"But, my dear friend, you take these things too tragically. These derisive songs have been sung time out of mind. Your husband has not invented them for your special aggravation. Laugh at him to his face, and he'll hold his tongue."
"Very well, then. Let what he does to ridicule me be forgiven. But ever since he has begun to suspect my spiritual condition, he leaves no stone unturned to disturb my devotions. If in the afternoon or evening, when the chiming of the cloister bell is wafted over to us, I involuntarily join my hands together, he laughs at me: 'Ha! ha! ha! they are ringing the bells to call you to prayer, are they?' Now, the Calvinists do not ring for evening prayers, neither do they sound the Angelus, and this is a great grief to me. It is like rolling my bread in the mud and then making me eat it. This continual ridiculing clings to me like tar; it chokes, it nauseates. I feel just as if I were swimming in a sea of glue. He relates to me the most villainous anecdotes about the holy images. Last Saturday it rained the whole morning, and I could not go to town. He saw my impatience, and said to me derisively, 'Never mind, thou female, it will clear up this afternoon, for the Virgin Mary wants to dry her son's little shirt for Sunday!' It was well for him that he left the room that instant, for I was very near driving my knife into his heart!"
I tried to quiet the excited creature by saying that though this was no very reverent jest, yet it was not an invention of Esaias's. This jest about the breaking out of the sunshine on Saturday afternoon was a common saying among the Hungarian country folk, and, taken seriously, had really nothing impious about it, representing, indeed, that sacred figure, whom all of us are bound to reverence, as a provident mother from the homely, rustic point of view.
"I don't like to hear that name on his lips. Why, I sent away an old servant of mine called Marcsa for no other reason than because her master was always calling her Maria, and every such time it was as if a dagger were piercing my heart."
I saw that the woman was really suffering. It was a case where a heroic remedy was required.
"My dear friend," I said, "I cannot blame your husband. Your religious extravagance, which has been not a little stimulated by the irritability of your nerves and the nostrums which the provincial doctors have made you drink, is a question of 'to be or not to be' for your husband. If you cling to the saints, poor Esaias will feel the earth giving way beneath him. You are bound to one another, remember. If you go and seek heaven in another church, you will only install hell in your own house. Believe me, if your husband discovers your design, he will fly into a fury and tear you to pieces. If I were you I should go to some medicinal watering place and get your nerves braced up a bit."
"I see—I see. You do not understand what is the matter with me. You think it is a mere feminine ailment, which is, generally, half affectation. Look at that recipe. The most famous doctor in the capital prescribed it for me. I went to him, he diagnosed me. He said that the country doctors had not treated my case properly. They had stuffed me full of quinine, he said, and it was not the medicament that I wanted. So he prescribed me another. Read it!"
I looked at the prescription and saw it was arsenic.
"The doctor prescribed six drops for the first day, and a drop more every other day up to twenty drops, and then back by single drops to six again. Then my fever will return no more. But he cautioned me to keep most strictly to his prescription, as the remedy was a very dangerous one. Is that so?"
"It is."