"You may if you like," whispered Tárhalmy, strangely touched at her request.
And Mariska set about making herself a new pen in order to do justice to the projected document.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Mathias Ráby kept as far as possible out of Vienna society after his arrival in the capital. He never appeared at Court, and rented a modest apartment in Paternoster Street without giving his address to anyone. It was not only that he wanted to be undisturbed so as to fulfil a difficult and important work, but that he felt that a turning-point in his life had come, which implied a momentous decision on his part.
His common-sense told him that so far the tragedy which he had lived through was only a huge jest for the Vienna public, who enjoy nothing so well as a joke. That the bold Magyars had played off this trick on the Emperor himself made the whole jest all the grimmer. For them it mattered not one jot who the victim was, as long as they had their laugh.
So Ráby avoided his nearest friends, and even reading the papers irritated him. With so many big affairs going on in the world, what did people care about the Szent-Endre happenings, or the machinations of the Pesth government authorities, at a time when in the East, Russia was shaking the Ottoman power to its foundations, and the rising of the German Netherlands was threatening Austria with the loss of her finest province, whilst like an ever darkening storm-cloud, the French Revolution was already lowering on the political horizon. With such contingencies, Szent-Endre affairs might well go to the wall.
Ráby worked so unremittingly at his task, that by the beginning of January, he could hand over his report to the Emperor.
It was a straggling and long-winded, but exhaustive, document. To make the tangled threads hold together and get a grip of the facts was no light business, but at last the bill of indictment was drawn up.
Nor were the Pesth authorities, meantime, slow in preferring their counter impeachment against Ráby, and a black one it was—instigator of rebellion, breaker of the peace, calumniator of the council—he was all these, and much more according to this weighty indictment which brought forward as many arguments to prove the case against him, as Ráby had adduced against his adversaries.