A Bride of the Plains

"You don't know what Klara is waiting for?" asked Béla, with an evil sneer; "why, my dove, you must be dreaming. Klara won't come to our church, of course, but she would like to come to the ball presently, and to-morrow to our wedding feast."

A second or perhaps less went by while Elsa passed her tongue over her parched lips; then she said slowly:

"Since Klara does not go to our church, Béla, I don't think that she can possibly want to come to our wedding feast."

Béla swore a loud and angry oath, and Andor, who was closely watching each player in this moving little drama, saw that Klara's olive skin had taken on a greenish hue, and that her gloved hands fastened almost convulsively over the handle of her parasol.

"But I tell you." began Béla, who was now livid with rage, and turned with a menacing gesture upon his fiancée, "I tell you that."

Already Andor had interposed; he, too, was pale and menacing, but he did not raise his voice nor did he swear, he only asked very quietly:

"What will you tell your fiancée, man? Come! What is it that you want to tell her on the eve of her wedding day?"

"What's that to you?" retorted Béla.

In this land where tempers run high, and blood courses hotly through the veins, a quarrel swiftly begun like this more often than not ends in tragedy. On Andor's face, in his menacing eyes, was writ the determination to kill if need be; in that of Béla there was the vicious snarl of an infuriated dog. Klara Goldstein was far too shrewd and prudent to allow her name to be mixed up in this kind of quarrel. Her reputation in the village was not an altogether unblemished one; by a scandal such as would result from a fight between these two men and for such a cause she might hopelessly jeopardize her chances in life, even with her own people.

Her own common sense, too, of which she had a goodly share, told her at the same time that the game was not worth the candle: the satisfaction of being asked to the most important wedding in the village, and there queening it with her fashionable clothes and with the bridegroom's undivided attention over a lot of stupid village folk, would not really compensate her for the scandal that was evidently brewing in the minds of Andor and of Elsa.

So she preferred for the nonce to play the part of outraged innocence, a part which she further emphasized by the display of easy-going kindliness. She placed one of her daintily-gloved hands on Béla's arm, she threw him a look of understanding and of indulgence, she cast a provoking glance on Andor and one of good-humoured contempt on Elsa, then she said lightly:

"Never mind, Béla! I can see that our little Elsa is a trifle nervy to-day; she does me more honour than I deserve by resenting your great kindness to me. But bless you, my good Béla! I don't mind. I am used to jealousies: the petty ones of my own sex are quite endurable; it is when you men are jealous that we poor women often have to suffer. Leopold Hirsch, who is courting me, you know, is so madly jealous at times. He scarce can bear anyone to look at me. As if I could help not being plain, eh?"

Then she turned with a smile to Elsa.

"I don't think, my dear," she said dryly, "that you are treating Béla quite fairly. He won't let you suffer from his jealousies; why should you annoy him with yours?"

Another glance through her long, dark lashes on both the men, and Klara Goldstein turned to go. But before she could take a step toward the door, Béla's masterful hand was on her wrist.

"What are you doing?" he asked roughly.

"Going, my good Béla," she replied airily, "going. What else can I do? I am not wanted here now, or later at your feast; but there are plenty in this village and around it who will make me welcome, and their company will be more pleasing to me, I assure you, than that of your friends. We thought of having some tarok5 this evening. Leopold will be with us, and the young Count is coming. He loves a gamble, and is most amusing when he is in the mood. So I am going where I shall be most welcome, you see."

She tried to disengage her wrist, but he was holding her with a tight, nervous grip.

"You are not going to do anything of the sort," he muttered hoarsely; "she is daft, I tell you. Stay here, can't you?"

"Not I," she retorted, with a laugh. "Enough of your friends' company, my good Béla, is as good as a feast. Look at Elsa's face! And Andor's! He is ready to eat me, and she to freeze the marrow in my bones. So farewell, my dear man; if you want any more of my company," she added pointedly, "you know where to get it."

She had succeeded in freeing her wrist, and the next moment was standing under the lintel of the door, the afternoon sun shining full upon her clinging gown, her waving feathers and the gew-gaws which hung round her neck. For a moment she stood still, blinking in the glare, her hands, which trembled a little from the emotion of the past little scene, fumbled with her parasol.

Béla turned like a snarling beast upon his fiancée.

"Ask her to stop," he cried savagely. "Ask her to stop, I tell you!"

"Keep your temper, my good Béla," said Klara over her shoulder to him, with a laugh; "and don't trouble about me. I am used to tantrums at home. Leo is a terror when he has a jealous fit, but it's nothing to me, I assure you! His rage leaves me quite cold."

"But this sort of nonsense does not leave me cold," retorted Béla, who by now was in a passion of fury; "it makes my blood boil, I tell you. What I've said, I've said, and I'm not going to let any woman set her will up against mine, least of all the woman who is going to be my wife. Whether you go or stay, Klara, is your affair, but Elsa will damn well have to ask you to stay, as I told her to do; she'll have to do as I tell her, or."

"Or what, Béla?" interposed Andor quietly.

Béla threw him a dark and sullen look, like an infuriated bull that pauses just before it is ready to charge.

"What is it to you?" he muttered savagely.

"Only this, my friend," replied Andor, who seemed as calm as the other was heated with passion, "only this: that I courted and loved Elsa when she was younger and happier than she is now, and I am not going to stand by and see her bullied and brow-beaten by anyone. Understand?"

"Take care, Béla," laughed Klara maliciously; "your future wife's old sweetheart might win her from you yet."

"Take care of what?" shouted Béla in unbridled rage. He faced Andor, and his one sinister eye shot a glance of deadly hatred upon him. "Let me tell you this, my friend, Lakatos Andor. I don't know where you have sprung from to-day, or why you have chosen to-day to do it.. and it's nothing to me. But understand that I don't like your presence here, and that I did not invite you to come, and that therefore you have no business to be here, seeing that I pay for the feast. And understand too that I'll trouble my future wife's sweetheart to relieve her of his presence in future, or there'll be trouble. And you may take that from me, as my last word, my friend. Understand?"

"What an ass you are, Béla!" came as a parting shot from Klara, who had succeeded in opening her parasol, and now stood out in the open, her face and shoulders in shadow, looking the picture of coolness and of good-temper.

"Andor," she added, with a pleasing smile to the young man, "you know your way to Ignácz Goldstein's. Father and I will be pleased to see you there at any time. The young Count will be there to-night, and we'll have some tarok. Farewell, Béla," she continued, laughing merrily. "Don't worry, my good man, it's not worth losing your temper about trifles on the eve of your wedding-day. And bless your eyes! I don't mind."

Then she swept a mock curtsy to Elsa.

"Farewell, my pretty one. Good luck to you in your new life."

She nodded and was gone. Her rippling laugh, with its harsh, ironical ring was heard echoing down the village street.

"Call her back!" shouted Béla savagely, turning on his fiancée.

She looked him straight in that one eye which was so full of menace, and said with meek but firm obstinacy:

"I will not."

"Call her back," he exclaimed, "you."

He was almost choking with rage, and now he raised his clenched fist and brandished it in her face.

"Call her back, or I'll."

But already Andor was upon him, had seized him by collar and wrist. He was as livid as the other man was crimson, but his eyes glowed with a fury at least as passionate.

"And I tell you," he said, speaking almost in a whisper, very slowly and very calmly, but with such compelling power of determination that Béla, taken unawares, half-choked with the grip on his throat, and in agonized pain with the rough turn on his wrist, was forced to cower before him, "I tell you that if you dare touch her.. Look here, my friend," he continued, more loudly, "just now you said that you didn't know where I'd sprung from to-day, or why I chose to-day in which to do it. Well! Let me tell you then. God in Heaven sent me, do you see? He sent me to be here so as to see that no harm come to Elsa through marrying a brute like you. You have shown me the door, and I don't want to eat your salt again and to take your hospitality, for it would choke me, I know.. but let me tell you this much, that if you bully Elsa.. if you don't make her happy.. if you are not kind to her.. I'll make you regret it to your dying day."

He had gradually relaxed his hold on Béla's throat and wrist, and now the latter was able to free himself altogether, and to readjust his collar and the set of his coat. For a moment it almost seemed as if he felt ashamed and repentant. But his obstinate and domineering temper quickly got the better of this softened mood.

"You'll make me regret it, will you?" he retorted sullenly. "You think that you will be allowed to play the guardian angel here, eh? with all your fine talk of God in Heaven, which I am inclined to think even the Pater would call blasphemy. I know what's at the back of your mind, my friend, don't you make any mistake about that."

"You know what's at the back of my mind?" queried Andor, with a puzzled frown. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," said Béla, with a return to his former swagger, "that you have been saying to yourself this past half-hour: 'Oho! but Elsa is not married yet! The vows are not yet spoken, and until they are I still have my chance.' That's what you have been saying to yourself, eh, Mr. Guardian Angel?"

"You d – d liar!"

"Oh! insulting me won't help you, my friend. And I am not going to let you provoke me into a fight, and kill me perhaps, for no doubt that is what you would like to do. I am not going to give Elsa up to you, you need not think it; and you can't take her from me, you can't make her break her solemn promise to me, without covering her with a disgrace from which she would never recover. You know what happened when Bakó Mariska broke off her marriage on the eve of her wedding-day, just because Lajos had got drunk once or twice? Though her mother whipped her for her obstinacy, and her father broke his stick across her shoulders, the whole countryside turned against her. They all had to leave the village, for no one would speak to Mariska. A scandal such as that the ignorant peasants round about here will never forgive. Mariska ultimately drowned herself in the Maros: when she no longer could stand the disgrace that pursued her everywhere. When you thought that to make a girl break off her engagement the day before her wedding was such an easy matter, you had not thought of all that, had you, my friend?"

"And when you thought of frightening me by all that nonsensical talk," retorted Andor quietly, "you had not thought perhaps that there are other lands in the world besides Hungary, and that I am not quite such an ignorant peasant as those whom you choose to despise. But you have been wasting your breath and your temper. I am not here to try and persuade Elsa into doing what she would think wrong; but I am here to see that at least you be kind to her."

"Pshaw!" ejaculated Béla, with a contemptuous snap of his fingers.

"Oh! you need not imagine that I wouldn't know how you treated her. I would know soon enough. I tell you," he continued, with slow and deliberate emphasis, "that what you do to her I shall know. I shall know if you bully her, I shall know if you make her unhappy. I shall know – and God help you in that case! – if you are not kind to her. Just think in future when you speak a rough word to her that Lakatos Andor will hear you and make you pay for every syllable. Think when you browbeat her that Lakatos Andor can see you! For I will see you, I tell you, in spite of your turning me out of your house, in spite of your fences and your walls. So just you ask her pardon now for your roughness, kiss her little hand and take her to vespers. But take this from me, my friend, that if you ever dare raise your hand against your wife I'll pay you out for it, so help me God!"

He had sworn the last oath with solemn earnestness. Now he turned to Elsa and took her cold little hand in his and kissed her trembling finger-tips, then, without another look on the man whom he hated with such an overwhelming and deadly hatred, he turned on his heel and fled precipitately from the room.

Béla stood sullen and silent for a moment after he had gone. Wrath was still heating his blood so that the veins in his forehead stood up like cords. But he was not only wrathful, he also felt humiliated and ashamed. He had been cowed and overmastered in the presence of Elsa. His swagger and domineering ways had availed him nothing. Andor had threatened him and he had not had the pluck or the presence of mind to stand up to that meddling, interfering peasant.

Now it was too late to do anything; the thoughts of retaliation which would come to his mind later on had not yet had the time to mature. All that he knew was that he hated Andor and would get even with him some day; for Elsa he felt no hatred, only a great wrath that she should have witnessed his humiliation and that her obstinacy should have triumphed against his will. The same pride in her and the same loveless desire was still in him. He did not hate her, but he meant to make her suffer for what he had just gone through. To him matrimony meant the complete subjection of the woman to the will of her lord; for every rebellion, for every struggle against that subjection she must be punished in accordance with the gravity of her fault.

Elsa had caused him to be humiliated, and it was his firm resolve to humiliate her before many hours had gone by. Already a plan was forming in his brain; the quietude of vespers would, he thought, help him to complete it.

Outside, the lads and maids were loudly demanding the appearance of the bride and bridegroom: the vesper bell had long ago ceased its compelling call. Erös Béla offered his silent fiancée his arm. She took it without hesitation, and together they walked across the square to the church.

CHAPTER XVIII

"I must punish her."

The little village inn kept by Ignácz Goldstein was not more squalid, not more dark and stuffy, than are the village inns of most countries in Europe. Klara did her best to keep the place bright and clean, which was no easy matter when the roads were muddy and men brought in most of the mud of those roads on their boots, and deposited it on the freshly-washed floors.

The tap-room was low and narrow and dark. Round the once whitewashed walls there were rows of wooden benches with narrow trestle tables in front of them. Opposite the front door, on a larger table, were the bottles of wine and silvorium,6 the jars of tobacco and black cigars, which a beneficent government licensed Ignácz Goldstein the Jew to sell to the peasantry.

The little room obtained its daylight mainly from the street-door when it was open, for the one tiny window – on the right as you entered – was not constructed to open, and its dulled glass masked more of daylight than it allowed to filtrate through.

Opposite the window a narrow door led into a couple of living rooms, the first of which also had direct access to the street.

The tap-room itself was always crowded and always busy, the benches round the walls were always occupied, and Klara and her father were never allowed to remain idle for long. She dispensed the wine and the silvorium, and made herself agreeable to the guests. Ignácz saw to the tobacco and the cigars. Village women in Hungary never frequent the public inn: when they do, it is because they have sunk to the lowest depths of degradation: a woman in drink is practically an unknown sight in the land.

Klara herself, though her ways with the men were as free and easy as those of her type and class usually are, would never have dreamed of drinking with any of them.

This evening she was unusually busy. While the wedding feast was going on lower down in the village, a certain number of men who liked stronger fare than what is usually provided at a "maiden's farewell" dance, as well as those who had had no claim to be invited, strolled into the tap-room for a draught of silvorium, a gossip with the Jewess, or a game of tarok if any were going.

Ignácz Goldstein himself was fond of a game. Like most of his race, his habits were strictly sober. As he kept a cool head, he usually won; and his winnings at tarok made a substantial addition to the income which he made by selling spirits and tobacco. Leopold Hirsch, who kept the village grocery store, was also an inveterate player, and, like Goldstein, a very steady winner. But it was not the chance of a successful gamble which brought him so often to the tap-room. For years now he had dangled round Klara's fashionable skirts, and it seemed as if at last his constancy was to be rewarded. While she was younger – and was still of surpassing beauty – she had had wilder flights of ambition than those which would lead her to rule over a village grocery store: during those times she had allowed Leopold Hirsch to court her, without giving him more than very cursory encouragement.

As the years went on, however, and her various admirers from Arad proved undesirous to go to the length of matrimony, she felt more kindly disposed toward Leo, who periodically offered her his heart and hand, and the joint ownership of the village grocery store. She had looked into her little piece of mirror rather more closely of late than she had done hitherto, and had discovered two or three ominous lines round her fine, almond-shaped eyes, and noted that her nose showed of late a more marked tendency to make close acquaintance with her chin.

Then she began to ponder, and to give the future more serious consideration than she had ever done before. She ticked off on her long, pointed fingers the last bevy of her admirers on whom she might reasonably count: the son of the chemist over in Arad, the tenant of the Kender Road farm, the proprietor of the station cabs, and there were two or three others; but they were certainly falling away, and she had added no new ones to her list these past six months.

Erös Béla's formally declared engagement to Kapus Elsa had been a very severe blow. She had really reckoned on Béla. He was educated and unconventional, and though he professed the usual anti-Semitic views peculiar to his kind, Klara did not believe that these were very genuine. At any rate, she had reckoned that her fine eyes and provocative ways would tilt successfully against the man's racial prejudices.

Erös Béla was rich and certainly, up to a point, in love with her. Klara was congratulating herself on the way she was playing her matrimonial cards, when all her hopes were so suddenly dashed to the ground.

Béla was going to marry that silly, ignorant peasant girl, and she, Klara, would be left to marry Leopold after all.

Her anger and humiliation had been very great, and she had battled very persistently and very ably to regain the prize which she had lost. She knew quite well that, but for the fact that she belonged to the alien and despised race, Erös Béla would have been only too happy to marry her. His vanity alone had made him choose Kapus Elsa. He wanted the noted beauty for himself, because the noted beauty had been courted by so many people, and where so many people had failed he was proud to succeed.

Nor would he have cared to have it said that he had married a Jewess. There is always a certain thought of disgrace attached to such a marriage, whether it has been contracted by peer or peasant, and Erös Béla's one dominating idea in life was to keep the respect and deference of his native village.

But he had continued his attentions to Klara, and Klara had kept a wonderful hold over his imagination and over his will. She was the one woman who had ever had her will with him – only partially, of course, and not to the extent of forcing him into matrimony – but sufficiently to keep him also dangling round her skirts even though his whole allegiance should have belonged to Elsa.

The banquet this afternoon had been a veritable triumph. Whatever she had suffered through Béla's final disloyalty to herself, she knew that Kapus Elsa must have suffered all through the banquet. The humiliation of seeing one's bridegroom openly flaunting his admiration for another woman must have been indeed very bitter to bear.

Not for a moment did Klara Goldstein doubt that the subsequent scene was an act of vengeance against herself on Elsa's part. She judged other women by her own standard, discounted other women's emotions, thoughts, feelings, by her own. She thought it quite natural that Elsa should wish to be revenged, just as she was quite sure that Béla was already meditating some kind of retaliation for the shame which Andor had put upon him and for Elsa's obstinacy and share in the matter.

She had not spoken to anyone of the little scene which had occurred between the four walls of the little schoolroom: on the contrary she had spoken loudly of both the bridegroom's and the bride's cordiality to her during the banquet.

"Elsa wanted me to go to the dancing this evening," she said casually, "but I thought you would all miss me. I didn't want this place to be dull just because half the village is enjoying itself somewhere else."

It had been market day at Arad, and at about five o'clock Klara and her father became very busy. Cattle-dealers and pig-merchants, travellers and pedlars, dropped in for a glass of silvorium and a chat with the good-looking Jewess. More than one bargain, discussed on the marketplace of Arad, was concluded in the stuffy tap-room of Marosfalva.

"Shall we be honoured by the young Count's presence later on?" someone asked, with a significant nod to Klara.

Everyone laughed in sympathy; the admiration of the noble young Count for Klara Goldstein was well-known. There was nothing in it, of course; even Klara, vain and ambitious as she was, knew that the bridge which divided the aristocrat from one of her kind and of her race was an impassable one. But she liked the young Count's attentions – she liked the presents he brought her from time to time, and relished the notoriety which this flirtation gave her.

She also loved to tease poor Leopold Hirsch. Leo had been passionately in love with her for years; what he must have endured in moral and mental torture during that time through his jealousy and often groundless suspicions no one who did not know him intimately could ever have guessed. These tortures which Klara wantonly inflicted upon the wretched young man had been a constant source of amusement to her. Even now she was delighted because, as luck would have it, he entered the tap-room at the very moment when everyone was chaffing her about the young Count.

Leopold Hirsch cast a quick, suspicious glance upon the girl, and his dull olive skin assumed an almost greenish hue. He was not of prepossessing appearance; this he knew himself, and the knowledge helped to keep his jealousy and his suspicion aflame.

He was short and lean of stature and his head, with its large, bony features, seemed too big for his narrow shoulders to carry. His ginger-coloured hair was lank and scanty; he wore it – after the manner of those of his race in that part of the world – in corkscrew ringlets down each side of his narrow, cadaverous-looking face.

His eyes were pale and shifty, but every now and then there shot into them a curious gleam of unbridled passion – love, hate or revenge; and then the whole face would light up and compel attention by the revelation of latent power.