“The man threatened me; yet he’ll do as I told him, I think. Better my wife should be there, and not I.—What else can he do but what I say?—Quarrel—and be expelled!”
He smiled in triumph, set his cap straight and buttoned up his capote, for a chill piercing wind came from the pond.
“There will be frost, surely, or else dirty weather,” he predicted, standing on the bridge and looking into the sky, where a scud of driven clouds was passing, not unlike a flock of muddy unwashed sheep. The pond uttered a low murmur, now and then beating upon its shores, along which, scattered about amongst blackened drooping alders and weeping willows, the outlines of women washing linen appeared, traced in red, and the obstreperous clatter of their bats rose on either bank. The roads were empty, save for the numerous flocks of geese, soiled with stiffening mire, that were waddling in and out of the ditches, now filled up with dead leaves and rubbish. Children outside the houses squealed and screamed; and the cocks crowed in the hedges—weather-prophets telling of a change.
“Better wait for him at the mill!” he growled and walked down the slope.
Antek, when the smith left him, had set to chopping straw so frantically that he forgot everything but his work; and Kuba, returning from the wood, cried out aloud:
“Mercy! there will be enough of it for a week’s fodder!” And then Antek woke up from his musings, threw the straw-cutter aside, stretched himself, and went into the hut.
“What must be will be,” he reflected, “and I must speak to my father this day.—That blacksmith fellow is a lying traitor; his advice may be good, for all that. Nay, there must be something in it.” He peeped in at his father’s door, and at once drew back; a score of urchins were sitting there. Roch was teaching them, and paying great heed to their behaviour; going round with beads in hand, hearing their lessons, correcting them at times; at others pulling one boy’s ear or patting another’s head, but for the most part sitting patiently and explaining the printed matter, or putting questions, which the children hastened to answer in chorus as fast as they could, gobbling like a troop of little turkeys when excited.
Hanka was getting dinner ready, and having a talk with her father, old Bylitsa, who seldom came, because he was always ailing and could hardly move about.
He sat close to the window, his chin and hands on his staff; hoary-headed, with a twitch of the lips and a treble voice like a bird’s, accompanied by thin wheezing sounds in the windpipe.
“Have you breakfasted?” she inquired.
“To say true, Veronka forgot me.”
“Oh, she even starves her dogs! they often come to me for food,” she cried. Her elder sister and she had been on bad terms ever since last winter, when their mother had died, and Veronka seized on all she had left, refusing to give anything up; which had estranged them.
He took her part in a feeble voice. “They have not too much for themselves. Staho threshes at the organist’s, where he gets food and a score of kopeks daily besides. And there are many mouths to feed in the cabin: the potato-patch cannot suffice for all. True, they have a couple of milch-cows and take butter and cheese to town, and get a few coppers; but she often forgets to give me my meals. Yet I do not want much … only a little every day, and at the right hour. …”
“Then come to us in spring, since you are so ill off with that jade!”
“But I make no complaint, no fuss; only. …” His voice died into silence.
“With us, you could tend the geese, and see to the children.”
“Hanka,” he said under his breath, “there is nothing that I would not do.”
“There is room for you here; I should put up a bed for you and make you cosy.”
“Oh, if I could but be with you, Hanka, and never go back to them, I would sleep in the cow-house or the stable,” he answered in a husky beseeching voice. “They took my featherbed from me; she says the children have nothing to sleep on. It is true that they were cold, so I had them with me. But my sheepskin is all torn, and does not keep me warm at all; and where I sleep there is no fire, and she will not let me have any wood, and counts every spoonful that I eat, and sends me out a-begging, and I am so weak I can scarcely crawl to your house.”
“Good God! and you never told me this was so!—Why?”
“How could I? she is my daughter!—And he is a good-hearted man, but very little in the house.—How could I?”
“She is a hag! She took half the land and half the cabin, and the other things. … So that’s the board and lodgings she promised to give you! We must go to law: they were bound to let you have food and firing, and clothing too.—And we were to give twelve roubles a year: have we not kept our promise, say?”
“Surely! For you are upright folk.—But those few zloty that I have saved for my burial—I had to give them up too, I could not help it.” He said no more but sat crouching in his place, more like a heap of rags than a human being.
After dinner, when the smith’s wife came with her children and greeted Hanka, the old man took up a bundle prepared for him by his daughter, and vanished unnoticed.
Boryna had not come home to dine.
The smith’s wife was determined to see him, nevertheless, though she should have to wait till nightfall. Hanka had set up a loom near the window, where she set to work, drawing the woof of hempen thread across the warp assiduously, and but seldom and timidly taking part in the talk between Antek and his sister. His conversation with her about
