Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
It stood close to the stove, the smoke of which had long ago covered the wood with soot. The lid was thrown open and hung crooked upon a broken hinge. Close to the fire in an armchair of polished wood sat old Kapus Benkó, now a hopeless cripple. The fate which lies in wait in these hot countries for the dissolute and the drunkard had already overtaken him.
"What did you bring Béla 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 néni!" he said, "this is the last Sunday, anyhow, that you will be troubled with my presence.
If she be forty she still owes implicit obedience, unbounded respect to them. If she fail in these, she becomes an unnatural creature, denounced to her friends as such, under a cloud of opprobrium before her tiny, circumscribed world. Kapus Irma brought out the whole armoury of her parental authority, her parental power: and her methods could be severe when she chose.
The work of taking Elsa in hand was thus promptly undertaken. Fate favoured the mother's intentions: old Kapus was stricken with paralysis, and Elsa had, from that hour forth, to spend most of her time with her father in the house, and immediately under her mother's eye.
The philosophy of life had taught Kapus Irma a good many lessons, foremost among these was the one which defined the exact relationship between the want of money and all other earthly ills. Certainly the want of money was the father of them all. Elsa in future would never feel it, therefore all other earthly ills would fall away from her for lack of support.
It was as well to think that the child realized this, and was grateful for her own happiness. "I put the bunda away somewhere." Kapus Irma went out after supper to hold a final consultation with the more influential matrons of Marosfalva over the arrangements for to-morrow's feast. Old Kapus had been put to bed on his paillasse in the next room and Elsa was all alone in the small living-room.
She knew quite well that, but for the fact that she belonged to the alien and despised race, Erös Béla 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.
About a fortnight after this, when the July sun was at its zenith and the starch out of everything animate and inanimate, old man Kapus came up to the ranch-house. Johnnie, he said, disappeared during the previous night. "And he's bin kidnapped, too," the uncle added. "Kidnapped?" "Yes, boys hauled out o' winder!
The people of Marosfalva were very merry to-day, for it was Kapus Elsa's wedding time and Erös Béla was being lavish with food and wine and music. Nobody guessed that in this one cottage sorrow, deep and lasting, had made a solemn entry and never meant to quit these two loving hearts again. "He must make you happy." Andor shut the door once more.
The interior of Kapus Benkó's home was as squalid, as forlorn looking as its approach; everywhere the hand of the thriftless housewife was painfully apparent, in the blackened crockery upon the hearth, in the dull, grimy look of the furniture once so highly polished in the tattered table-cloth, the stains upon the floor and the walls, but above all was it apparent in the dower-chest that inalienable pride of every thrifty Hungarian housewife the dower-chest, which in Ilona's cottage was such a marvel of polish outside, and so glittering in its rich contents of exquisite linen.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking