They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [166]
A strange, unexpected and cruel smile played across her lips. Then she straightened up so abruptly that she might have suddenly grown several inches taller. From under her thick lashes there flashed a look of uncontrollable hatred. ‘Well! If you see him again, tell him that we have met … and also what I’m doing now!’
Now she did put out her hand, and then, from the door, she spoke again, ‘Be sure to tell him that too … that too…’ and she laughed as she went out, a laugh that to Balint seemed filled with cruelty.
Balint stayed where he was, rooted to the spot.
What had she said? Why on earth should she want that of him?
And why did she ask after Crookface only now and not when she had enquired after all her other old friends? Why this unexpected commission … and, above all, why that demonic laughter?
How did it all fit together?
He tried to recall everything he had ever heard about Laszlo’s mother. He had never heard any mention of Sandor Kendy when people had talked about Julie Ladossa. Neither her sister-in-law, Princess Kollonich, nor even Aunt Lizinka who never left any piece of evil gossip unsaid, had ever mentioned him. It was true that no one had ever told him with whom she had eloped and it seemed that no one really knew, for Aunt Lizinka told many different stories, at one time saying it was with a hussar who happened to be riding by, or a waiter, or a tight-rope walker, but it was clear she was just improvising for she really knew nothing and her candidates for the culprit were always unknown men, never anyone they all knew like Sandor Kendy. Crookface was surely above suspicion.
This was how Balint’s first thoughts took him; but then other memories came into his mind. There had been that evening he had spent at Crookface’s manor at Kis-Keresztur where he had seen the portrait of a lovely young woman he had taken to be Crookface’s deaf wife when young. It was quite a logical assumption because the picture had been exactly like Countess Kendy dressed for a costume ball, for her gown had been in the style of the eighties, old-fashioned now and covered with the frills of the past. He remembered that he had asked about this but had not been given an answer.
Now he also remembered that the picture seemed at one time to have been damaged. There had been signs of a repair to a diagonal gash that had once sliced the picture almost in two, right down to the little painted bouquets on the skirt. He had noticed it then but something in the gruff old man’s manner had prevented him from asking about it. Many years before he had heard that when Julie Ladossa had bolted Mihaly Gyeroffy had slashed at her portrait and flung it out of the window. Could Crookface’s picture have been that portrait? And if it was, how had it got to Keresztur? And why?
Had Kendy married that gentle deaf girl who was not of his class just because she was so like that other who had flung out of his life with a peal of demonic laughter some thirty years before?
These were all unconnected fragments from an untold story. For a moment Balint felt almost ashamed of himself, prying into matters that did not concern him. Let it all pass into oblivion, he said to himself. Let nobody know. One shouldn’t rake up the past. If there was one thing in a man’s life that should remain strictly private, and which was no concern of anyone else’s, it was his innermost feelings. Those were one’s own: to others they should be taboo.
He thought of his own love for Adrienne, a love that had now lasted ten years, and he was filled with happiness and gratitude. They had never misunderstood each other no matter what storms had afflicted their lives. Now it seemed they had reached port at last.
Until death do us part.
Chapter Three
BALINT NEVER GAVE JULIE LADOSSA’S MESSAGE to Crookface Kendy. In fact he had never intended to, but his conversation with the ‘Contessa’ did have one other result.
When the former Countess Gyeroffy was asking him about her son, Balint felt ashamed that he could tell