At last, when the worthy gentleman really believed that it was quite impossible to play any more variations on the well-worn topic of the mouse, the gipsy suddenly put his hand to his bosom, and cried with a laugh, "Here"s the mouse!" And with that he drew it forth from the inside pocket of his frock-coat, where he had shoved it un.o.bserved, while the terrified company fancied he had swallowed it, and in sheer despair had soothed him by making him eat and drink all manner of good things.
"Look, Mat!" said he to the dog, whereupon the greyhound immediately swallowed the _corpus delicti_.
"You good-for-nothing rascal!" cried the n.o.bleman, "so you"d bandy jests with me, would you! I"ll have you hanged for this. Here, you heydukes, fetch a rope! Hoist him upon that beam!"
The heydukes immediately took their master at his word. They seized the gipsy, who never ceased laughing, mounted him on a chair, threw the halter round his neck, drew the extreme end of the rope across the beam, and drew away the chair from beneath him. The gipsy kicked and struggled, but it was of no avail; there they kept him till he really began to choke, when they lowered him to the ground again.
But now he began to be angry. "I am dying," he cried. "I am not a fool that you should hoist me up again, when I can die as I am, like an honest gentleman."
"Die by all means," said the poet. "Don"t be afraid. I"ll think of an epitaph for you."
And while the gipsy flung himself on the ground and closed his eyes, Gyarfas recited this epitaph over him--
"Here liest thou, gipsy-lad, never to laugh any longer, Another shall shoulder the fiddle, and death shall himself fiddle o"er thee."
And, in fact, the gipsy never moved a limb. There he lay, p.r.o.ne, stiff, and breathless. In vain they tickled his nose and his heels; he did not stir. Then they placed him on the table with a circle of burning candles round him like one laid out for burial, and the heydukes had to sing dirges over him, as over a corpse, while the poet was obliged to stand upon a chair and p.r.o.nounce his funeral oration.
And the Nabob laughed till he got blue in the face.
While these things were going on in one of the rooms of the "Break-"em-tear-"em" _csarda_, fresh guests were approaching that inhospitable hostelry. These were the companions of the carriage that had come to grief by sticking fast in the mud of the cross-roads, for, after the men and beasts belonging to it had striven uselessly for three long hours to move it from the reef on which it had foundered, the gentleman sitting alone inside it had hit upon the peculiar idea of being carried to the _csarda_ on man-back instead of on horseback. He mounted, therefore, on to the shoulders of his huntsman, a broadly built, st.u.r.dy fellow, and leaving his lackey in the carriage to look after whatever might be there, and making the postillion march in front with the carriage lamp, he trotted in this humorous fashion to the _csarda_, where the muscular huntsman safely deposited him in the porch.
It will be worth while to make the acquaintance of the new-comer, as far as we can at least, as soon as possible.
From his outward appearance it was plain that he did not belong to the gentry of the _Alfold_.
As he divested himself of his large mantle with its short Quiroga collar, he revealed a costume so peculiar that if any one showed himself in it in the streets in our days, not only the street urchins but we ourselves should run after it. In those days this fashion was called the mode _a la calicot_.
On his head was a little short cap, somewhat like a tin saucepan in shape, with such a narrow rim that it would drive a man to despair to imagine how he could ever catch hold of it. From underneath this short cap, on both sides, there bulged forth such a forest of curly fluffy hair that the rim of the cap was quite overwhelmed. The face beneath was clean-shaved, except that a moustache, pointed at each end, branched upwards towards the sky like a pair of threatening horns, and the neck was so compressed within a stiffly starched cravat, with two sharply-pointed linen ends, that one could not so much as move one"s chin about in it. The body of this gentleman"s dark green frock-coat lay just beneath his armpits, but the tails reached to the ground, and the collar was so large that you could scarce distinguish its wearer inside it. He also had double and triple shirt frills, and while the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons of his coat were no larger than cherry pips, the monstrously puffed sleeves rose as high as his shoulders. The wax-yellow waistcoat was almost half concealed by the huge projecting ruffles. The whole costume was set off by hose _a la cosaque_, which appeared to amplify downwards, bulged over the boots, and were slit up in front so as to allow them to be stuffed therein. Above the waistcoat dangled all sorts of jingling-jangling trinkets, but the boots were provided with spurs of terrible dimensions, so that if a fellow did not look out he might easily have had his eyes poked out. Such was the martial mode of those days, at the very time when no war was going on anywhere. The finishing touch to this get-up was supplied by a thin tortoisesh.e.l.l cane with a bird"s head carved in ivory, which a beau with any pretensions to _bon ton_ used regularly to twiddle in his mouth.
"Eh, ventre bleu! eh, sacre bleu!" exclaimed the new-comer (so much, at any rate, he had learnt from Beranger), as he kicked at the kitchen door and shook his saturated mantle. "What sort of a country is this? Hie, there, a light! Is there any one at home?"
This marvel brought forth Peter Bus with a light, and after gaping sufficiently at the new-comer and his servant who had thus broken into his kitchen, he asked, with an alacrity to oblige by no means corresponding to his amazement, "What are your commands, sir?" His face showed at the same time that he meant to give nothing.
The stranger murdered the Hungarian language terribly, and he had a distinctly foreign accent.
"Milles tonnerres!" he cried, "can"t you speak any other language here but Hungarian?"
"No."
"That"s bad. Then where"s the innkeeper?"
"I am. And may I ask, sir, who you are, whence you came, and where you live?"
"I own property here, but I live at Paris, and what devils brought me hither I don"t know. I would have gone on further if the mud of your roads hadn"t stopped me. And now give me--comment s"appelle ca?" And here he came to a stop because he could not find the word he wanted.
"Give you what, sir?"
"Comment s"appelle ca? Tell me the name!"
"My name, sir? Peter Bus."
"Diable! not your name, but the name of the thing I want."
"What _do_ you want, sir?"
"That thing that draws a coach, a four-legged thing; you strike it with a whip."
"A horse, do you mean?"
"Pas donc! They don"t call it that."
"A _forspont_?"[2]
[Footnote 2: Relay of horses: Ger. _Vorspann_.]
"That"s it, that"s it. A forspont! I want a forspont immediately."
"I have none, sir; all my horses are out to gra.s.s."
"C"est triste! Then here I"ll remain. Tant mieux; it will not bore me. I have travelled in Egypt and Morocco. I have spent the night in as deplorable a hut as this before now; it will amuse me. I will fancy I am in some Bedouin shanty, and this river here is the Nile, that has overflowed, and these beasts that are croaking in the water--comment s"appelle ca?--frogs? oh yes, of course--these frogs are the alligators of the Nile. And this miserable country--what do you call this department?"
"It is not a part of anything, sir; it is a dam, the dam of the cross-roads, we call it."
"Fripon! I am not speaking of the mud in which I stuck fast, but of the district all about here. What do they call it?"
"Oh, I see! They call it the county of Szabolcs."
"Szabolcs, eh? Szabolcs? C"est parceque, no doubt, so many _szabos_[3]
live in it, eh? Ha, ha! That was a good _calembourg_ of mine, c"est une plaisanterie. Dost understand?"
[Footnote 3: Tailors.]
"I can"t say for certain, but I believe the Hungarians so called it after the name of one of their ancient leaders who led them out of Asia."
"Ah, c"est beau! Very nice, I mean. The worthy magyars name their departments after their ancient patriarchs. Touching, truly!"
"Then, may I ask to what nationality you yourself belong, sir?"
"I don"t live here. Bon Dieu! what a terrible fate for any one to live here, where the puddles are bottomless and a man can see nothing but storks."
Peter Bus turned to leave the room; he was offended at being treated in this manner.
"Come, come, don"t run away with the light, signore contadino!" cried the stranger.
"I beg your pardon, but I am of gentle birth myself. My name is Peter Bus,[4] and I am well content with it."
[Footnote 4: p.r.o.nounced _Bush_.]