, after all, I will wear my blue sash and bows, Róza, the pink will make me look so pale. Oh, dear! oh, dear! how late it is! I have heard the czigány tune up half an hour ago; I shall never get dressed to-day.”
And the little maid rushed hither and thither, bustling round her young mistress, changing the blue sash for the pink, then, back again to the blue, arranging a stray golden curl, putting a stitch here and there, eager, excited and proud. Proud of such a mistress, the prettiest heiress in the lowlands. Bideskúty Ilonka, then barely seventeen, was reputed to be the beauty of the countryside, the fairest in that land where all women are fair, with the graceful, yet full figure of the Hungarian race, the peach-like skin, the golden hair, and forget-me-not eyes, that are calculated to drive any inflammable Magyar heart to despair. Since, according to the noble hostess of Bideskút, it is the duty of every aristocratic Hungarian girl to be beautiful, Ilonka certainly fulfilled that duty to absolute perfection, and the Countess, her mother, had little fear but that her daughter would fulfil her other duty with equal perfection, and make the most suitable marriage her and motherly heart could desire.
Downstairs the agitation was becoming positively electrical. The Countess herself, in the tight-fitting silk dress, that had formed part of her trousseau, and had passed through many stages of promiscuous, and antiquated attempts at modernisation, was giving her final look round to the gorgeously laid out table in the big hall. The heavy oak buffet, which stood the whole length of the hall, almost broke down under the weight of the huge dishes of meat and fish of every description, that filled each available corner, whilst the two horse-shoe tables literally creaked beneath the enormous baskets of grapes and melons, which threw a penetrating scent around.
Gigantic bottles of wine stood ready to hand, between each of two guests, and a couple of huge casks on tall trestles, each side of the buffet, were ready tapped, in case the bottles did not prove sufficient. The valets in their best tight-fitting Magyar frock coats, and still tighter breeches, with boots of the shiniest leather, lined the lower hall below, awaiting the arrivals. Outside a band of czigány, the czimbalom player in the middle, the leader well to the fore, had turned ready to strike up the Rákózy march directly the distant cracking of a whip would announce the first arrival.
The Countess Irma expected one or two of the nearer neighbours in time for mid-day dinner: they would come in their own coaches all the way, from either side of the Tarna. Bideskút had supplied the relays for those of the guests who came from a considerable distance, and, already the day before, carriages had gone off in every direction, from which the main road branched off, and visitors might be expected to arrive; whilst the smartest coaches harnessed with the pick of the Bideskút stables had been sent overnight to Gyöngyös, to bring from the railway station there those, who from the still more distant counties were obliged to travel by train. These would mostly be the younger and smarter people, who had been to Budapesth, or even to Vienna, and had become accustomed to those terrible inventions of Satan, akin to Bideskúty's threshing machines, the railway trains. All older people preferred the mode of travelling, that had been good enough for their fathers and their grandfathers—the cumbersome but comfortable harnessed with four sure-footed Hungarian horses from their own herds, who did not rush along at devilish speed on metal tracks, which surely never were forged anywhere, but in Satan’s own workshop.