They sat on the bench until it was almost dark and for Margit it was time well spent. Adam felt happier than he had for days because at last he had been able to tell everything that was in his heart to such a sweet, selfless girl. It was like talking to the sympathetic sister he had never had, whose hands he could squeeze in sympathy and with whom he could share his tears and his sadness. Although they had often talked of all this before it had never been so good as today on the bench on the hilltop. As they walked back to the house Margit suggested that perhaps he would like to write to her, especially if he was far away and needed some relief for his aching heart. Wouldn’t that be a help to him, she said, a comfort in his loneliness? And he agreed that it would.
Adrienne and Balint, in order to escape from the other two, turned off the path at the angle of the manor-house and continued to the end of a long side wing. This was where Judith Miloth had lived since her mind had become clouded and they had brought her home. Next to the house was the wire fence of the poultry yard that Adrienne had had made for her sister when she discovered that the girl took pleasure in looking after small animals.
On the sunny side there was a double row of chicken coops and next were several separate little houses for broody hens. A little further on was a low hut to house the rabbits in front of which a clay floor had been laid. Further on still there was a pile of sand which was renewed each month by a cart sent up from the Maros. This was necessary because no sand was to be found in the high prairie-lands and the health of the chickens depended on it. Once, before Adrienne had organized this, some epidemic had broken out, the hens had died and Judith had cried for days on end.
There was a narrow path between the fence and the lilac bushes and along this Adrienne led Balint in single file. From here he caught his first sight of Judith whom he had not seen since she had been brought home from Venice a year and a half before.
The girl was sitting on the ground. A black kerchief covered her hair and was tied under her chin like the peasant girls’. She wore a wide blue cotton apron which was spattered with whitish chicken droppings as were her hands. On the ground beside her was a metal scraper with which she had just cleaned the clay floor of the chicken run. Around her was a cluster of rabbits greedily munching on the lettuce leaves she had just given them. As she sat there Judith with one hand flung out handfuls of feed to the chickens while with the other she nursed a crippled chick which had been born lame.
‘Eat, my little one,’ she was murmuring. ‘Go on, eat! No one will harm you here. It’s good, isn’t it? Eat, little one, eat!’
Judith only spoke to her animals; to people she hardly opened her mouth.
The old maidservant who looked after her was standing at the door of her room and, as Adrienne passed by, she called out, ‘Kiss your hand, my Lady.’
As the old woman spoke Judith looked up. Seeing only Adrienne at first her expression did not change; but the moment she saw that Abady was with her, and lifted his hat in polite greeting, her face was contorted with horror and she looked at him with a mixture of surprise and terror, her eyes opened wide with shock. Her thin lips opened, as she straightened up, hands hanging loosely at her sides. She only looked at him for a few seconds but it seemed to him that perhaps she was, however uncertainly, recalling the moment when he had brought her home after she had been abandoned by the man she loved.
Abady too was thinking of that moment when he had found her alone at the railway station at Kolozsvar, waiting for the man she loved, that scoundrel Wickwitz with whom she had planned to elope to Austria but who had fled across the Romanian border the night before without even troubling to send her word. He remembered well the terrified expression on her face, like some caged wild bird, when he had stepped up to her just after the Budapest express had already left and told her that she was waiting in vain. Today, for a brief instant, he saw in her face that same expression, but it remained there only briefly and then the vacant look returned, empty and blind as it had been ever since that second shock which had broken her completely, when an unknown woman had sent her all the letters she had written to Wickwitz.
Now Judith lived shut away in these rooms in a remote corner of her father’s house. She lived there like a shadow. She was alive but she might have been dead. She was still beautiful, but she was paler than before, and thinner, and her glance held no more meaning than the unblinking stare of a wild animal.
Adrienne and Balint walked on without speaking. They had both been upset by the sight of Judith.
When they had been wandering in the orchard for a while Balint started to speak, and as so often happened between them, he said exactly what was in her mind too.
‘Ever since I left Almasko I’ve been thinking that if Uzdy is now so wrapped up in his new hobby, and if he doesn’t seem so jealous and possessive as he was, surely a divorce might now be possible?’
Adrienne answered very slowly, ‘Yes, maybe. I often think about it, especially when I’m with you. But he isn’t always the same, you know. Sometimes … well, sometimes he seems to … oh, he’s completely unpredictable … and … and, well, demanding!’ Her face clouded over and she shut her eyes tightly. It was clear that her victory over him was by no means certain.
‘I use every excuse,’ she went on, ‘to go away. Now I’ll stay here for a week or so; then maybe go to Kolozsvar for the hunting at Zsuk. I really ought to do that for Margit’s sake and of course I’ll say it’s for her, to give her a chance of meeting some young men. I may not be able to pull it off as of course we can’t go to balls as we’re still in mourning. Anyhow I’m doing all I can to get him used to my being away.’ They walked on in silence. Then Adrienne tried to sum up her feelings: ‘This is what I’m working on, but I can’t make a final decision yet. The time isn’t ripe and I feel it’s impossible just now. If I raised the matter I’d have to tell him why. Even if I didn’t tell him and he didn’t already suspect the reason, he’d soon find out … and then …’ She shuddered. ‘No, it’s impossible now.’
Balint thought he caught a note of fear in her voice, even though she had not told him everything that was in her mind.
The day after she had last been with Balint into the forest she had returned to take a walk in the same direction, westwards, towards the Abady holdings. On that day she had not gone as far as the boundary between the properties before turning to go home: and then a most unexpected thing had happened. She found herself face to face with her husband. There, on the path, was Uzdy who never normally walked more than a hundred paces away from the house and who ran his estates by studying the agents’ reports in the comfort of his own study. But there he was, standing in front of her!
He must have been spying on her, she thought. That could be the only reason why he had got up so unusually early. She could only imagine that he had been secretly watching to see when she left the house and then, wearing noiseless rubber-soled shoes so as not to be heard as he stole after her, he must have followed wherever she went, presumably at some little distance. And he, who never took a shot at any living animal but only at targets set up in the park or in the castle shooting gallery, was carrying a precision rifle on one shoulder. He surely would not carry such a thing for no reason — he must have brought it either for her, or for Abady.