The girl had anticipated something much worse than this, so she quietly answered: "You can spare yourself the trouble, I have already returned it to Fatia Negra. I would not carry it about with me any longer."
"You have acted wisely," said the old man, lowering his musket. "Now you can ride on."
The early dawn was breaking as they reached home. When Anicza entered her room she found hanging up beneath the ikon that gleamed and shone over her bed both the damaged ducat and the little cross which she had given to Fatia Negra two hours before. He must indeed be in league with the devil—else how could he have got there, invisibly, so long before them?
Anicza said not a word about it to anybody, but she hid both the amulets safely away in her bosom again—and now she was right proud of her Fatia Negra!
CHAPTER VIII
STRONG JUON
Henrietta's married life was not a happy one. Her husband was polite, complaisant, and conventionally correct in his behaviour towards her, and that was all. And then she saw so little of him. He was frequently absent from Hidvár for weeks at a time, and when he returned he regularly brought in his train a merry company of comrades, in whose pastimes Henrietta could take no sort of pleasure.
During those long days when she had Hidvár all to herself and was left entirely to the company of her sad thoughts, she would sometimes walk about till late in the evening in the shady alleys of the home park, listening to the songs of the girls working in the fields. At the end of the park was a church, and in front of it a small clearing fenced around with stakes and looking like a cabbage garden. It surely belonged to some poor man or other. It did—and the poor man was the parish-priest.
Henrietta often saw him, a tall, grey-bearded man in a long black cassock, hastening to his little garden; there the reverend gentleman would divest himself of his long habit, produce a rake, and work till late in the evening. Henrietta fancied at first that was merely a dietetic diversion, but afterwards, when she found him there the next day and the day after that, and at every hour of the day; when she saw him wiping the sweat from his brow in the burning afternoons and leaning wearily at intervals on his rake to rest a while from his labour, then she was persuaded that this work was not a pastime, but a bitter toil for daily bread.