About a fortnight after the priest’s visit, she saw the young man on his way past the pond.
“Do you know? Old Boryna said many things to the priest against you.”
“Of what new thing has he been yelping?” was his contemptuous answer.
“He says you stir folk up against the manor, and that the gendarmes ought to arrest you.”
“Let him but try! Ere they get hold of me, I would make such a ‘Red Cock’ perch on his roof, that his place would burn down to the ground,” he replied in a great rage.
She at once ran to tell the old man, who thought the news over for a time, and then remarked: “ ’Tis like him, the villain! He is the very man to do such a thing.”
He said no more, not wishing to take counsel with a woman; but to Roch, who came in the evening, he told all.
“Do not believe whatever Yagustynka says: she is an evil-minded beldame.”
“Yes, it may be all a falsehood: yet such things have been. Old Prychek burnt his father-in-law’s hut down for dealing unjustly by him in dividing the land. True, he went to prison, but he burnt it down. … And Antek may do the same. And he must have said something; she could not have made it all up.”
Roch, who was a kindhearted man, felt greatly pained, and tried to advise him.
“Make it up. Let him have a little land for himself: to live, he needs the wherewithal. Besides, that would steady him, and leave him without excuse for quarrels and threats.”
“No! Were I even to be quite ruined—made a beggar—no! Beg I may, but, so long as I live, not one inch of my land will I give up. … That he struck me and used me shamefully, I could forgive, though hardly and with pain; but should he attempt such a thing as this … !”
“Is it meet to take the tattle of a gossip so to heart?”
“I do not believe it, not I!—But what maddens me, what makes my blood run cold, is that it might be true!”
He sat with fists clenched, motionless and numb, at the bare possibility of so heinous an act. He had no proof of Yagna’s guilt, nay, he felt really sure she was innocent. But he shrewdly guessed that in his son’s hatred for him there was more than mere resentment for the land withheld; that the wild reckless look he had seen in Antek’s eyes came from some other cause. And he, too, was instantly aware of the same feeling within himself—of cold, revengeful, implacable hate. He turned to Roch, and muttered:
“There is not room enough in Lipka for us twain!”
“What—what can ye mean?” Roch cried in alarm.
“God forbid he fall into my hands, if I seize him in the act!”
Roch did his best to calm him and bring him round, but to no purpose.
“Ah, he would burn me out, would he?—That remains to be seen!”
Thenceforward he had no peace. Every evening he watched in secret, hiding behind corners, making the round of the house and messuages, looking under the thatches; and often, waking up at night, he would listen for hours together or, jumping out of bed, go round the premises with his dog. And once he saw certain faint traces about the haystack, where the ground had been trampled. Later, he found marks of footsteps near the stile, and became more and more convinced that Antek had been there at night, and was only seeking an opportunity to set the rick on fire. For as yet he had no thought of any other possible outrage.
He purchased a very savage dog from the miller, chained it up in a kennel under the shed, and made it more savage still by starving and baiting it. At night he would set it free, and then it would bark furiously and set upon anyone it met. It bit several people so seriously that complaints were lodged against Boryna.
But this vigilance and these precautions made the old man weaker and weaker, though his eyes glowed with feverish excitement.
He had determined to speak and complain to no one any more; this very greatly increased the intensity of his sufferings.
It also prevented anyone from guessing the cause of his restless behaviour.
That he watched so carefully over the premises, and had bought that dog, and made those nightly rounds, found an easy explanation. That winter, wolves had multiplied to an extraordinary degree; almost every night, they would approach the village in packs, and the inhabitants often heard them howl; not infrequently, too, they scratched holes under the byres, and carried off something here and there. Moreover, as was common enough just before the spring, cases of theft became more rife. A peasant in Debitsa had been robbed of a couple of mares; in Rudka, a hog had been stolen; elsewhere, a cow was missing. Therefore did many a man in Lipka scratch his head, and get better locks, and keep good watch over his stables; for the horses there were the very best in the district.
So the days went on, slowly, regularly, like the hands of a clock—only neither to be pushed forward nor set back.
Not only was the winter uncommonly severe, but the weather was also unusually changeable. There were such frosts as the oldest inhabitants had never known; sometimes the snow would fall in immense quantities; then it would thaw for whole weeks together, so that the ditches were filled with water, and the fields stretched out, black and desolate: after which there would be whirlwinds and snowdrifts such as the land had never seen as yet—and then a spell of serene calm weather, when the lanes swarmed with children, and the folk were glad, and the old people basked against the warm sunny walls.
In Lipka things went on according to
