The way was solitary, and strewn with fallen leaves, which covered, as with a carpet of dead gold, all its deep holes and ruts, and the gnarled roots about its surface: a carpet striped by the falling shadows of the poplars, as the sun shone across the way.
“Gee-up! my little one, gee-up!” He cracked his whip, for the road sloped upwards, though slightly, towards the forest, black in the distance.
The silence made Boryna drowsy; he gazed through the colonnade of poplars upon the fields bathed in the rosy radiance, and tried to think of Eva’s accusation and of Red-and-White’s death; but he could not help feeling slumber coming on. Birds were chirruping in the boughs; through the treetops murmured the wind, here and there bringing down a leaflet, like a golden butterfly, that settled with a whirl on the road, or on some dusty clump of thistles, whose fiery eyes opened bravely to the sun. And the poplars talked one with another, and murmured softly with swaying boughs, and then were still.
It was only when he had reached the forest, and the horse stopped, that he woke up completely.
“The corn is coming up nicely here,” he mused, gazing sunwards at the grey fields, with their rust-coloured haze of sprouting rye.
“A good bit of land, and next to mine—just as if it had been put there on purpose!—This rye, I think, was not sown long ago.” He cast a longing glance at the recently harrowed lands, and then, uttering a sigh, entered the forest.
Here, however, a cold bleak wind, driving in his face, quite dispelled his reverie.
The forest was very old and very great. It stood, compact and thick, in the majesty of age and strength combined. Nearly all the trees were pines; but not unfrequently an ancient spreading oak would appear, or some birches, in their smocks of white bark, let their tangled yellow foliage float in the air. The lower growths—the hazelnut, the dwarf hornbeam, and the trembling aspen—were crowded around the mighty red pine-trunks, so closely and with branches so intertwined, that the sunbeams could but seldom touch the ground, where they seemed to be crawling, like bright-hued insects, over the mosses and reddish faded ferns.
“All this is mine. Four acres,” he reflected, devouring the wood with his eyes, and gloating over the best bits of timber.
“Ah! the Lord will not let us be wronged! Nor will we let people wrong us, either! The manor folk think what we have is too much: we think it too little.—Let me see: my four, and Yagna’s one; four and one’s. … Gee-up! foolish beast! Afraid of magpies?” He whipped her up smartly; for, upon the dry Tree, where the crucified Christ was hanging, magpies were quarrelling so violently that the filly had pricked up her ears and stopped short.
“ ‘Magpies’ quarrelling, rain will surely bring,’ ” he muttered, and with a few strokes of the whip mended the filly’s pace to a trot.
It was now well past eight, for the people in the fields were sitting down to breakfast, when he came to Timow: a small town whose empty narrow streets were lined with dilapidated houses, like rows of old saleswomen—lining gutters full of rubbish, and dirty Jewish children, and pigs.
He had scarcely entered, when crowds of Jews and Jewesses rushed round him, eager to look into his cart and fumble among the straw it was strewn with—even under the seat—to find anything he might have to sell.
“Off, ye scurvy louts!” he growled, turning into the marketplace, where, in the shadow of a few ancient decayed chestnut-trees slowly dying in the centre of the square, hard on a score of wagons were drawn up, their horses unharnessed.
He drove his own cart in there among them, brushed off the straw from his coat, and went straight to Mordko the barber’s, to get a shave. Presently he issued thence, clean-shaven, and with only one cut on his chin, plastered with a bit of paper, through which the blood oozed.
The court was not yet open; but in front of the building that stood right in the marketplace, opposite a very large church, a good many people had already assembled, and were sitting upon the timeworn steps, or lounging outside the windows. Women squatted along the white walls, chatting together, with the red aprons they had worn on their heads as they came, now fallen on to their shoulders.
Boryna perceived Eva holding her boy by the hand, and surrounded by her witnesses. A storm of anger surged within him. He spat contemptuously, and withdrew into the corridor that ran the whole length of the officials’ private lodgings. The judgment hall was to the left; the secretary occupied the right side.
Just then the manservant Yacek had passed the threshold of the lodgings with a samovar, and was blowing it so hard that it smoked like a factory chimney. From time to time a shrill angry voice was raised from the extremity of the smoke-darkened corridor.
“Yacek! the young ladies’ shoes!”
“Presently, presently.”
The samovar was now hissing, and spouting flames, and burning like a volcano.
“Yacek! water for master to wash!”
“Yes, yes, directly, directly!”
Perspiring, distracted, the man ran to and fro about the corridor till it rang again, and returned to blow, and went off anew; for his mistress now screamed:
“Yacek, you rascal, where are my stockings?”
“Confound this devil of a samovar!”
The scene continued for some time yet; but at last the door of the court opened, and in the people rushed, filling the large whitewashed hall.
Yacek was there again, now in his capacity as usher: barefooted, but in a dark-blue jacket and trousers of the same hue, and brass buttons. His red face perspiring freely, he wiped it with his sleeve as he slipped in behind the black grating by which the hall was divided into two parts. Tossing his head like a horse attacked by a
