Part 6 (1/2)

At sight of Elsa his wrinkled face, which was so like that of a corpse, brightened visibly. She ran to him and said something in his ear which caused his dulled eyes to gleam with momentary pleasure.

”What did you bring Bela home with you for?” said the mother ungraciously, speaking to her daughter and rudely ignoring the young man, who had thrown his hat down and drawn one of the chairs close to the table. At Kapus Irma's inhospitable words he merely laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

”Well, Irma neni!” he said, ”this is the last Sunday, anyhow, that you will be troubled with my presence. After Wednesday, as I shall have Elsa in my own home, I shall not need to come and visit here.”

”No!” retorted Irma, with a snap of her lean jaws, ”you will take good care to alienate her from her duty to her father and to her mother, won't you?”

Then, in answer to a further sneer from him, she added, more viciously: ”You will teach her to be purse-proud like yourself--vain, and disdainful of her old home.”

Bela's one eye--under the distorted brow--wandered with a sullen expression of contempt over every individual piece of furniture in the room.

”It's not a home to be proud of, anyway,” he said dryly; ”is it, Irma neni?”

”You chose your future wife out of it,” retorted Irma; ”and 'tis from here that you will have to fetch her on Wednesday, my friend.”

She was always ready to quarrel with Bela, whose sneering ways she resented, all the more that she knew they were well-deserved. But her last words had apparently poured oil over the already troubled waters of the young man's wrath, for now his sullen expression vanished, and a light of satisfaction and of pride lit up his ungainly face:

”And I will fetch my future wife in a style befitting her new position, you may be sure of that,” he said, and brought his clenched fist down upon the table with a crash, so that pots and pans rattled upon the hearth and started the paralytic from his torpor.

Then he threw his head back and began to talk still more arrogantly and defiantly than he had done hitherto.

”Forty-eight oxen,” he said, ”shall fetch her in six carts! Aye! even though she has not one stick of furniture wherewith to endow her future husband. Forty-eight oxen, I tell you, Irma neni! Never has there been such a procession seen in Marosfalva! But Eros Bela is the richest man in the Commune,” he added, with an aggressive laugh, ”and don't you forget it.”

But the allusion to Elsa's poverty and his own riches had exasperated the old woman.

”With all your riches,” she retorted, in her turn, with a sneer, ”you had to court Elsa for many years before she accepted you.”

”And probably she would not have accepted me at all if you had not bullied and worried her, and ordered her to say 'Yes' to me,” he rejoined dryly.

”Children must obey their parents,” she said, ”it is the law of G.o.d.”

”A law which you, for one, apply to your own advantage, eh, Irma neni?”

”Have you any cause for complaint?”

”Oh, no! Elsa's obedience has served me well. And though I dare say,” he added, suddenly casting a sullen look upon the young girl, ”she has not much love for me now, she will do her duty by me as my wife, and love will follow in the natural course of things.”

Elsa had taken no part in this wordy warfare between her mother and her future husband. It seemed almost as if she had not heard a word of it.

No doubt her ears were trained by now no longer to heed these squabbles.

She had drawn a low stool close to the invalid's chair, and sitting near him with her hand resting on his knee, she was whispering and talking animatedly to him, telling him all the gossip of the village, recounting to him every small event of the afternoon and of the morning: Pater Bonifacius' sermon, the behaviour of the choir boys, Patkos Emma's new kerchief; when the stock of gossip gave out she began to sing to him, in a low, sweet voice, one of those innumerable folk-songs so dear to every Hungarian peasant's heart.

Irma intercepted the look which Bela cast upon his fiancee. She, too, turned and looked at her daughter, and seeing her there, sitting at the feet of that miserable wreck of humanity whom she called ”father!”

ministering to him, for all the world like the angels around the dying saints, a swift look of pity softened for a moment the mother's hard and pinched face.

”You cannot expect the girl to have much love for you now,” she said, once more turning a vicious glance upon her future son-in-law; ”your mode of courts.h.i.+p was not very tender, you will admit.”

”I don't believe in all that silly love-making,” he rejoined roughly, ”it is good enough for the loutish peasants of the _alfold_ (lowlands); they are sentimental and stupid: an educated man does not make use of a lot of twaddle when he woos the woman of his choice.”