They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [53]
Regina moved slowly across the frozen yard, her feet skidding on the hard-trodden surface of the snow. She reached the corner of the woodshed and, from the gate in the fence, looked across the empty field towards Laszlo’s house. There was a light in the window, a sinister reddish light; and to the girl it seemed as if the wicked flames of hell were beckoning to her and calling for her to come and look.
Clutching the heavy shawl around her she stumbled across the field in which her father had been growing potatoes. Where these had been lifted the earth had been left in uneven little mounds and ridges and holes so that, as the young girl headed straight for the light in the window, she stumbled and slipped and fell frequently to her knees, as her thin, dark figure made its tortured way across. If anyone had been watching it would have looked as if she were battling against a hurricane, staggering to left and to right as she struggled on through the dark night.
Finally she got there. There was not a sound to be heard and only the light that filtered out through the flower-like hoarfrost on the window-panes showed that anyone was still awake inside.
Regina crept up and pressed her face against the lowest pane, despite the fact that it was almost opaque from the ice-crystals that had formed an incrustation of dense arabesques on the glass. Obsessed by the need to know what was happening inside she would have broken the glass itself if that had been the only way. She had to know, she had to! That was why she had come. She started to breathe on the window-pane and then to rub it with a corner of the shawl. Several times she had to repeat the process until at last a small patch at the centre began to come clear as she managed to melt a square no larger than her own little hand.
With searching eyes she looked round the room, her body rigid with emotion and excitement, her hand tightly grasping the window-ledge. She stretched up her neck with the folds of the shawl falling like mourning bands on each side of her face.
She was very pale, except for her blood-red lips, and it was some time before she was able to see clearly what was happening in the room. It was even longer before she realized what it was, and longer still before she really understood.
For a long time she stood where she was, as if turned to stone. Then, overcome by deep disgust, she started shuddering and at length was able to force herself to turn away. Then she reeled from the window and started to run for home, heedless of how she fell and stumbled and tripped in mindless panic. She ran with eyes wide open as if by so doing she could run far away from what she had seen. She ran as a deer pursued by hounds …
In Regina’s head was nothing but the thought of escape. She clattered up the wooden steps of her father’s house, fell against the door and then, though somehow she succeeded in opening it, fell senseless across the threshold.
Regina was ill for days and during all this time, though her parents looked after her with loving care, they never discovered where she had been that night. As it happened they never even asked her for they assumed that it was all the result of a fright she had had for, either as a result of being over-excited, or from the effects of her fall, that night she stopped being a child and became a woman.
As for Laszlo he hardly noticed Regina’s absence. For some days after that evening’s drinking he had lazed about, tired and listless. Fabian had left behind three bottles of brandy, perhaps