Читать книгу A Son of the People - Baroness Orczy - Страница 6

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All was astir in the castle, in the stables, the farmyard, the park and garden of Bideskút. The innumerable grooms, coachmen, cooks, and maids rushed hither and thither, like so many chickens let loose, busy, each with his or her own work, hot, panting, and excited. The Countess, herself, accustomed as she was to the boundless hospitality of a Hungarian nobleman, could not quite shake off the electrical wave of excitement which pervaded the whole house. The festivals in honour of her birthday, coupled with those for the opening of the new steam-mill, were in full preparation. To-day, still, the big house was fairly free from guests; but to-morrow, probably, the stream of arrivals would commence, and would continue throughout the day.

As to the numbers of the invaders it was wholly problematical: it was generally known throughout the county that the 28th of August was Countess Irma’s birthday, that Bideskút itself had some sixty guest chambers, and that any Hungarian noble, far or near, with all his family, was sure, during the few days’ gaiety by which the occasion was annually celebrated, to find the warmest welcome, the most lavish hospitality, the richest and choicest of wines, in the time-honoured traditions of the Hungarian lowland.

Therefore Bideskúty Gyuri,and the Countess Irma, his wife, were at this season of the year always prepared to receive a number of guests; oxen, sheep, and lambs were indiscriminately slaughtered, also geese, ducks, poultry of every kind; the whitest of bread baked, the oldest casks of wine tapped, the finest cloths, sheets, and napkins aired, all ready for the probable hundred guests, their children, their coachmen and valets, their couriers, and their maids.

In one of the old-fashioned, lofty rooms of the ancestral home of Bideskút, the lord thereof and his aristocratic wife sat discussing the final arrangements for the entertainment of all the expected and unexpected guests. Fine old oak and mahogany chairs and tables, turned and carved by the skilful hands of a village carpenter, furnished the room, whilst curtains of thick unbleached linen, embroidered in exquisite designs of many colours, hung before the small leaded windows, and tempered the glare of the midday sun.

Bideskúty Gyuri, jovial and good-tempered, was smoking his favourite pipe, while Countess Irma was telling off, on her slender fingers, the row of guests she was expecting on the morrow:

“The Egregyis are sure to come,” she said, meditatively, the Kantássys, the Vécserys, the Palotays, the Arany, the Miskolczys, and the Bartócz: these are all quite certain. You cannot reckon less than four servants to each, and with their children and any friends they may bring with them, will make no less than seventy that we are quite sure of. Then another forty or fifty always come, beyond those one expects. You remember last year we sat down one hundred and seventy to dinner.”

“Well, my dear,” rejoined my lord, “you give what orders you like, and kill whatever you wish eaten. Thank God there is plenty of food in Bideskút to feed every friend and his family for as long as they choose to take a bite with us. If there is not enough room to give them each a separate bed, then we can lay straw all round the riding school, and the younger men can sleep there, and leave the good rooms for the ladies and children. Kill, my dear, by all means; let Panna slaughter what poultry she will, pull up what cabbages and carrots she wants, there is plenty and to spare!”

And Bideskúty, proud and secure in his fat lands, which yielded him all that could enable him to exercise the lavish hospitality for which his country is famous, leaned back in his arm-chair, and puffed away contentedly at his long cherry-wood pipe.

“I wish I could have got Ilonka a new silk dress for the occasion,” said Countess Irma, a little wistfully.

“My dear,” laughed her lord, jovially, “Ilonka will look bewitching in that bit of muslin I bought from the Jew for her for a couple of florins, and you know quite well that greasy bank-notes and other portraits of our well-beloved majesty, Francis Joseph, are very scarce in this land of ours. And I say thank God for that! We never want for anything we cannot have. Why,” he added with a pleasurable chuckle, “if it were not for my mill and my machinery I should never wish to see a bank-note from year’s end to year’s end.”

“And yet you will go on spending it on that accursed steam-mill and those reaping machines, which the peasants fear and hate, and I must say I do not blame them for that. God never had anything to do with those things. They are the devil’s own invention, Gyuri, and I cannot help dreading that some trouble will come of it all.”

“Why! you talk like some of those superstitious peasants themselves. You women cannot understand the enormous boon and profit it will be to me and to my land, when my steam-mill is regularly at work.”

“The profit may or may not come by and by; I dare say I do not understand these things, but I do see that you cannot possibly go on spending money with both hands on those inventions of Satan.”

Bideskúty did not reply. He had found by long experience that it was always best to oppose silence to his wife’s voluble talk whenever the subject of his favourite and costly fad cropped up between them.

“Gyuri,” resumed Countess Irma, “it is not too late. Will you give up this folly, and not mar the jolly times we always have on my birthday, by starting that mill on its ungodly work?”

“My dear,” replied her lord, driven out of his stronghold of silence by this direct question, “you are supposed to be an intelligent woman; therefore, you do not imagine that I have spent close upon a million florins in building a mill, and do not mean to see it at work now that it is finished?”

“You have only gone on with the thing from a feeling of obstinacy, Gyuri; it is not too late to give in. There is not a soul who has not dissuaded you from continuing these terrible new-fangled notions, which have already made you hideously unpopular on your own estate.”

Once more her lord had entrenched himself behind a barrier of impenetrable silence. Dreamily he went on smoking his long-stemmed cherry-wood pipe, and allowed the flood of his wife’s eloquence to spend itself over his unresisting head.

“Gyuri,” continued the Countess, “I have noticed that you have received lately a great many visits from the Jews. When we were first married, never one of them darkened our doors. You know I hate all your machinery fads, so you tell me nothing of what you are doing with them, but no Jew would come here, unless there was something to buy or sell, or money to lend at usury. You will indeed bring shame upon us, if you begin to sell your lands, your corn, or your wine, just like any Jew tradesman. There is plenty and to spare, I know, you have said it yourself, but the corn does not grow upon a Hungarian nobleman’s estate that he should dirty his fingers by taking money for it.”

“My dear,” suggested the lord of Bideskút mildly, “when I took over this property, after my father’s death, I found over thirty thousand measures of wheat rotting away, without the slightest use being made of it.”

“Well!” she said, “why not? why should it not rot? If there is too much of it, even to give away? In my father’s house in one year three thousand measures of wheat went bad, and he would have allowed fifty thousand to go the same way sooner than sell it. Take money for it? . . . Horrible!” she added, with all the pride of her long line of ancestry.

Again her husband did not reply; perhaps he thought of the fact that neither his wife nor any of her sisters would probably have had a roof over their heads at this moment if they had not been married; for not only the corn, but the fields, the beasts, the farms, and even the ancestral home had long since passed into the hands of the Jews; their father had not sullied his fingers by trafficking with his corn and timber, but had mortgaged his land, his house, his all, up to the hilt, and left his children proud as Lucifer, but without a groat apiece.

The Countess Irma was still a very handsome woman, in spite of her forty-odd years. Her figure was shapely, her skin still fresh, her hair as black as the raven’s wing. She had been a great beauty in her day, and had been the acknowledged belle of the two carnivals she spent at Budapesth. Her mother had brought her up in the firmly-rooted principle that it is the duty of every Hungarian aristocratic girl to be beautiful, and to make a good marriage, and the young Countess Irma, when she reached the age of eighteen, was quite ready to do both. The first year of her going out she picked and chose carefully amongst her adorers, for she had many. High lineage and vast estates were an absolute sine qua non before any partner dared even to ask her to dance the cotillon. “Humanity begins with the Barons,” was her much-repeated statement, which virtually choked off any aspirant to her hand who was not thus elevated in the human scale. But alas! the first year went by, and Countess Irma had not found the proper parti that would suit her own and her mother’s pride, and the following year it was vaguely whispered in the aristocratic club of Budapesth that she had not been heard to make her sweeping statement on the subject of humanity once during the carnival.

The next carnival came and went, and Countess Irma, to her horror, noted that at two balls of the season she was obliged to have a headache before the cotillion, for she had not secured a partner. Things were beginning to look absolutely tragic when suddenly Bideskúty Gyuri appeared upon the scene. He was young, good-looking, owned half the county of Heves, and professed to be violently in love with the somewhat faded beauty; true, he was not a Baron, and therefore a couple of years ago might have been ranked on a level with the Countess’s lapdog and pet canary; but since then much water had flowed down the Danube and the world was becoming more radical throughout. Bideskúty paid his court, was duly accepted, and the Countess Irma was heard, at the great Casino ball, to remark that humanity embraced every Hungarian noble who owned half of any county.

They had led a very comfortable married life together, Gyuri being always willing to give way to his wife in all matters; fortunately her tastes were very similar to his in all but one respect; like him, she loved the almost regal life of a Hungarian nobleman upon his estates, and, like him, once married, she cared nothing for Budapesth, where money was necessary, of which they had very little, and where she would perforce have to eat the meat of other people’s oxen and calves, and vegetables grown in some alien garden; like him, she was absolutely indifferent as to the political aspect of the country; she loved it because it was her own country and therefore must be better than anybody else’s, and because better corn and wine grew there, fatter beasts were fed there, than in any other country in the world; but, as to the changes of ministry up there in Budapesth, as to parliaments, elections, union with Austria, or complete severance, neither she nor her lord cared anything about that; so long as her daughter Ilonka, in her turn, made a suitable marriage, and her husband did not get into the Jews’ hands through his unfortunate fondness for agricultural improvements, she would just as soon have seen Hungary in the hands of Russians, Hottentots, or even Germans. Serenely she would have sailed through life, satisfied that all was for the best in this best possible world, if alas! the crumpled roseleaf had not troubled her, in the shape of her husband’s unfortunate craze for machinery, which reeked of “bourgeoisism,” and was altogether unworthy of a Hungarian nobleman, whose duty it was to eat and drink, to live in a lordly manner, to entertain his friends, and to leave all other matters to people who had no ancestors, and formed therefore no integral part of humanity.