"With all my heart. Will you give me your daughter?"
"Which one? You may have your choice."
"The one next him. When she is grown up she will be just a match for him and we shall both have a son and a daughter."
Beldi laughed good-naturedly, the two women smiled at each other and Kutschuk Pasha looked with satisfaction at his son, while the latter drew the heron's feather out of his turban, tore off the jeweled clasp which had been most pleasing to the little Aranka, and gave it to the child with generous gallantry. The little maid reached for the costly present timidly, without the slightest suspicion of either its material or moral worth; but when once the trinket was in her hand she would not have let it go for anything in the world. The parents suddenly became silent. True, their expression was a smiling one, but their eyes were serious.
CHAPTER VI
THE BATTLE OF NAGY-SZÖLLÖS
Meanwhile Michael Apafi assured by Ali Pasha that help would come to him in a short time, advanced on Schassburg and there awaited the change of fortune. John Kemény came against him with a great army of German and Hungarian troops in imposing numbers, and he himself was a bold general in time of action. Michael Apafi could make but slight opposition. He had a few hundred stiff-necked Szeklers incapable of discipline, together with the blue janissaries who had stayed behind as bodyguard for him; in all not the tenth of Kemény's force in point of strength. By the advice of Stephen Apafi the Prince determined to stay in Schassburg on the defensive until he could be joined by the auxiliaries from his Turkish patron. This decision was pleasing to the Saxon burghers, for behind the walls of their own town they knew how to defend themselves, but in open field they were never quite comfortable. With the Szeklers it was just the opposite. It was Nalaczy's mission to keep them in a warlike frame of mind. One evening he brought them to such a state of excitement at the inn that with the dawn they went noisily to the windows of the Prince and swore roundly that the gate must be opened to them for they were determined to attack Kemény and fight it out to the death. The Prince and his advisers came down in terror and strove in every way to make them understand that Kemény's troops were more numerous than they; that the half of his army was made up of musketeers while on their side none but the Saxons knew how to use firearms; that if they should make a sally by one gate the enemy would rush in by the other and all would be confusion. But the man who thinks he can clear a Szekler's mind of an idea once gained is much mistaken.
"We are either going to be led against the enemy or we are going home," they shouted. "We positively will not consent to stay here ten years like the Trojans, for we are needed at home. Portion out to every man the number of the enemy that falls to his share, these he shall strike down and then take his discharge. We do not wish to stay here and be besieged and starved out, and then thrown to the dogs and rats."
"If you do not wish to stay, my friends, you may go," was the final decision of Apafi, "but it would be madness for me to be drawn into an engagement."
The Szeklers said never a word but took up their knapsacks, shouldered their spears and moved out of Schassburg as if they never had been there. From this time on the Szeklers were Apafi's enemies and remained so until his death.