Besides, she cared little for gossip, and had no liking for neighbourly chats and bits of scandal bandied round over the fences.
No. She had enough with her own troubles, and her neighbours’ shortcomings did not interest her.
At this stage of her thoughts, Yagna recurred forcibly to her mind—Yagna, with whom she was waging silent but desperate and stubborn warfare. The thought was like a stab in her breast; it made her start up and hurriedly end her prayer, crossing herself and beating her breast.
Returning in no pleasant mood, she was all the more vexed to find everybody asleep in the cottage, and in the outhouses as well.
She rated Vitek soundly, routed Pete out of his litter of straw, and scolded Yuzka too, for “lying abed when the sun was a span high!”
“If I but take my eyes off them to pray for a moment, I find them all snoozing, each in his corner!” she grumbled, as she lit the fire.
Afterwards, taking the children outside, and cutting some bread for each of them, she called Lapa to play with them, while she went in to see after Boryna.
On that side of the cottage, all was as still as death; and she slammed the door angrily. Yet she did not wake Yagna; and the old man still lay as she had left him the night before, his ashen face, overgrown with a stubbly beard, showing above the red-striped coverlet; worn, gaunt, impassive as the wood-carven image of a saint. His eyes, wide open and motionless, stared right before him; his head was wrapped up in cloths, and his arms hung limp and lifeless, like broken boughs of a tree.
She set his bed in order, shook up the covering about his legs (for the room was close), and gave him some fresh water, which he drank slowly, but made no other motion, lying as still as a felled trunk. Only in his eyes there was a faint glimmer, as that of a river which, between night and dawn, is shadowed forth feebly for the twinkling of an eye.
She heaved a mournful sigh over him, and then, darting a glance of hate at the sleeping Yagna, struck a pail with her foot.
The noise did not wake the latter. She lay, her face turned towards the room, the coverlet thrown back from her bosom on account of the heat, so that her shoulders and throat were bare. Her parted lips, cherry-red, showed a row of shining teeth, like beads of the purest white; her dishevelled hair, fair as the finest sun-dried flax, was streaming over her coverlet and down to the floor.
“Oh! I could dig my nails into that pretty face of yours so deep that it would never be pretty any more!” she hissed with fierce aversion, a sharp pang stabbing at her heart. She mechanically smoothed her hair and looked into the glass that hung by the window, but shrank back on beholding her own faded discoloured features and red-fringed eyelids.
“She! … she has naught to try her; feeds abundantly, sleeps in a warm bed, brings forth no children: what should mar her beauty?”
And she slammed the door violently as she went out.
This noise woke Yagna; but old Boryna lay as he had lain, staring straight before him.
He had been thus ever since they had brought him home from the fight. At times only did he seem to rouse himself and, taking Yagna’s hand, strive to speak; but he always relapsed into insensibility, and could never utter a word.
Roch had brought a doctor from the town, who had examined the man, written a recipe on a scrap of paper, and taken ten roubles. The medicine, too, was costly, and did no more nor less good than Dominikova’s incantations, recited gratis.
It soon was clear to all that he would never mend, and so they let him be.
All they now did was to change the wet bandages on his head, and give him a little water or milk to drink; solid food he could not take.
Folk said, and Ambrose, who had experience in such matters, said too, that should Boryna not come to his senses again, he would die shortly, though of course without pain. This end, then, they were daily expecting, but it did not come, and the delay was irksome.
It was Yagna’s right and duty to take care of the patient and stay by him; but how could she—she who was unable to remain there an hour? She had more than enough of him as it was; and she was, moreover, weary of the continual struggle with Hanka, who had usurped her place and set her completely aside. She therefore kept out of doors by preference, rejoicing to bask in the warm morning light, and to go out free into the village. She abandoned the care of her husband to Yuzka, and used to wander about, no one knew where, often returning only in the evening.
Yuzka then looked after him; but this was only when others were by, she being as yet but a little girl, silly and a gadabout, so that Hanka was obliged to watch over the dying man alone. The smith and his wife, indeed, were popping in to look round any number of times a day; but it was she that they came to watch, and to see whether she had taken nothing out of the cottage, eagerly anticipating the possibility of Boryna’s recovering his senses enough to bequeath his property.
They snarled round him like dogs quarrelling round a dying sheep, each impatient to get his fangs first into the poor beast’s entrails, and carry off the best piece of the carcass. Meanwhile, the blacksmith clutched at everything he could see and lay his hands on; it had to be snatched from him by force and the strictest watch kept; and no day passed by without brawling and furious invectives.
The proverb says that “God gives to everyone who rises with the sun.” Yes, but the blacksmith would rise
