He looked around him. He was quite alone.
He looked for Henrietta, he called her by name. She was nowhere to be seen. Their luggage had also disappeared. He went into the courtyard and looked for the carriage. That also was nowhere to be seen. Only the four horses were in the stable, and they were neighing for water; nobody had watered them.
After that Mr. Gerzson's head grew more muddled than ever.
What had become of the lady? What had happened during the night? How was it that he remembered nothing about it, he who generally used to sleep so lightly that the humming of a midge was sufficient to awake him?
Gradually he bethought him that the evening before he had drunk some wine with an unusual flavour. Even now he was conscious of a peculiar taste in his mouth. Yet no wine in the world had ever been able to do him harm. He returned to the room to examine the contents of his flask. But even the flask was now nowhere to be seen. There was not a single forgotten object, not a single indication to give him a clue in this obscure confusion. What could have happened here?—he had not the faintest idea.
He went and stood in front of the csárdá. He gazed out upon the desolate puszta stretching around him in every direction. From every point of the compass wagon tracks, some old, some still fresh, zig-zagged to and from the csárdá and he could not make up his mind which of them to take in order to reach the world beyond.
CHAPTER XVI
LEANDER BABEROSSY
Whenever one carts away a heap of stones which have been lying undisturbed for years, or whenever one removes the shingle-roof of an ancient tenement, or drains off the water from a marshy place, one generally stumbles upon all sorts of hitherto undiscovered, curious beetles, odd looking moths and spiral-shaped, creeping things in these routed out lurking places, which nobody ever saw before or read of in the natural history books; and at such times a man bethinks him how wonderful it is of Mother Nature to provide even such holes and corners as these with living inhabitants which never see the light of day at all.