They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [120]
It was eight o’clock before the sisters came out of the house and walked over to where the pony was waiting.
Pityu at once offered to go with Adrienne. He begged her to accept his services, perhaps a shade too fervently for during the long wait he had paid several swift visits to the barn to get some Dutch courage from the clandestine brandy-flask.
Margit did not give Adrienne time to reply but answered swiftly, ‘Certainly not! You’re not leaving here!’ Then she laughed and said, ‘What an idea! Leaving two women alone without a man to protect them! It’ll be quite enough if Gligor goes.’
‘I don’t need him either,’ said Adrienne. ‘The boy knows the road; he came up it only yesterday.’
But Pityu insisted. ‘Impossible! Going alone through the forest with some lad you don’t know! I can’t allow it, I can’t! I can’t possibly let you go like that, I can’t!’ And, holding his beaky nose high in the air, he started gesticulating wildly.
Margit turned sharply towards him and said, ‘What a way to talk! If I didn’t know there was no liquor in the house anyone’d think you’d been drinking!’
Brought up short by such a suspicion Pityu stopped insisting at once, and from then on concentrated so hard on being careful that he hardly said another word.
The sisters said their goodbyes and Adrienne set off on foot along the ridge. The forester went first, followed by Adrienne and behind them the boy leading the pony.
Margit waited until they reached the second turning on the path and then called out after them, ‘Addy! When you get to the top, send back Gligor if you don’t need him any more. The post arrives today and I’d like him to go down to the village.’
‘All right, I’ll send him back,’ called Adrienne, and the little band disappeared from view. Young Countess Alvinczy gazed after them for a moment or two, a tiny smile on her face. Then she turned abruptly to Pityu and said roughly, ‘Well? What are you standing about here for? Take off that rucksack and split some wood. No lunch for anybody who doesn’t work!’
Clumsily the young man started to take the bag off his back, and as he did so Margit looked hard and suspiciously at him.
Balint had been waiting since dawn at Piatra Talharilor – the Thieves’ Stone – just where the Abady forests met the common-lands of Valko and the district of Ambak. The four towers of rock dominating the steep hilltop meadow gave the place its name.
He stood there watching the little road which started far away down by the bed of the Aranyos, wound its way along the ridge which marked the watershed between the valleys and, about two kilometres from where he stood, dipped suddenly down beside the edge of the sheep pastures and disappeared towards the upper stream of the Beles. With his binoculars he could see a long way.
Finally, at about ten o’clock, what he was waiting for appeared: there, in the far distance, was Adrienne riding the pony, and the lad from Gyurkuca was leading the way.
He left the rock and met them on the saddle of the ridge. After a brief greeting, Adrienne dismounted and Balint led the boy and the pony to the shepherds’ hut at the bottom of the meadow and told him to wait there until they came to fetch him in the morning. Then he came back to Adrienne and at once they started upwards on the mountain path which wound its way ever higher, round a dense stand of pines which covered the upper slopes, through labyrinths of huge rocks and scattered junipers, until they arrived at the summit of the Ursoia.
As they mounted ever higher so the landscape widened until they could see ridge after ridge of tree-covered hilltops. The bald slopes on the Albak side had long disappeared from view on the other side of the ridge