He was frequently
absent from Hidvar 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 Hidvar 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.
Often times she would very much have liked to ask him how this was, but
she was a stranger in these parts and did not understand his language;
at last, however, the priest, perceiving the lady one day, peered at her
through the palings and wished her good-day in the purest Hungarian,
thereby giving her to understand that the language of the gentry was
well known to him.
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