“And where’s Yagna?” he asked, seeing with surprise that the room was empty.
“At her mother’s. I turned her out,” she replied in a firm voice, looking him full in the face.
He knit his brows, pondered awhile, then lit a cigarette, and said quietly and with seeming indifference:
“Dominikova is a bad animal; she will not be ousted without a lawsuit.”
“I hear they both went to lodge a complaint yesterday.”
“Well, well, ‘between complaint and sentence, there is a good long distance’; but we must consider things well, and not let her play us any tricks.”
She told him how it had all come about—of course, omitting many a detail. He heard her out, put no question, and only frowned heavily. But when she handed him the paper, he gave a sarcastic laugh.
“With that paper ye may as well … why, ’tis worth absolutely naught!”
“How so!—It is the very same paper your father gave her!”
“What’s the use of a broken stick?—Had she annulled the deed at the notary’s, that would have been something. It was in mockery she flung it to you!”
He gave a shrug, took little Peter on his arm, and made for the stile.
“I am going to look at the fields and come back,” he said over his shoulder, and at the hint she stopped short, much as she had longed to go with him. As he passed the stack, now repaired and filled with new hay, he glanced at it from under heavy eyelids.
“It was repaired by Matthew!” she called out to him from the stile where she stood. “The roof alone required some scores of straw trusses.”
“Good, good!” he grunted in reply, and strode away through the potatoes along the pathway, uninterested in such trifles.
The fields on that side of the village nearly all bore autumn-sown crops this year: so he met but few people, and those he met he saluted curtly, and passed on. But soon he walked more slowly, for Peter was beginning to feel heavy, and the hot still weather acted strangely upon him. He stopped to examine almost every field in particular.
“Ha! that weed is simply choking the flax!” he cried, observing the patches of flax, azure-blue with flowers, but thickly strewn with the yellow blooms of some weed.
“She bought her linseed unsifted, and sowed it unsifted too!”
Then he stopped close to the barley, stunted, parched and scarce visible for the thistles, and camomile plants, and sorrels which grew there.
“They have sown in too wet soil.—That swine! he has ruined the field! The rascal ought to have his neck twisted for tilling the land so. And how it has been harrowed! Dog-grass and couch-grass everywhere!” He was much displeased.
But presently he came to a vast expanse of rye, waving in the sunshine, with heavy billowy ears of corn, sounding and rustling. This was a set-off: it had grown magnificently, the straw was thick in the stem, and the ears were full.
“It grows like a forest of pines! Ah, that was Father’s sowing. … Even the Manor could show naught better!”—He plucked an ear, and rubbed it in his hands. The grain was full and fine, but soft as yet, liable to be ruined by a hailstorm.
But where he stopped longest to admire and feast his eyes was over the wheat. The growth was not quite regular—in clumps here, in hollows there—but the ears were all glossy, darkish in hue, dense-growing, and large in size.
“A first-rate crop! And, though on rising ground, it has suffered not at all from the drought. … ’Tis a harvest of pure gold!”
On arriving at the boundary, he gazed back. Away by the churchyard they were mowing the clover, and the scythes moved flashing over the meadows, like gleams of lightning. On the fallows flocks of geese were feeding; men swarmed about like ants; and higher and farther still he could descry lonely houses, trees hunched up, gnarled and drooping over the roads; and again more and more vast lands fading into the distance, as into a flood of bluish trembling water.
All was hushed in profound silence; the sultry air vibrated; it was, as it were, an atmosphere of white flame, through which a stork might be seen walking up and down, or poising itself on dropping wings; or a crow flying past, with beak wide open, gaping with the heat.
On high there was but the intense dark azure, with a few white clouds straying across it. But below, the dry burning wind made sport: now whirling and staggering about like a drunken man; now starting up with a sudden loud whistle; or, again, lurking somewhere away out of sight, and then bursting out unexpectedly in the corn, which it teased and dashed to and fro, and drove hither and thither in lofty billows—to disappear again as suddenly, no one knew where, while the cornfields murmured in low voices, as if complaining of its rough behaviour.
Antek, having reached his fallow at the skirt of the forest, had another burst of indignation.
“Not yet ploughed up or manured! Our horses stand idle, the dung is wasted in heaps … and what does it matter to him, the dirty scamp?—May all. …” he swore fiercely, drawing nigh to the cross by the poplar road.
But here, tired, slightly dizzy, and with his throat full of dust, he sat down in the shadow of the birch-trees by Boryna’s Cross. Little Peter had gone to sleep: he laid him down on his capote; and then, wiping away streams of sweat from his brow, he looked out upon the landscape, and fell into a reverie.
The first afternoon shadows of the forest were hesitatingly creeping down to the corn. The treetops, glowing in the sun, were conversing one with another, while the thickets of hazel and aspen below shook like men sick with an ague. Woodpeckers pecked on incessantly; magpies were shrieking somewhere unseen. And at times a bee-eater would flash athwart the old moss-grown oak-trees—a flying fragment of rainbow!
A cool breath was wafted from within the quiet woodland recesses, into which the sun
