"I will no longer keep the money which your father lent to me at the rate of six per cent. Here it is for you—ten thousand gulden; take it, and make what you can of it." As he spoke he paid her the whole sum in Hungarian bank-notes.
A week later another commandant arrived in the town; this one was a German. The next morning more drumming was heard in the market-place, and the order was given that all who possessed Hungarian bank-notes must give them up to have them burned. Those who refused would be shot or hanged.
The poor widow ran weeping to her neighbor, and asked what she should do. The whole sum he had given her lay in her drawer untouched. If it were taken from her she and her child must beg or starve. Why had he given her this money? Why had he changed her German notes if he knew that this was going to happen?
"How could I know it?" shrieked Csanta; and, still screaming, he went on to lament over himself. "If you are beggared, so am I—ten thousand times more beggared than any one. I haven't a copper coin in the house. I don't know how I can pay even for a bit of meat. I shall have a hundred thousand bank-notes burned. I am ruined! I am a beggar!"
And he fell to cursing both Germans and Hungarians, until the widow Belenyi implored him not to shriek so loud, else he would be heard, and, God help us all! hanged.
"Let them hear, then! Let them hang me! I don't care. I shall go to the market-place and tell them to their faces they are robbers, and if they won't hang me I'll hang myself. I am only considering whether I shall suspend myself from the pump-handle or from the steeple of the tower."
The widow besought him, for Heaven's sake, not to do such a terrible deed.
"And what's to become of me? Am I to go round with a hat and beg for a penny? Here, these are my last halfpence."
He drew a few coins from his pocket, and began to weep piteously; his tears flowed in streams. The poor woman tried her best to console him. She begged him not to despair; the butcher and the baker knew him, and would trust him. She was tempted to offer him a piece of twenty groschen.
"Oh, you will soon see!" sobbed the old man. "Come to-morrow morning early, and you will see me hanging from a hook in the passage. I couldn't survive this!"