What could she do? The poor soul carried her Hungarian bank-notes to the commander, and saw them consumed in the market-place.
Oh, it was a laughable joke! To this day when people talk of it their eyes fill with tears.
For the widow, and many like her, there followed months and years of grinding poverty. She had lost all the capital saved for her by her father; there remained nothing but the house. The front rooms she let as a shop, and in the back she lived and eked out her miserable income as best she could.
For a long time she looked with a frightened gaze at her neighbor's passage, expecting to see the old man hanging from an iron hook; but she was spared this sight. The old man had no notion of ending his days. He had certainly lost a few thousand gulden, but these were only the chaff; the corn was safe. He had a secret hiding-place to which he could have access by a secret passage underneath his house; the cellar was, in fact, underneath the water. A mason from Vienna had built it for him, and the people of the town knew nothing of it. The cellar was full of casks, and every cask was full of silver; the old man's cellar concealed a treasure. By means of secret machinery constructed in his bedroom the owner was able by touching a spring to open a sluice concealed in the bed of the stream, and thus in a few minutes to submerge his cave. No robber could have penetrated there. All the gold and silver pieces which came into Csanta's hand found their way to this subterranean hiding-place, and never saw the light of day again.
Meantime his neighbor, the widow, suffered the grip of poverty; she sewed her fingers to the bone to keep things together and to earn their daily bread. The gold pieces Ivan had given she wouldn't have touched even to save herself from starvation; they were used for the purpose for which he gave them—for Arpad's musical education, and musical instruction was so dear. The child was a genius.
But living grew dearer, work harder to get. The widow was forced to get a loan upon the house; she asked her neighbor, and he gave it readily. The loan grew and grew until it reached a good sum of money, and then Csanta asked it back. Frau Belenyi was not able to refund, and the old man instituted proceedings, and as he was the only mortgagee he got it for one-quarter its real value. The amount over and above the debt and the costs were handed to the widow, and there was nothing left but to leave. Madame Belenyi took her son to Vienna, to begin in earnest his artistic education.
The old Greek possessed the whole street; there was no one left to annoy him in his immediate neighborhood; he suffered neither from children, dogs, or birds. And his treasure increased more and more. The casks which filled the cellar that lay beneath the water were filled to overflowing, and the contents were always silver.
One day Csanta received a visit. It was an old acquaintance, a banker from Vienna, whose father had been a friend of the old man's, and at whose counting-house he could always get exchange for his bank-notes and other little accommodations. The visitor was Felix Kaulmann.
"To what circumstance do I owe the honor? What good news do you bring me?"
"My worthy friend, I shall not make any preamble. Time is precious to you, as it is to me, and therefore I go straight to the point. By the authorization of the Prince of Bondavara I have been placed at the head of a joint-stock company, who have just started some gigantic coal-works, whose capital has risen from ten millions to eight hundred and twenty millions."