I comforted Bessy with the assurance that I would make the damaged portrait all right again--there were special colours for that.
"But she must not sit again," hastily intervened her mother. She was afraid I should begin coming to the house again and spoil the good match.
"And I haven't got that dress either," said Bessy.
It certainly was a pretty dress. Would that she had never had it!
I assured them, however, that I would be able to put the picture to rights at home, all by myself. And with that I put it in my pocket. I never went back there again.
The mother and the aunt ostentatiously occupied themselves with Muki, expressing all the time their regretful sympathy, at which he was beside himself for fury.
I beat a retreat without any attempt to say good-bye. But Bessy ran after me, and, overtaking me in the doorway, seized my hand, and whispered in an ardent voice, "You'll put _me_ to rights, won't you?"
An hour afterwards I was sitting on the steamer and gazing at the lingering smoke which hid my native town from my eyes. It was just as if I were returning from a funeral.
WELTSCHMERZ CONDITIONS[25]--"REMAIN OR FLY!"
[Footnote 25: _Világ fájdalmas_ állapotok. There is no English equivalent of _Világ fájdalmas_.]
When I got back to Pest, I found two letters awaiting me on my writing-table, one from Tony Várady, inviting me to stand godfather to his new-born son, and the other from Petöfi, informing me that he had just been married to Julia Szendrey, and that they were having very happy days at Teleky's Castle, Koltó. Both of these friends were poor fellows, like myself; and the ladies who had chosen to be their companions through life were girls belonging to wealthy, eminent families, accustomed to luxury and splendour, surrounded by obsequious wooers, and their mothers loved them as the apples of their eyes. Their families opposed the marriages, and the enamoured young ladies, handicapped as they were by the weight of their parents' refusal, followed their beloveds notwithstanding.
Then true love is no dream after all, but pure gold. And yet when I seek this pure gold they call me a crazy alchemist!
And now Petöfi begged me by letter to seek out a convenient lodging for him, where they and I could live together. That a newly-married bridegroom should invite his faithful bachelor comrade to be a fellow-lodger with him is a fact which belongs to the realm of fairy tales.