Rulers of kings: A novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Therefore was her most characteristic product filled with a quiet and gentle arrogance, sadly, if contemptuously, confident of the illimitable powers of wealth, and owning to a sincere respect for but one man in Europe. With that man, in spite of a deep and mutual friendship, he played many a game of chess, and once in a while he was beaten.

He no longer regarded the severe and ofttimes thunderous visage of William of Germany with envy; for time and work, fever and bitter anxieties had robbed his own face of all its freshness and most of its youth. His long body had lost its lankness, and was closely knit, properly covered, and very erect and imposing; but his face was thin, sallow, lined, and his finely cut features had acquired the sharpness peculiar to the American of intellect who gives his life to practical affairs—the sort that has the mere million-making kink is always as fat of face as of wit. But his smile was still quick and delightful, and his eyes, if sharper, were as bright and dark, sometimes as happy and eager as ever. He had acquired the trick of throwing back his head, lowering his upper lid, and darting a look over a cheek-bone, which was merely impish, or peculiarly disconcerting, according to his mood. As regards the rest of his personal appearance on this October morning in Hungary, he wore a sweater, the oldest pair of trousers in his wardrobe, and a straw hat with the brim turned down—by which it will be seen there was a good deal of the old Fessenden left.

Indeed there was a great deal; and as he rode straight towards the gala village on Count Zrinyi’s estate, he was in a very susceptible not to say sentimental frame of mind—which was usually the case when he was alone in Europe. The fountain of romance in the depths of him still bubbled. He had worked it deeply in the way of adventure and the realizing of patriotic ideals, superficially when he met an attractive woman. But life had pressed him too hard for love; moreover, he was easily disillusioned, and this particular ideal increased in stature and seemed ever more impossible of attainment. He stood on a lonely height himself, and he wanted a woman who stood on one as lonely.

XI

Fessenden stood for a few moments at the window before entering, although he had danced the Chardash many times and was arrayed as one of the elect. The deserted street of the village, and the muffled strains of a gypsy band, had informed him as he approached that it was a day of dancing and feasting, and he had despatched a casual boy to summon the tallest young man of the village. From the genial peasant he had borrowed a native costume, and without the aid of gold—for he carried a love potion in his indifferent command of the Magyar tongue. Another New-Yorker might have been daunted by the white divided skirt, which looked like anything but trousers, and the white blouse hanging free above it, but not Fessenden. He would indeed have preferred the Sunday best which the man had offered him to his own undoing, but had generously refused it. The men all looked very fine in their gay cloth or leathern jackets, embroidered, inlaid, their bright sashes, loose shirts and flapping trousers, embroidered with worsted or silk; but the women, after decorating their lords and brothers, would appear to have had no time left to enhance their own charms, for they wore common cotton frocks and had made no attempt at adornment beyond a ribbon or a string of glass beads.

The room in which they danced evidently belonged to the rich man of the village. It was of fair size for a peasant’s house, and its prints of saints and Mary were draped with embroidered towels. The older folk sat against the wall, and some sixty young people danced in what at first sight looked to be a solid mass. The Chardash was near its finish, and the couples were executing the vigorous and intricate figures, even separating for a second and flying together again, without the collision of an elbow or the twitch of a facial muscle.

Suddenly Fessenden swore in three languages and clutched the arm of his host.

“Who is that girl?” he demanded.

“I do not know her name. The Count came two hours ago with two—Austrian peasants,” he said, “but we doubt—who wished to learn the Chardash. We know nothing further, except that they speak Hungarian well and are virgins, for they wear their braids hanging; but we are curious, for that one you admire is very pretty and lively, and the other is as beautiful and queenlike as a Roumanian peasant—observe her, my friend.”

The music had ceased and the crowd was melting towards the open. The girl worthy to be compared to a Roumanian stood almost in the middle of the room talking with pleasing humility to a young man who, even in his peasant’s costume, was plainly the lord of the village. She wore a common blue cotton gown a size too small for her, and a kerchief pinned so tightly about her head that only half an inch of hair brushed flatly backward was visible. But the figure was magnificent; the hands were small, pointed, white; the skin of face and throat had never been exposed to a peasant sun, and the visible hair was red. The girl suddenly raised her eyes, and Fessenden screwed up his own and left the window.