The reader was short-sighted, and as he spelt out the letter he put his face so near it as to quite cover his features.
"What the deuce is all this about?" thought Mr. Kordé to himself as he peeped through the crevices of the dog's dwelling-place, "what is my colleague, the myoptic schoolmaster doing here, and why is he burying his nose in that bit of paper?"
"I hasten to inform you," so read the man in the cassock, "that the hostile armies are already on the confines of the kingdom. What the object of the enemy is you know right well. He is coming to ravage the realm, wipe out the landed gentry, and divide their estates among the peasantry. What then shall we do? Our peasants are wrath with us for we have treated them very badly, and you, sir, in particular, have no cause to trust them. When you had your house built, as you well remember, you made your serfs work three weeks running for nothing. When you were a young man you ruined the domestic happiness of many a married peasant; you appropriated the communal lands to your own uses; you never bestowed a thought upon the parish church; once you gave the priest a good cudgelling; you kept a poor fellow in jail for four or five years and beat and shamefully treated him. When a poor man wanted to build him a house, you never gave him clay to make bricks with, nor rushes for the thatching of his roof. When lots of planks were rotting away in a corner of your courtyard, and two poor young fellows stole just enough of them to make a coffin for their father, you tied the pair of them up tight in the burning sun and beat their naked bodies with thorny sticks; one of them died a week afterwards of sun-stroke. On one occasion you injured the thigh of a neat-herd on your estate and he is a cripple to this day. When your sheep died of the murrain you hung up their hides to dry—in the schoolhouse. If all these things should now recur to the minds of your tenants, you will have, I fancy, rather a bad time of it. But the rest of us are in the same boat. We never gave a thought to the education of our people. They grew up, they grew old, and all they have ever learnt to know of life is its wretchedness; not one of them therefore has any reason to love us now. What can we do if it comes to an open collision with them? Five hundred thousand gentry against twenty times as many peasants! Why not one of our heads would remain for long in the place where God placed it. We must defend ourselves with the weapons of desperation. It is too late now to try and entice the common folk over to our side, as some of our set want to do who are now distributing no end of wine and corn among their underlings, building sick-houses for them, and putting the priests up to preaching sobriety to them, and the fear of God and due respect for the squire and his family. It is too late now for all that I say. We should only raise suspicions. We must summon Death to our assistance. In order to keep the people down by terror, therefore, we have resolved, in a secret conference, to establish cordons in the various counties and send patrols of soldiers in every direction to search and examine everybody passing to and fro. In this way we shall prevent the people from going from one village to another in large bodies, in fact we must keep them down in every possible way. I, therefore, send you by the bearer of this letter, on whom I can thoroughly rely, a box of powder which you are to scatter about in the barns, the fields, the pastures where the cattle feed, and especially in the wells from which the herdsmen draw water. The county authorities will take care that where this simple method does not do its work, the parish doctor shall compel the peasants to take this powder by force. At the same time we mean to make a great fuss, and spread the rumour that the plague is spreading from the neighbouring states, and will be mortal to many. You, meanwhile, will enclose a large plot of land on your estates, and make a churchyard of it. You may safely make the peasants a present thereof, as it will be mostly filled by them. Take out, by the way, the tongues of all the church-bells, that the number of the dead may not cause any commotion. You might also have prayers said in the church to avert the calamity, and at the same time scatter the powder broadcast. A separate cemetery must be dug lest the plague spread among the gentry. In this way we shall kill two birds with one stone: in the first place the peasantry will be sensibly diminished, and, taking the whole thing as a Divine visitation, will not have the spirit to rise up; and in the second place, the enemy hearing that the plague has broken out among us will fear to pitch his camp here lest it fare with him as it fared with King Sennacherib, who lost his whole army in a single night, as the Bible testifies.
"Believe me, my dear brother-in-law,
"Always affectionately yours,
"Ambrose Ligeti."
"The letter is addressed to the noble Benjamin Hétfalusy."
"Horrible, horrible!" cried two or three of the men, while the rest remained speechless with amazement.
"Softly, my friends!" said the rector soothingly. "We must do nothing hastily. So much is certain, however: they have designs upon our lives, and would wipe us clean out."
"Not a doubt of it, else why should they be so friendly towards us? Why should they distribute among us such a lot of food? We have never yet asked an alms from our masters, and hitherto they have snatched the food from our very mouths. If they caress us now it is because they fear us."
"Yes, they would destroy us. The other day they gave me a glass of brandy to drink at the tavern. I saw at once that it was not the usual sort of stuff, and, to make certain, I dipped a bit of bread in it and threw it to a dog, and he would not eat it."
"And why do the parsons preach so much about the scourge of God, the pestilence? Why we have never had a better promise of harvest than now. How do they know when Death will come? Only God can know beforehand whom He will destroy and whom He will keep alive."
"Suspend your judgments, my good friends," resumed the rector, with an affectation of benevolence, "you can see that the hand of God is over us all. He can work great wonders, and it is not impossible that these wonders will come. You can perceive from the signs of Heaven that great changes are about to come on the earth. On Good Friday a bloody rain fell near the hill of Mádi; not long ago a flaming sword was visible in the sky three nights running; everywhere about curious big fungi have shot up from the ground, which turn red or green immediately they are broken. Earth and sky seem to feel that the hand of God is about to press heavily upon us."