A Bride of the Plains Part 20

Bela 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, Eros Bela 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 Eros Bela'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 Bela'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 Bela 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 gla.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 impa.s.sable 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 pa.s.sionately 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+fty, but every now and then there shot into them a curious gleam of unbridled pa.s.sion--love, hate or revenge; and then the whole face would light up and compel attention by the revelation of latent power.

This had happened now when a fellow who sat in the corner by the window made some rough jest about the young Count. Leopold made his way to Klara's side; his thin lips were tightly pressed together, and he had buried his hands in the pockets of his ill-fitting trousers.

"If that accursed aristocrat comes hanging round here much more, Klara," he muttered between set teeth, "I'll kill him one of these days."

"What a fool you are, Leopold!" she said. "Why, yesterday it was Eros Bela you objected to."

"And I do still," he retorted. "I heard of your conduct at the banquet to-day. It is the talk of the village. One by one these loutish peasants have come into my shop and told me the tale--curse them!--of how the bridegroom had eyes and ears only for you. You seem to forget, Klara,"

he added, while a thought of menace crept into his voice, "that you are tokened to me now. So don't try and make a fool of me, or . . ."

"The Lord bless you, my good man," she retorted, with a laugh, "I won't try, I promise you. I wouldn't like to compete with the Almighty, who has done that for you already."

"Klara . . ." he exclaimed.

"Oh! be quiet now, Leo," she said impatiently. "Can't you see that my hands are as full as I can manage, without my having to bother about you and your jealous tempers?"

She elbowed him aside and went to the counter to serve a customer who had just arrived, and more than a quarter of an hour went by before Leopold had the chance of another word with her.

"You might have a kind word for me to-night, Klara," he said ruefully, as soon as a brief lull in business enabled him to approach the girl.

"Why specially to-night?" she asked indifferently.

"Your father must go by the night train to Kecskemet," he said, with seeming irrelevance. "There is that business about the plums."

"The plums?" she asked, with a frown of puzzlement, "what plums?"

"The fruit he bought near Kecskemet. They start gathering at sunrise to-morrow. He must be there the first hour, else he'd get shamefully robbed. He must travel by night."

"I knew nothing about it," rejoined Klara, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. "Father never tells me when he is going to be away from home."

"No!" retorted Leopold, with a sneer, "he knows better than to give all your gallants such a brilliant opportunity."

"Don't be a fool, Leo!" she reiterated with a laugh.

"I don't give any of them an opportunity, either," resumed the young man, while a curious look of almost animal ferocity crept into his pale face. "Whenever your father has to be away from home during the night, I take up my position outside this house and watch over you until daylight comes and people begin to come and go."

"Very thoughtful of you, my good Leo," she rejoined dryly, "but you need not give yourself the trouble. I am well able to look after myself."

"If any man molested you," continued Leopold, speaking very calmly, "I would kill him."

"Who should molest me, you silly fool? And anyhow, I won't have you spying upon me like that."

"You must not call it spying, Klara. I love to stand outside this house in the peace and darkness of the night, and to think of you quietly sleeping whilst I am keeping watch over you. You wouldn't call a watchdog a spy, would you?"

"I know that to-night I shan't sleep a wink," she retorted crossly, "once father has gone. I shall always be thinking of you out there in the dark, watching this house. It will make me nervous."

"To-night . . ." he began, and then abruptly checked himself. Once more that quick flash of pa.s.sion shot through his pale, deep-set eyes. It seemed as if he meant to tell her something, which on second thoughts he decided to keep to himself. Her keen, dark eyes searched his face for a moment or two; she wondered what it was that lurked behind that high, smooth forehead of his and within the depths of that curiously perverted brain.

Before she had time, however, to question him, Eros Bela made noisy irruption into the room.

He was greeted with a storm of cheers.

"h.e.l.lo, Bela!"

"Not the bridegroom, surely?"

"Who would have thought of seeing you here?"

While Leopold Hirsch muttered audibly:

"What devil's mischief has brought this fellow here to-day, I wonder?"

Bela seemed in boisterous good-humour--with somewhat ostentatious hilarity he greeted all his friends, and then ordered some of Ignacz Goldstein's best wine for everybody all round.

"Bravo, Bela!" came from every side, together with loud applause at this unexpected liberality.

"It is nice of you not to forget old friends," Klara whispered in his ear, as soon as he succeeded in reaching her side.

"Whew!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with a sneer, "you have no idea, my good Klara, how I've been boring myself these past two hours. Those loutish peasants have no idea of enjoyment save their eternal gipsy music and their interminable csardas."