The Village Notary Part 63

"For G.o.d's sake, tell me what _has_ happened?" cried he, as he rushed into the room.

"My dear Akos.h.!.+" cried Mrs. Ershebet, taking his hand, "we are lost. Our name is dishonoured. My husband is accused of murder. They are going to take him to the county gaol."

"And I am the cause of my father's ruin!" cried Vilma. "Save him, Akosh; if you ever loved me, save him!" And the wretched girl fell fainting to the ground.

They took her away. The notary looked after them in silence; and, turning to Vandory, said: "Be a father to them when I am gone!"

Rety, the sheriff, though deeply moved, was a silent spectator of this scene; for the cold politeness with which Tengelyi deprecated his interference whenever he attempted to advocate his cause, prevented him from expressing his sympathy. He now came up to the notary and a.s.sured him, with a trembling voice, that, come what might, he would use the whole of his influence to extricate his former friend from his present painful position.

"I thank you, sir," said Tengelyi, coldly, as he turned to the speaker.

"I must confess I was not aware that we were still honoured by your presence under my roof. I thought you had accompanied Mr. Skinner; for, as I take it, the transaction which excited your interest is now over.

Everything is in the best order, and the crime, it appears, is fully brought home to me."

"Tengelyi," said the sheriff, with deep emotion, "do not treat me unjustly. What brought me to this house, was my wish to a.s.sist you by my presence, and to induce Skinner to treat you with kindness and moderation."

"If that was your intention," retorted Tengelyi, "it would have been wise not to have used your influence for the election to that post of a man whom the presence of his chief does not prevent from abusing the powers of his office."

The sheriff was confused.

"I will not argue that point with you," said he; "but what I wish to a.s.sure you of is, that, however circ.u.mstances may speak against you, I still am convinced of your innocence. I a.s.sure you, you can rely upon me!"

"Sir!" said the notary, "there was a time when I did place my trust in my friends; but they have since been kind enough to convince me that friends.h.i.+p is far too pure and lofty to descend to this poor world of ours, I shall shortly be called upon to appear before my judges; and if you, sir, think you have strength enough to forget the friends.h.i.+p which you have hitherto shown me, it will give me pleasure to see you on the bench. Pardon me, if I leave you, I have but two hours to myself, and I wish to spend them with my wife and daughter."

And, bowing low to the sheriff, Tengelyi seized Vandory's hand and led him from the room. Rety sighed, and left the house.

CHAP. III.

The notary's position was critical, his future doubtful, and his separation from his family painful in proportion. Tengelyi wanted all his strength of mind to speak words of consolation and hope to his weeping family. The despair of his daughter in particular filled his heart with the deepest, bitterest grief.

"Do not weep, dear girl!" said he, embracing poor Vilma, whose pallid face showed more than her tears what agonies she felt. "You know your father is innocent. Things will clear up, and I shall be allowed to return to you. Won't you be my good, happy girl, when I come back!"

"Oh, father!" cried Vilma, "to think that you should go to prison, to be confined with those wicked people though but for a day, though but for an hour! And to think that I am the cause of it, dear father, it drives me mad!"

"You, my daughter? What makes you think that your confession of Viola having been hid in the house can do any thing to make my case worse than it is?"

"Father!" said she, sadly, "don't talk to me in that way! I am undeserving of your love. Will they not say you were aware of Viola's being in the house, and that you wished to deny it? And even if this were not so, are not all our misfortunes owing to our having taken in Susi and her children? And that was _my_ doing!"

"And since _that_ is the cause of your misfortune," interposed Vandory, "I am sure G.o.d will not abandon you in your trials. His ways are indeed unaccountable; but I never heard of a good action having led a man to utter ruin!"

Tengelyi sighed, but Vilma felt comforted; and even Mrs. Ershebet's sobs ceased when the curate told her that this unjust accusation was possibly the means to defeat their enemies, and to lead to the recovery of the doc.u.ments. The notary added to the comfort of his wife by a.s.suring her that his incarceration was not likely to continue for any length of time, and that Vandory would be their friend and adviser during his absence.

Again Mrs. Ershebet entreated him to allow her and Vilma to accompany him to Dustbury; but the notary felt that he wanted all his strength for the moment in which he must cross the threshold of the prison; and, with Vandory's a.s.sistance, he prevailed upon his wife to desist, at least for the present.

"If my captivity were indeed to be of long duration," said he, "I would of course send for you. But in the first days I must devote myself exclusively to an examination of my position, and of my means of defence. Volgyeshy is an honest man. I intend to retain him as my counsel; and Akosh, I know, will find means of informing me how you are going on. Where is Akosh?"

Mrs. Ershebet replied, that he had left the room with the sheriff; and Tengelyi turned to arrange his papers and books, when the young man entered. He looked excited, and his eyes showed traces of tears.

"Have you spoken to your father?" cried Mrs. Ershebet.

"I have!" replied young Rety, with a trembling voice.

"And what does he say?" asked Ershebet and Vandory at once.

"Nothing but what is beautiful and edifying, I a.s.sure you!" said Akosh.

"He wept; indeed he did! He embraced me! He called me his dear son! He told me he was convinced of Tengelyi's innocence; and his heart bled to think that so honest a man, and his old friend too, should be in such an awkward position; and Heaven knows what he said besides! He pleaded Tengelyi's cause admirably; but the end of it was that he refused to comply with my request. He said that fellow Skinner would not take bail, and he could not force him. In short, he said there was nothing to be done. But then, you know, he told us his _heart_ was bleeding; can we ask for more?"

"I could have told you so!" said Tengelyi, quietly.

"No! no! You could not!" cried Akosh, pa.s.sionately. "If an angel from heaven had told me that my father would reply to my entreaties in _this_ manner, by Heaven I would not have believed it! Oh! you cannot know how I implored him. I wept! I knelt to him! I reminded him of my poor mother! I told him, if he had ever loved me, if ever he wished to call me his son, if he would not make me curse fate for having made him my father, he should grant me this one, this poor request! And he refused to grant it!"

Vandory felt hurt at the manner in which Akosh spoke of his father. He said:--

"Who knows whether he was not justified in saying that he _could_ not comply with your request?"

But Akosh replied with increased bitterness:--

"Do you really think Skinner would have dared to resist my father if he had insisted on putting in bail for Tengelyi, or, at least, on having him confined in our own house? Oh, indeed, and what was His Excellency, the lord-lieutenant, likely to say to such an infraction of the rules?

And perhaps the ill.u.s.trious Cortes would not be pleased with his protecting the notary! Such are the reasons which induced my father to stifle his better feelings, and to spurn me, his only son, who wept at his feet!"

"Who knows," said Vandory, "how painfully he felt it that he was compelled to refuse you?"

"No matter!" said Akosh. "When I left the house, I saw Kenihazy busy with the carriage. We have not much time left; it were a shame to lose that time in a dispute about my father's character." And, turning to Tengelyi, he added, "Will you allow me to accompany you to Dustbury?"

The notary repeated to him what he had already stated to the other members of his family. He entreated him to bring him news of Mrs.

Ershebet and Vilma; "and," added he, with a smile, "to recommend them to your protection is unnecessary!"

"All I wish is, I had a better right to protect them. I wish Vilma were my wife. What my father would not do for his son, he might perhaps be induced to do for the honour of his name."

"I understand you!" said Tengelyi; "but, thank G.o.d! I want no protection to prove my innocence. I have nothing I can leave my daughter but an honest name; and until the honour of that name is restored, I cannot consent to your marriage."

Akosh would have replied; but the carriage, which drove up that moment, diverted his thoughts into another channel. Tengelyi embraced his wife and daughter, seized his bunda, and stepped into the carriage, which Rety had sent, to the great vexation of Mr. Skinner, who intended to convey the notary in a peasant's cart. Mr. Kenihazy seated himself beside the prisoner, two haiduks occupied the rumble, and the unfortunate notary thanked heaven when the carriage drove off, and withdrew him from the gaze of his despairing family.

The county gaol at Dustbury was, in those days, free from the prevailing epidemic of philanthropical innovations, which a certain set of political empirics are so zealous in spreading. The ancient national system of Austrio-Hungarian prison discipline was still in full glory; but as coming events cast their shadows before, so this venerable and time-honoured system was every now and then attacked by the maudlin and squeamish sentimentality of modern reformers. Nay more, a committee was appointed to inquire into the condition of the prisons and their inmates in the county of Takshony; and though the keeper of Dustbury gaol allowed each prisoner on the day of the inquest full two pints of brandy; though they were ordered to play at cards, and be merry, the gentlemen of the committee insisted on giving a libellous account of Captain Karvay's mode of treating his prisoners. The established prison discipline suffered a still ruder shock, when, in the gaol of a neighbouring county, no fewer than six prisoners were dull enough to permit their feet to be frozen by the cold; and though the county magistrates gave them the full benefit of their attention, though their feet were amputated with a handsaw, though only one of the patients survived, and though such things were known to have frequently happened without any one being the worse for it, yet (so great is human perversity) a cry of indignation was got up against the wors.h.i.+pful magistrates of the said county, for all the world as if those honourable gentlemen had _made_ the cold.

And besides, at the very time that the prisoners' feet were frozen in the lower gaol, there were no fewer than eighty prisoners confined in one room in the upper part of the building; and these eighty men, though they disagreed and fought on the slightest provocation, were still unanimous in their complaints of excessive heat. This circ.u.mstance shows that malicious persons will complain of any thing, if they can but hope to bring their betters into trouble. But the committee of inquiry could not continue for ever, and the cry of indignation became hoa.r.s.e from its very excess. The new instructions, which government was weak enough to publish during this crisis, were put on the shelf, and Mr. Karvay returned to his Austrio-Hungarian management, of which the excellence was clearly proved by the yearly increasing number of its _pupils_--pupils, we say, for what is a prison but an academy for grown-up boys and girls?

The council-houses in Hungary serve likewise the purposes of county gaols. The council-chambers, the court, and the prison are under one roof. This system has its merits on account of its compactness. The council-houses, which, though not exactly _built_ by the n.o.bility, are built for their exclusive _use_ (always excepting the prisons, of which the n.o.bility leave a small part to the peasantry,) are not only used for quarter sessions and the like; no, they are also made to serve purposes of a more social nature.

The hall, for example, with its green table, resounds in the morning with the shrill tones of Hungarian eloquence, or it is hushed by the gravity (it is well known that this inestimable quality is greatly aided by the smoking of strong tobacco) with which sentences of death are pa.s.sed, and criminals sent off to instant execution. But whatever want of measure and order a man may detect in the debate of the morning, he will find it brought to its level in the ball of the evening, when a hundred couples move to the sounds of harps and violins. Among the miscellaneous uses to which the county-house is put, one of the most important is that it serves as a place of rendezvous for the a.s.sessors and other officials. They meet in every room, and show a wonderful activity in conversation, and a no less wonderful energy in smoking their pipes, which pursuits are notoriously conducive to despatch and accuracy in business. The Hungarian n.o.bility resemble the Romans in more than one respect. That cla.s.sic people had an innate desire to pa.s.s their time in the forum; the Hungarian a.s.sessor exults in his council-house.

In it he pa.s.ses his life. It is here he works, eats, smokes, sleeps, and gambles. In the county of Takshony, this laudable custom was of course in a high state of perfection. It is therefore but natural that Mr. Skinner should have left Tengelyi's house only to proceed to the council-house at Dustbury, where he spread the news and surrounded himself with a chosen body of his friends, who, with him, were eagerly looking for the arrival of the prisoner. We find them in the recorder's office, where Mr. Shaskay condoled with the a.s.sessor Zatonyi about the depravity of the world; while James Bantornyi, holding the recorder by the b.u.t.ton, informed that worthy magistrate of all the forms and observances of the English trial by jury; and an Austrian captain, who spent his half-pay at Dustbury, held forth at the further end of the room, a.s.suring some of the older a.s.sessors that this shocking increase of crime was solely owing to the flagitious mildness of the penal laws, a proposition to which his hearers gave their unconditional a.s.sent by sundry deep sighs and significant exclamations against the scandalous scarcity of capital executions and the jeopardy into which this ill-advised leniency put the lives and limbs of the well-clad and bean-fed among the Takshony population. Volgyeshy, though generally averse to large a.s.semblies, had joined and indeed scandalised the party, by protesting his conviction of Tengelyi's innocence.

Mr. Kenihazy's arrival, and the news that he had safely conveyed the prisoner to Dustbury, drew the attention of the several groups in the room to the worthy clerk, who gloried in the excitement which his presence produced.

"Heavy roads," said he, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.