“What’s the matter?” the priest said to him in the sacristy after Mass. “You were sighing so hard, you almost put out the candles!”
“My soutane makes me so hot!” he answered evasively, averting his face.
“When you are accustomed to it, ’twill be as easy to wear as your own skin!”
Yanek kissed his hand and went off to breakfast, picking out the shadows along the millpond, for the heat was broiling. On the way, he met Maryna pulling the priest’s blind old mare along by the mane, and singing a noisy song.
His recollections of her stung him to the quick, and he went up to her in an angry mood.
“What makes you rejoice so, Maryna?” And he gazed at her with shamefaced curiosity.
“The heyday in my blood!” she replied, showing her white teeth in a broad grin; and she went on pulling at the mare’s mane and singing still more noisily.
“Merry! … and after what she has done!” He turned away hastily from the girl—whose skirt was tucked up almost to her snowy knees—and went on to the Klembas’. There Agata lay in high state and in the centre of the dwelling-room, arrayed in her best holiday attire, wearing her cap, deeply frilled over the brows, many strings of beads round her neck, and a new striped skirt, and shoes laced with bright red laces. Her face seemed moulded in bleached wax, and full of a marvellous joy. Her cold stiffened fingers held the holy image, somewhat awry; two tapers burned at the bed’s head. Yagustynka was brushing the flies away with a bough. The smoke of juniper-berries was wafted through the room from the fireplace. Every now and then somebody came in to pray for her soul, and several children were playing about outside.
Yanek, not without some qualms, looked into the dark room.
“The Klembas have gone to town,” Yagustynka whispered. “As she has left them no small amount, they have to deck themselves out for her funeral. For is she not their kinswoman? Surely! But the body will be taken out only this evening; Matthew has not finished the coffin yet.”
The room was close; and, besides, that waxen face with its changeless smile looked so ghastly that he must needs cross himself and go out speedily. On the doorstep, he met Yagna and her mother entering. She stopped on seeing him, but he passed her by without a word, not even the usual “Praised be Jesus Christ!” It was only on nearing the fence that he inadvertently turned round. She was still standing where he had passed her, gazing mournfully after him.
Going home, he would take no breakfast, pretexting a headache.
“Go out for a walk; it may pass away,” his mother advised.
“Mother! where am I to go? Ye will directly fancy … who knows what?”
“Yanek, how can you speak so?”
“Why, Mother, have you not locked me up in our house? Can I go out, if I must not speak to people?”
His nerves were overstrung, and he made his mother suffer in consequence. … It all ended, however, in her bandaging his head with a compress dipped in vinegar, and making him lie down in a darkened room. She drove the children out of the yard, and watched over her boy like a hen over her chicken till he had slept well and eaten a good meal.
“And now go for a walk; and go by the poplar road, where ’tis cooler because of the shade.”
He did not reply, but, seeing that she carefully noted the way he took, chose the opposite direction on purpose. He strayed about the village, looked in at the forge and the hammers as they smote with deafening din on the anvil; he peeped into the mill, entered garden after garden, and went past the flax-fields and wherever the crimson gleam of a woman’s dress was to be seen. Then he sat and talked with Mr. Yacek, tending Veronka’s cows by a field-path, went on to Simon’s cottage in Podlesie, where they refreshed him with some milk, and came back late in the afternoon, without having seen Yagna anywhere.
It was only the next day, at Agata’s funeral, that he met her; her eyes were fixed upon him during all the service. The letters of his book danced before his eyes, and he mistook his Responses. As the body was on its way to the churchyard, she walked almost at his side, utterly indifferent to the fierce glances and loud murmurs of his mother; she felt herself melting in his presence like snow in the spring sunshine!
When the coffin was lowered into the grave and the customary lamentations broke forth, his ear caught the sound of her wailing; but he knew well that those sobs were not for Agata, and that they flowed from the fullness of a sorely pained and wounded heart.
“I must—I must have speech with her!”
His mind was made up on this point on returning from the funeral, but he could not get free at once. Many people from the other hamlets, and even some from neighbouring parishes, had come to Lipka about noon, in order to join in the pilgrimage.
This was to start the next morning at once after the votive Mass had been sung; and all were now slowly assembling, so that the road by the millpond was crowded with carts. A great many, too, had gone to the priest’s bureau, and Yanek had to stay and help his Reverence in settling many various matters. It was only quite at evening that he found a convenient time to take his book and slip out behind the barn and to that pear-tree under which he had once sat together with Yagna.
He never opened the book at all, but threw it somewhere away into the grass. Then, looking round the fields, he entered the rye;
