A Bride of the Plains. Emma Orczy
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grazed the girl's bare shoulder, and noted the quiver which went right through the young, slender body and the look that shot through the quickly-veiled blue eyes.
He was only a peasant, a rough son of the soil, whose temperament was hot with passion and whose temper had never known a curb. He had never realized until this moment how beautiful Elsa was, and how madly he loved her. For he called the jealous rage within by the sacred name of love, and love to a Magyar peasant is his whole existence, the pivot round which he frames his life, his thoughts of the present, his dreams of the future.
The soil and the woman! – they are his passions, his desires, his religion – to own a bit of land – of Hungarian land – and the woman whom he loves. Those two possessions will satisfy him – beyond these there is nothing worth having – a plough, of course – a hut wherein to sleep – an ox or two, perhaps – a cow – a horse.
But the soil and the woman on whom he has fixed his love – we'll call it love.. he certainly calls it so – those two possessions make the Hungarian peasant more contented than any king or millionaire of Western civilization.
Erös Béla had the land. His father left him a dozen kataszter (land measure about two and three-quarter acres) or so; Elsa was the woman whom he loved, and the only question was who – he or Andor – would be strong enough to gain the object of his desire.
CHAPTER III
But now it is all over, the final bar of the csárdás has been played, the last measure trodden. From the railway station far away the sharp clang of a bell has announced the doleful fact that in half an hour the train will start for Arad, thence to Brassó, where the recruits will be enrolled, ticketed, docketed like so many heads of cattle – mostly unwilling – made to do service for their country.
In half an hour the train starts, and there is so much still to say that has been left unsaid, so many kisses to exchange, so many promises, protestations, oaths.
The mothers, fearful and fussy, look for their sons in among the crowd like hens in search of their chicks; their wizened faces are hard and wrinkled like winter apples, they carry huge baskets on their arms, over-filled with the last delicacies which their fond, toil-worn hands will prepare for the beloved son for the next three years: – a piece of smoked bacon, a loaf of rye bread, a cake of maize-flour.
The lads themselves – excited after the dance, and not quite as clear-headed as they were before that last cask of Hungarian wine was tapped in Ignácz Goldstein's cellar – feel the intoxication of the departure now, the quick good-byes, the women's tears. A latent spirit of adventure smothers their sorrow at leaving home.
The gipsies have struck up a melancholy Magyar folksong; the crowd breaks up in isolated groups, mothers and fathers with their sons whisper in the dark corners of the barn. The father who did his service thirty years ago gives sundry good advice – no rebellion, quiet obedience, no use complaining or grumbling, the three years are quickly over. The mother begs her darling not to give way to drink, and not to get entangled with one of the hussies in the towns; women and wine, the two besetting temptations that assail the Magyar peasant – let the darling boy resist both for his sorrowing mother's sake.
But the lad only listens with half an ear, his dark eyes roam around the barn in search of the sweetheart; he wants one more protestation of love from her lips, one final oath of fidelity.
Andor has neither father to admonish him, nor mother to pray over him; the rich uncle Lakatos Pál, with whom he has lived hitherto, does not care enough about him to hang weeping round his neck.
And Elsa has given her father and mother the slip, and joined Andor outside the barn.
Her blue eyes – tired after fifteen hours of pleasure – blink in the glare of the brilliant sun. Andor puts his arm round her waist and she, closing her aching eyes, allows him to lead her away.
And now they are wandering down the great dusty high road, beneath the sparse shade of the stunted acacias that border it. They feel neither heat, nor dust, and say but little as they walk. From behind them, muffled by louder sounds, come the sweet, sad strains of the Magyar love-song, "Csak egy kis lány van a világon."
"There is but one girl in all the world,
And she is my own white dove.
Oh! How great must God's love be for me!
That He thought of giving you to me."
"Elsa, you will wait for me?" asked Andor, with deep, passionate anxiety at last.
"I will wait for you, Andor," replied the girl simply, "if the good God will give me the strength."
"The strength, Elsa, will be in yourself," he urged, "if only you love me as I love you."
"Three years is such a long time!" she sighed.
"I will count the weeks that separate us, Elsa – the days – the hours – "
"I, too, will be counting them."
"When I come back I will at once talk with Pali bácsi – he is getting tired of managing his property – I know that at times lately he has felt that he needed a rest, and that he means to ask me to see to everything for him. He will give me that nice little house on the Fekete Road, and the mill to look after. We can get married at once, Elsa – when I come back."
He talked on somewhat ramblingly, at times incoherently. It was easy to see that he was trying to cheat sorrow, to appear cheerful and hopeful, because he saw that Elsa was quite ready to give way to tears. It was so hard to walk out of fairyland just when she had entered it, and found it more beautiful than anything else in life. The paths looked so smooth and so inviting, and fairy forms beckoned to her from afar; it all would have been so easy, if only the good God had willed it so. She thought of the many sins which – in her innocent life – she had committed, and for which Pater Bonifácius had given her absolution; perhaps if she had been better – been more affectionate with her mother, more forbearing with her father, the good God would have allowed her to have this happiness in full which now appeared so shadowy.
She fell to wishing that Andor had not been quite so fine and quite so strong, that his chest had been narrower, or his eyesight less keen. Womanlike, she felt that she would have loved him just as much and more, if he were less vigorous, less powerful; and in that case the wicked government would not want him; he could stay at home and help Pali bácsi to look after his lands and his mills, and she could marry him before the spring.
Then the pressure of his arm round her waist recalled her to herself; she turned and met his glowing, compelling eyes, she felt that wonderful vitality in him which made him what he was, strong in body and strong in soul; his love was strong because his body was strong, as was his soul, his spirit and his limbs, and she no longer wished him to be weak and delicate, for then it would no longer be Andor – the Andor whom she loved.
The clang of the distant bell chased away Elsa's last hovering dreams. Andor did not hear it; he was pressing the girl closer and closer to him, unmindful of his surroundings, unmindful that he was on the high road, and that frequently ox-carts went by laden with people, and that passers-by were hurrying now toward the railway station.
True that no one took any notice of this young man and maid; everyone was either too much absorbed in the business of the morning, or too much accustomed to these final scenes of farewell and tenderness ere the lads went off for their three years' service, to throw more than a cursory glance on these two.
"I love you, Elsa, my dove, my rose," Andor reiterated over and over again; "you will wait for my return, will you not?"
"I will wait, Andor," replied the girl through her sobs.
"The thought of you will lighten my nights, and bring sunshine to my dreary days. Every morning and every evening when I say my prayers, I shall ask my guardian angel to fly over to yours, and to tell him to whisper in your ear that I love you beyond all else on earth."
"We must part now, Andor," she said earnestly, "the second bell has gone long ago."
"Not yet, Elsa, not yet," he pleaded; "just walk as far as that next