"Have you lost your wits, Margari? How could you possibly get a fiddle into that? Or has the fellow never cast eyes on a fiddle? Bandi, you go and look in the carriage for the fiddle!"
But this was not at all to Margari's liking. What, send that vagabond to the carriage to ferret about there! His lordship must have clean taken leave of his senses. Why, in the carriage was Margari's own brand-new mantle, for which he had paid nine and twenty gulden. The vagabond would be sure to lay his hands upon it. No, he would rather go to look for the fiddle himself. So he found the violin case at last somehow, and handing it to the baron through the csárdá window (for he durst not trust himself inside), he retired again beneath the coach-house, although the rain was now splashing down upon it.
Baron Leonard took from its morocco case his splendid Straduarius, that relic of the greatest master of fiddle-making, for which he had paid a small fortune, and following the lead of the young vagabond's tilinka played the bitter-sweet melancholy air on the sonorous instrument, and at the third trial he enriched it with so many variations as to astonish everyone. Then Ripa became enthusiastic and chimed in with his hoarse old voice.
When the baron once had the violin in his hands, he was not content with playing a single song, one melody enticed another forth, and so, one after another, his fiddle-bow ran through all those rhapsodies of the last century, those compositions of the "Gipsy-Beethoven," Bihari, and other great popular masters, with the most classical variations. Princes listen not to such a concert as now resounded through that wretched, desolate csárdá. Even Henrietta arose from her couch the better to enjoy these melancholy airs. If ever in her life, it was at this moment that she beheld her husband in an aureole of dazzling light which irresistibly attracted, overpowered, subdued.
One thing, however, struck her as strange, incredible—how could a fashionable man brought up in the atmosphere of elegant saloons, find any pleasure in playing bravoura pieces in the tap room of a miserable csárdá to an audience of half-tipsy vagabonds? Was this an habitual diversion of these wealthy magnates, or was it only Hátszegi's bizarre humour?
However, when "the lads" began to chime in a little too vigourously, Hátszegi restored the violin to its case, took out his pocket-book, opened it before them all and nonchalantly displayed as he did so the bundles of thousand-gulden notes which it contained. Nay, he searched among them for stray ten-gulden notes and gave one to each of the four vagabonds "for the fine song they had taught him"—that was the way he put it—at the same time requesting them to quit the tap-room, as the ladies in the adjoining chamber wanted to sleep and must not be kept awake by any further noise. The vagabonds must seek a couch elsewhere.
The vagabonds, without the slightest objection, arose, drank up the dregs of the wine, pocketed the bank-notes without so much as a "thank you!" and settled down for the night on the roof of the coach-house—to the great terror of Margari, who was concealed in one of the coaches and did not have a wink of sleep all night, his teeth chattered so.
But Hátszegi, when the drinkers had withdrawn, spread out his hunting pelisse on the long table, laid down thereon and quietly fell asleep. He did not even shut the door, nor did he have his pistols by him.
In the adjoining chamber, meanwhile, the csárdá-woman had brought out her spindle, set all its many wheels a-working and began to tell her ladyship a lot of those wondrous tales that have neither beginning nor end, puszta adventures, the atrocities of vagabonds and their fellows, the sad love stories of poor deserted maidens and such like. And all the while the wheels of the spindle whirr-whirr-whirred monotonously, and Henrietta felt like a little child whose nurse sits beside her bed and lulls her to sleep with fairy tales. For weeks she had not enjoyed so quiet and dreamless a slumber as she had that night beneath the roof of the csárdá in the midst of the lonely puszta.
Next morning Clementina, after first making quite sure that nobody had had his or her throat cut during the night, was moved by curiosity to ask what sort of connection his lordship had with this csárdá since he seemed to know everybody in it. And then she learnt that not only this csárdá but the whole of the surrounding puszta also was the property of his lordship, for which the people who lived upon it paid very little rent, inasmuch as his lordship did not look upon it as a source of income but chiefly valued it on account of its numerous reedy lakes where he was wont every year to hunt water-fowl and beavers on a grand scale. Moreover, from this spot to his own house, a good two days' journey by foot, everything belonged to his lordship's estate. Nay, his lordship, if he liked, could traverse the whole kingdom from Deva to Pest, and be on his own property the whole time, it was only like moving from one of his houses to another.