doubt, she had done, for no one saw her the whole of that day,
nor the next, which was the day of the funeral, and an occasion of
wonderful pomp and ceremony. Béla's brother had arrived in the meanwhile
from Arad, where he was the manager of an important grain store, and he
it was who gave all directions and all the money necessary that his
brother should have obsequies befitting his rank and wealth.
The church was beautifully decorated: there were huge bunches of white
flowers upon the altar, and eight village lads carried the dead man to
his last resting-place; and no less than thirty Masses were ordered to
be said within the next year for the repose of the soul of one who in
life had enjoyed so much prosperity and consideration.
And in the tiny graveyard situated among the maize-fields to the north
of Marosfalva, and which is the local Jewish burial ground, the suicide
was quietly laid to rest. There was no religious service, for there was
no minister of his religion present; an undertaker came down from Arad
and saw to it all; there was no concourse of people, no singing, no
flowers. Ignácz Goldstein--home the day before from Kecskemét--alone
followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from the village to
the field.
It was the shop assistant who had seen to it all. He had gone up to Arad
and seen a married sister of his late master's--Sara Rosen, whose
husband kept a second-hand clothes shop there, and who gave full
instructions to an undertaker whilst declaring herself unable--owing to
delicate health--to attend the funeral herself.
The undertaker had provided a cart and a couple of oxen and two men to
lift the coffin in and out. They came late on the Thursday evening, at
about eight o'clock, and drew up at the back of the late Leopold
Hirsch's shop. No one was about and the night was dark.
Slowly the cart, creaking on its wheels and axles, wound its way through
some maize stubble, up a soft, sandy road to the enclosed little bit of
ground which the local Jews have reserved for themselves.
And the mysterious veil which divides the present from the past fell
quickly over this act of the village tragedy, as it had done with pomp
and circumstance after the banquet which followed the laying to rest of
the murdered man.