A Hungarian Nabob | Page 8

fiddle o'er thee."
And, in fact, the gipsy never moved a limb. There he lay, prone, 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 pronounce 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" csárda, 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 csárda on man-back instead of on horseback. He
mounted, therefore, on to the shoulders of his huntsman, a broadly built,
sturdy 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 csárda,
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 Alföld.
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 à 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 brass buttons 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 à 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 tortoiseshell 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, sacré bleu!" exclaimed the new-comer (so much,
at any rate, he had learnt from Béranger), 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 Bús 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