"It is true."
By the time that Andor turned the corner of the house into the street, he found that the news of his arrival had already spread through the village like wildfire. Klara Goldstein's ready tongue had been at work this past hour; she had quickly disseminated the news that the wanderer had come home. She did not say that the malice and love of mischief in her had caused her to say nothing to Andor about Elsa's coming wedding. She merely told the first neighbour whom she came across that Lakatos Andor had come back, just as she, for one, had always declared that he would.
Andor's friends had assembled in the street in a trice; here was too glorious an opportunity to shout and to sing and to make merry, to be lightly missed. And Andor had always been popular before. He was doubly so now that he had come back from America or wherever he may have been, and had made a fortune there; he shook one hundred and fifty hands before he could walk as far as the presbytery. The gypsies who had just arrived by train from Arad were not allowed to proceed straight to the schoolroom. They were made to pause in the great open place before the church, made to unpack their instruments then and there, and to strike up the Rákóczy March without more ado, in honour of the finest son of Marosfalva, who had been thought dead by some, and had returned safe and sound to his native corner of the earth.
It was with much difficulty that at last Andor succeeded in effecting his escape and running away from the series of ovations which greeted him when and wherever he was recognized. The women embraced him without further ado, the men worried him to tell them some of his adventures then and there. Above all, everyone wanted to hear how very much more wretched, uncomfortable and God-forsaken the rest of the wide, wide world was in comparison with Hungary in general and the village of Marosfalva in particular.
The heartfelt, if noisy, greetings of his old friends had the effect of soothing Andor's aching heart. The sight of his native village, the scent of the air, the dust of the road acted as a slight compensation for the heavy load of sorrow which otherwise would hopelessly have weighed him down.
With a final wave of his hat he disappeared from the enraptured gaze of his friends into the cool quietude of the presbytery garden. He stood still for a moment behind a huge clump of tall sunflowers and gaudy dahlias to recover his breath and rearrange his coat, which had been mishandled quite a good deal by his friends in the excess of their joy.
From the other side of the low gate came the buzz of animated talk, his own name oft-repeated, cries of surprise and of pleasure, when the news reached some late-comers, and through it all the soft, pathetic murmur of the gipsies' fiddles; they had lapsed from the inspiriting strains of the Rákóczy March to one of the dreamy Magyar love-songs which suited their own languid Oriental temperament far better than the martial music.
But here, in the small presbytery garden, the world seemed to have slipped back an hundred years or more. Perfect peace! the drowsing of flies and wasps, the call of thrushes, the crackling of tiny twigs in the branches of the old acacia tree in the corner! Only the flies and the birds and the flowers seemed to live, and the air was heavy with the pungent odour of the sunflowers.
Andor drew a long breath. He seemed suddenly to wake from a long, long dream. It was just over five years ago that he had stood one morning just like this in this little garden; the late roses had not then ceased to bloom. It was the day before he had to leave Marosfalva in order to become a soldier, and he had come after Mass to say a private good-bye to the kind priest.
Now it seemed as if those five years were just one long dream—the soldiering, the voyage across the sea, the two years in a strange, strange land, all culminating in that awful cataclysm which had for ever robbed him of happiness.
It seemed as if it could not all be true, as if Elsa was even now waiting for him to go out for a walk under the acacia trees as she had done on that morning five years ago. Even now he pulled the bell as he had done then, and now—as then—Pater Bonifácius himself came to the door.
His old housekeeper had already brought the news to the presbytery of Andor's home-coming, and the old Pater was overjoyed at seeing the lad—now become so strong and so manly. He took Andor to his heart, chiefly because he would not have the lad see the tears which had so quickly come to his eyes.
"It is true then, Pater," said Andor, when he had followed the old man into the little parlour all littered with papers and books. "It is true, or you would not have cried when first you embraced me."
"What is true, my son?" asked the Pater.
"That Elsa is to marry Erös Béla to-morrow?"
"Yes, my son, that is true," said the priest simply.
And thus Andor knew that, at any rate, the hideous present was not a dream.