Makkabesku was a very long time coming to, but he contrived at last, in a very tremulous voice, to tell Hátszegi the somnambulistic case of the double shots, nay he called Heaven to witness that Fatia Negra had caught the bullets in his hands as if they were flies.
"You're a fool," cried Hátszegi angrily. "I suppose you fired above his head on both occasions."
"But then you ought to see the marks of the bullets on the opposite wall."
And it was a fact that, look as they might, they found no trace of a bullet on the walls or anywhere else.
CHAPTER XV
WHO IT WAS THAT RECOGNIZED FATIA NEGRA
The events at the Mikalai csárdá considerably upset Hátszegi. He returned home very sulky and was unusually ungracious towards Henrietta. There were several violent scenes between them, in the course of which the baron twitted his wife with having betrayed him and hinted that it was all in consequence of her own and her brother's bad conduct that she had been disinherited by her grandfather. He revealed to her that he knew everything. He was well aware, he said, that in her girlhood she had had a rascally young attorney as a lover and had thereby incurred her grandfather's anger.
Henrietta, poor thing, had not the spirit to answer him back: "If you knew this, why did you marry me? Why did you not leave me then to him with whom I should have been happy if poor?" She could only reply with tears. She trembled before him while she loathed him.
And yet how dependent she was on him.