They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [75]
Boldly and together Balint and Adrienne faced the world openly.
Deprived of her favourite object of malice Aunt Lizinka had had to look around to find another target. She soon found it in the person of Count Jeno Laczok’s elder brother Tamas. After a riotous youth and several years of adventure abroad, Tamas had qualified as a railway engineer and had found employment with the Hungarian State Railways. His work had brought him back to Kolozsvar, and his predilection for very young gypsy girls soon became well-known. Aunt Lizinka at once pounced on this juicy scandal and decided to become ‘worried’ about him. Now, sitting on the Patronesses’ elevated dais, she plunged into the matter with glee, explaining with zest and false concern, that she was terrified that her nephew Tamas would land in gaol. ‘You know, my dear, that little gypsy girl he keeps isn’t even thirteen! Think of the scandal! How dreadful this would be for the family! I know for a fact that the police are after him even now.’
Although Aunt Lizinka’s high-pitched screech could be heard in most parts of the hall, Balint and Adrienne, who were strolling past, heard nothing of it. Other people’s affairs were no concern of theirs and so they did not bother to listen. They walked together as in a dream, completely wrapped up in each other and in their own happiness. Soon they sat down together on a bench beside the wall and then Adrienne turned smiling to her lover and said, ‘Do you like it?’
‘Very, very much!’
‘Really and truly?’
‘Even more than very, very much!’ he repeated warmly and then, very softly, in a low whisper that no one could possibly overhear, he muttered into her ear a few words in English, words whose meaning was their own secret symbol of their love.
For a moment Adrienne lowered her eyelids over her big topaz-coloured eyes. She did not speak, for the little movement was her accepted answer; but her full lips opened slightly to show the gleam of her white teeth …
Then with joy in her heart she told him how she had devised her imperial head-dress, how she had pored over illustrated books, and how, when she went to Vienna, she had somehow managed to have it made in the workshop of the opera house. Then she told too how she had secretly brought it home and how, because the hanging flowers at the back had tickled her neck, she had lengthened them herself to make that jewelled cascade that everyone had admired so much.
The ball soon got under way, and the opening csardas was followed by a series of waltzes. Just as Laci Pongracz, the popular band-leader, swung his musicians into the new favourite, the ‘Luxembourg Waltz’, there was a new arrival. A powerfully built man with a black beard entered the room. It was Tamas Laczok, and his appearance was to cause almost as much stir as had that of Isti Kamuthy an hour before, especially among the Lady Patronesses and the other matrons on the platform. This reaction was not entirely unexpected, even by the subject of it himself, for he, as well as all the others, had been fully aware of all the tales that had been circulating about him. As an engineer of the State Railways he had been sent to take charge of some repair works on the line between Kolozsvar and Apahida and had taken up residence some three weeks before in a small peasant’s house in the district of Bretfu.
Though he was not far from the centre of Kolozsvar