“The rotten liar!—Hand in glove with the old man, to come and talk to me of friendship! He that would make beggars of both of us, if he could!”
It took him some time to cool down after this meeting; especially as everything that morning went wrong with him. He had scarcely begun chopping the logs, when a knot made a notch in his ax; then, just before noon, a piece of timber crashed upon his foot, and only failed to crush it by a rare good chance: he had to pull his boot off and cool his swollen foot with ice. Matthew was, moreover, in bad humour that day, finding fault with everybody: this was badly done, that done too slowly; and, as for Antek, he took every pretext to grumble at him.
Everything went wrong; even the barley that Franek was to have ground, and about which Hanka was always troubling, had not been done yet, the excuse being press of work.
At home, too, things were not quite right. Hanka was distressed and tearful, for little Peter lay sick of a burning fever, and she had been forced to call in Yagustynka to fumigate him.
She came just at suppertime, sat by the fire, looked furtively about her, and would have liked to gossip very much, but that they received her attempts very coldly; and so she presently set to trying her healing powers on the boy.
“I am off to the mill,” Antek said, taking his cap; “unless I see the barley ground myself, it never will be done.”
“Could not Father go in your stead?”
“I shall be far more likely to get it.”—He went off in a hurry, ill-humoured, out of sorts, tossed about like a solitary tree in a storm. Besides, everything at home enraged him—especially those prying ferret eyes of Yagustynka.
The evening was still and not frosty, with but few stars to be seen—only one or two, twinkling far away as through a veil. The wind blew from the woods, with a dull humming murmur, betokening a change of weather. Dogs barked dispersedly about the hamlet, smoke trailed along the road, and the air, though bleak, was damp.
Christmas being at hand, there were plenty of people at the mill. Those whose corn was being ground waited in the passage; the others stayed in the room of the miller’s man. These formed a circle round Matthew, who was telling them something very funny, at which they every now and then burst into laughter. Antek did not care to cross the threshold, and went out to look for Franek at the mill.
“He is on the dam,” they said, “squabbling with Magda—you know—the wench the organist turned out.”
“The miller,” another peasant told him, “has threatened to send him away, if he is ever again seen in the mill with Magda; for she used to spend her nights there. But, poor thing! where else has she to go?”
And someone else added, jestingly: “ ‘What in March we pursue, in November we rue!’ ”
Antek sat down to wait, close to the place where the finest flour was ground, and opposite to the half-open door of the waiting-room. There he could discern Matthew’s shoulders, and the heads of the others all turned towards him and intent on what he was telling them. But for the clatter of the wheels, he could have even made out what was said, though he had no curiosity that way.
He threw himself on to some sacks of corn, and presently, out of sheer dejection and weariness, began to doze.
The mill clattered away, flapping, throbbing, and in full activity in every one of its compartments; the wheels beat as if a hundred washerwomen were all using their bats with might and main; the water swirled past them with a bubbling hullabaloo and, churned up into boiling foam and snowy flakes, rushed on to the river.
For hard upon an hour, Antek stayed there, expectant, but at last made for the yard to go and seek Franek and also to rouse himself up somewhat, feeling overcome with slumber. The way out led through the waiting-room, which he was just going to enter, and his hand was upon the latch, when what he heard Matthew saying made him stop on a sudden.
“Yes, the old fellow boils the milk and tea, and takes it to her in bed! They say that he, along with Yagustynka, does all the kine want done for them, and will not let her soil her hands; nay, that he has bought something for her in town, lest she catch cold by going out behind the barn!”
Here followed a burst of loud laughter, and then a hailstorm of jests. Antek, by an instinctive movement, returned to where he had sat before and, flinging himself again upon the sacks, gazed vacantly at the streak of ruddy light that came from the door which stood ajar. Now he could hear no more, for the din made the talk inaudible; a grey mist of flour-dust rose and dimmed everything round him; the lamps, which hung by cords from the ceiling, twinkled through the white fog, and glowed athwart it, as yellow as cats’ eyes, and vibrated continually. But he was too restless to stay seated; again he rose, and quietly and on tiptoe approached the door, and bent his ear.
“… She explained everything!” Matthew said. “Dominikova assured him that the girl had been in a hurry, scrambling over a fence … it was a thing that very frequently happened … had occurred to herself when a maiden. A most convenient explanation! And he believed her, the old ram! Such a clever man! and he believed her.”
The laughter became a hurricane; they all were in paroxysms, and made the house ring again.
Nearer and nearer crept Antek, now almost on the very threshold, pale as a corpse, with fists clenched, crouching and gathered together for a spring.
When they had done, Matthew continued: “But as to what they say of Antek’s
