“Oh, will you try?—Only touch me! Only dare!” she repeated, with a defiant scream.
“Ha! will she, who has waxed fat upon wrongs done to her neighbours, venture now to beset and pester them—as hard to shake off as a bur?”
“Say, you, in what thing have I ever done you wrong?”
“That you will know, when your husband shall be condemned to jail!”
The Voyt’s wife rushed at her with lifted fists; but Hanka caught her back, and said sternly to them both:
“Women, for God’s sake!—Would ye turn my cabin into a tavern?”
This instantly put a stop to their brawl. Both breathed hard and were panting. Tears came streaming from under the bandages that covered Dominikova’s eyes, but she was first to come back to her senses, and say, sitting down with hands clasped and a deep sigh:
“God be merciful to me a sinner!”
The Voyt’s wife had rushed out in a fury; but, returning, she put her head in at the window, crying out to Hanka:
“I tell you, drive that wanton from your house! And do so while there yet is time, lest you rue it sorely! Let her not stay one hour more beneath your roof, or that hell-born pest will make you go yourself! O Hanka, defend yourself—and for that, be merciless, be without pity for her. She is only lying in wait to entrap your Antek. … Don’t you see what a hell she now prepares for you?” She leant further into the room and, stretching her fist towards Yagna, shouted with the most intense hatred:
“Yet a little, yet a little, you devil from hell! I shall not die in peace, I shall not go to Holy Confession, until I have seen you driven with cudgels out of Lipka!—Oh, get you away to the soldiers, you drab, you swinish jade! Your place is with them!”
She was gone, and over the cabin there came a silence like that of the grave. Dominikova shook with a dumb passion of weeping; Magda rocked her little one; Hanka, plunged in torturing thought, looked into the fire; and Yagna, though she still had on her face the same hardened reckless expression, the same wicked smile, had turned as white as a sheet. Those last words had cut deep into her soul; she felt stabbed as though by a hundred knives, each stab streaming with her lifeblood: an inhuman torment that was impelling her to shriek out at the top of her voice, or even dash her brains out against the wall. But she controlled herself, pulled her mother by the sleeve, and said in an agonized whisper:
“Mother, come away. Let’s flee this place. And quickly!”
“Right; for I am broken and shattered. But you must return and watch over what is yours.”
“I will not stay here! I so loathe the place that to stay is beyond me.—Why did I ever darken these doors? Better have broken a limb than have ever come here!”
“Were you, then, so evilly dealt with?” Hanka asked quietly.
“Worse than a chained-up dog! Even in hell there must be less pain than I have suffered here!”
“Strange, then, that you could bear it so long: no one imprisoned you here. You were free as air to go!”
“So I will. And may the plague choke you, for being—what you are!”
“Curse not, or I may cast my own wrongs in your teeth!”
“Why are ye all—as many as dwell in Lipka—all of you against me?”
“Live rightly: none will say one word of bitterness to you!”
“Peace, Yagna, peace; Hanka bears you no malice!”
“Let her too howl with the rest. Aye, let her! As dogs, dirt to me is all their howling. And what have I done to them? Whom have I robbed or slain?”
“What have ye done? Have you the front to ask?” Hanka exclaimed, in stupefaction, standing up opposite her. “Do not drive me too far, or I may speak!”
“Speak, prithee! I dare you to speak! What do I care for you?” Yagna vociferated, now in a towering passion, that spread within her like a conflagration; and she was ready to do anything—even the very worst that offered.
The tears had instantly sprung to Hanka’s eyes at the remembrance of Antek’s infidelity, that rose up before her with a pang so acute that she could hardly stammer out:
“What have ye done with him—with my husband, say? Ye never would let him be, but followed him everywhere, like the rampant piece of lust ye are!” … Her breath failed her, and she broke into sobs.
Like a she-wolf set upon in her den, at bay, and ready to tear anything she meets with to pieces, Yagna sprang up. Burning with the most furious hate, and frenzied to the uttermost extreme of rage, she lashed her adversary with stinging words, that came each of them from her lips like the strokes of a whip.
“Indeed?—So ’twas I who pursued your man, was it? Yet there is none but knows how I always drove him from me! How, like a cur, he would whine outside my door, that he might have but the mere sight of a shoe of mine!—Yes, and he took hold of me by force, till I was bereft of sense, and let him do all his will, for my brains whirled.—And now will I tell you all the truth … but you will rue the telling! He loved me—loved me more than tongue can tell! And you he shrank from, even to loathing; his gorge, poor man! rose at the thought of your love; ’twas in his throat, as rancid reasty fat, ancient and musty and unbearable; and at the memory of you, he would spit with sheer disgust! Nay, not to see you any more, he willingly would have done himself a harm. … You sought the truth; you have it now!—And, moreover, I will tell you—and do not forget it—if I should but say the word, when you would kiss his
