Part 36 (2/2)

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 Eros Bela'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 grat.i.tude.

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 Ignacz 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. Ignacz 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 Ma.s.s 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 Bonifacius 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 Ma.s.s, but that her eyes were swollen and her cheeks puffy from having cried all the night and all the day before.

After Ma.s.s 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. Bela'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 Ma.s.ses 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. Ignacz Goldstein--home the day before from Kecskemet--alone followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from the village to the field.

It was the shop a.s.sistant 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 circ.u.mstance after the banquet which followed the laying to rest of the murdered man.

CHAPTER XXIX

”Some day.”

A week went by after the funeral before Elsa saw Andor again. She had not purposely avoided him, any more than she had avoided everyone else: but unlike most girls of her cla.s.s and of her nationality she had felt a great desire to be alone during the most acute period of this life's crisis through which she was pa.s.sing just now.

At first on that never-to-be-forgotten morning when she woke to her wedding-day--her white veil and wreath of artificial white roses lying conspicuously on the top of the chest of drawers, so that her eyes were bound to alight on them the moment they opened--and saw her mother standing beside her bed, dishevelled, pale, and obviously labouring under some terrible excitement, she had been conscious as of an awful blow on the head, a physical sensation of numbness and of pain.

Even before she had had time to formulate a question she knew that some terrible calamity had occurred. In jerky phrases, broken by moans and interjections, the mother had blurted out the news: Eros Bela was dead--he had been found just now--murdered outside Klara Goldstein's door--there would be no wedding--Elsa was a widow before she had been a bride. Half the village was inclined to believe that Ignacz Goldstein had done the deed in a moment of angry pa.s.sion, finding Bela sneaking round his daughter's door when he himself was going away from home--others boldly accused Andor.

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