The Poor Plutocrats

by Mór Jókai

Henrietta told her husband not a word of all this, and the chatter about the black jewelry gradually died a natural death. Hátszegi sent back her property to the widow and told her where she could find the vendor—in Paris. We can readily imagine that she did not go all the way to Paris to make enquiries, being quite content with getting back her stolen property.

This incident made such an impression on Henrietta that she avoided all those circles in which she had been so ruthlessly exposed to insult. A blush of shame and anger suffused her face whenever she thought of it. She also abandoned all her work of benevolence among the people. She began to think that her husband was right after all when he said, as he did continually: "Let the gentry stick to the gentry, and the poor to the poor!" In fact she was now inclined to think him right in everything; the easiest thing a wife can do, she said to herself, is to trust her husband implicitly. Henceforth Henrietta adopted another mode of life; her motto now was: "Whatever my husband chooses, for at home he is my lord!"

So the halls of Hidvár overflowed with guests again, and balls, soirées, and picnics followed each other in quick succession. The young wife learnt to know the gentry and magnates of Transylvania face to face, and it was no wonder if she quickly accommodated herself to her new surroundings and began to be reconciled to her fate. She felt like one who, after seeing a landscape by moonlight and thinking it highly crude, sees it again by the light of day and finds it quite different.

And now the autumn came, the season when men prepare and congregate together for dangerous hunting expeditions. Bears and boars are now the only topics. For a week beforehand the women cannot get a word out of the gentlemen, they herd together in the armoury and talk of nothing but guns and dogs, firing each other by recounting their past exploits, making bets, and playing at cards. The ladies at such times are shelved altogether.

During the actual hunting season the men are not to be seen for whole weeks at a time, but off they go to the woods and stalk or lurk for their prey in the midst of water and ice, and the ladies think it nothing extraordinary if their husbands or lovers, as the case may be, come back, or are carried back, drenched with rain, invisible for mud, with their garments torn to shreds and their limbs mangled; for after all it is the only manly diversion—the only diversion really fit for a gentleman.

When the bear-hunting began, that heroic cripple, Squire Gerzson, also appeared with Count Kengyelesy and numerous other familiar faces from distant counties, who had all met together on the day after Henrietta's wedding, and who regularly made Hidvár their autumn trysting-place.

Count Kengyelesy did not bring his wife with him: the little rogue on her husband's departure declared that she was ill and remained behind—verbum sap!

Henrietta was very much occupied by the duties of hospitality. She took a pride in anticipating the wants of all her guests, and at the evening soirées she played the part of hostess with becoming aplomb.

One day the gentlemen with their beaters, rangers, dogs, and carts, had all gone off to the forest as usual, and Henrietta was left alone in the castle with Clementina, Margari, and the domestics. As for Margari, he would not have gone to the woods for all the bears in the world.

Clementina, solemnly cackling gossip as usual, imparted to Henrietta that the night before, when the gentlemen played at cards, the luck had run dead against Hátszegi: Count Kengyelesy had won back from him the whole of the Kengyelesy estate. "Thank God!" sighed Henrietta at this glad intelligence. This was one of the things that had weighed down her heart like a nightmare, one of the partition-walls, so to speak, which had hitherto separated her from her husband. This, at any rate, had now disappeared.