The whip cracked, the horses started, and my substitute departed for my dear home, while I remained in her place.
As I pondered for the first time over my great isolation, in a place where everybody was a stranger to me, and did not even understand my speech, at once all thought of the great man, the violin-virtuoso, the first eminence, the P. C., the heroic lover, disappeared from within me; I leaned my head against the wall, and would have wept could I have done so.
CHAPTER IV
THE ATHEIST AND THE HYPOCRITE
Let us leave for a while the journal of the student child, and examine the circumstances of the family circle, whose history we are relating.
There was living at Lankadomb an old heretic Samuel Topándy by name, who was related equally to the Bálnokházy and Áronffy families; notwithstanding this, the latter would never visit him on account of his conspicuously bad habits. His surroundings were of the most unfortunate description, and in distant parts it was told of him that he was an atheist of the most pronounced type.
But do not let any one think that the more modern freedom of thought had perhaps made Topándy cling to things long past, or that out of mental rationalism he had attempted, as a philosopher, to place his mind far beyond the visible tenets of religion. He was an atheist merely for his own amusement, that, by his denial of God, he might annoy those people—priests and the powers that be—with whom he came in contact.
For to annoy, and successfully annoy, has always been held as an amusement among frail humanity. And what can more successfully annoy than the ridiculing of that which a man worships?
The County Court had just put in a judicial "deed of execution," and had sent a magistrate, and a lawyer, supported by a posse of twelve armed gendarmes, for the purpose of putting an end, once for all, to those scandals, by which Topándy had for years been arousing the indignation of the souls of the faithful, causing them to send complaint after complaint in to the court.