Through Russia Part 14

"Who is that speaking?"

"It is the mistress," I replied.

"What? Nadezhda? With her I have a bone to pick."

"What did he say?" the woman asked tensely as she raised her dark, thinly pencilled brows, and made as though to go and lean over the well. Independently of my own volition I forestalled what Gubin might next have been going to say by remarking:

"I must tell you that last night he saw you walking in the garden here."

"Indeed?" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, and drew herself to her full height. Yet in doing so she blushed to her shoulders, and, clapping plump hands to her bosom, and opening dark eyes to their fullest, said in a hasty and confused whisper as, again paling and shrinking in stature, she subsided like a piece of pastry that is turning heavy:

"Good Lord! WHAT did he see?... If the lame woman should call, you must not admit her. No, tell her that she will not be wanted, that I cannot, that I must not--But see here. Here is a rouble for you. Oh, good Lord!"

By this time even louder and more angry exclamations had begun to ascend from Gubin. Yet the only sound to reach my ears was the woman's muttered whispering, and as I glanced into her face I perceived that its. .h.i.therto high-coloured and rounded contours had fallen in, and turned grey, and that her flushed lips were trembling to such an extent as almost to prevent the articulation of her words. Lastly, her eyes were frozen into an expression of pitiful, doglike terror.

Suddenly she shrugged her shoulders, straightened her form, put away from her the expression of terror, and said quietly, but incisively:

"You will not need to say anything about this. Allow me."

And with a swaying step she departed--a step so short as almost to convey the impression that her legs were bound together. Yet while the gait was the gait of a person full of suppressed fury, it was also the gait of a person who can scarcely see an inch in advance.

"Haul away, you!" shouted Gubin.

I hauled him up in a state of cold and wet; whereafter he fell to stamping around the coping of the well, cursing, and waving his arms.

"What have you been thinking of all this time?" he vociferated. "Why, for ever so long I shouted and shouted to you!"

"I have been telling Nadezhda that last night you saw her walking in the garden."

He sprang towards me with a vicious scowl.

"Who gave you leave to do so?" he exclaimed.

"Wait a moment. I said that it was only in a dream, that you saw her crossing the garden to the washhouse."

"Indeed? And why did you do that?"

Somehow, as, barelegged and dripping with mud, he stood blinking his eyes at me with a most disagreeable expression, he looked extremely comical.

"See here," I remarked, "you have only to go and tell her husband about her for me to go and tell him the same story about your having seen the whole thing in a dream."

"Why?" cried Gubin, now almost beside himself. Presently, however, he recovered sufficient self-possession to grin and ask in an undertone:

"HOW MUCH DID SHE GIVE YOU?"

I explained to him that my sole reason for what I had done had been that I pitied the woman, and feared lest the brothers Birkin should do an injury to one who at least ought not to be betrayed. Gubin began by declining to believe me, but eventually, after the matter had been thought out, said:

"Acceptance of money for doing what is right is certainly irregular; but at least is it better than acceptance of money for conniving at sin. Well, you have spoilt my scheme, young fellow. Hired only to clean out the well, I would nevertheless have cleaned out the establishment as a whole, and taken pleasure in doing so."

Then once more he relapsed into fury, and muttered as he scurried round and round the well:

"How DARED you poke your nose into other people's affairs? Who are YOU in this establishment?"

The air was hot and arid, yet still the sky was as dull as though coated throughout with the dust of summer, and, as yet, one could gaze at the sun's purple, rayless...o...b..without blinking, and as easily as one could have gazed at the glowing embers of a wood fire.

Seated on the fence, a number of rooks were directing intelligent black eyes upon the heaps of mud which lay around the coping of the well. And from time to time they fluttered their wings impatiently, and cawed.

"I got you some work," Gubin continued in a grumbling tone, "and put heart into you with the prospect of employment. And now you have gone and treated me like--"

At this point I caught the sound of a horse trotting towards the entrance-gates, and heard someone shout, as the animal drew level with the house:

"YOUR timber too has caught alight!"

Instantly, frightened by the shout, the rooks took to their wings and flew away. Also, a window sash squeaked, and the courtyard resounded with sudden bustle--the culinary regions vomiting the elderly lady and the tousled, half-clad Jonah; and an open window the upper half of the red-headed Peter.

"Men, harness up as quickly as possible!" the latter cried, his voice charged with a plaintive note.

And, indeed, he had hardly spoken before Gubin led out a fat roan pony, and Jonah pulled from a shelter a light buggy or britchka. Meanwhile Nadezhda called from the veranda to Jonah:

"Do you first go in and dress yourself!"

The elderly lady then unfastened the gates; whereupon a stunted, oldish muzhik in a red s.h.i.+rt limped into the yard with a foam-flecked steed, and exclaimed:

"It is caught in two places--at the Savelkin clearing and near the cemetery!"

Immediately the company pressed around him with groans and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, and Gubin alone continued to harness the pony with swift and dexterous hands--saying to me through his teeth as he did so, and without looking at anyone:

"That is how those wretched folk ALWAYS defer things until too late."

The next person to present herself at the entrance gates was a beggar-woman. s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her eyes in a furtive manner, she droned:

"For the sake of Lord Je-e-esus!"

"G.o.d will give you alms! G.o.d will give you alms!" was Nadezhda's reply as, turning pale, she flung out her arms in the old woman's direction.

"You see, a terrible thing has happened--our timber lands have caught fire. You must come again later."

Upon that Peter's bulky form (which had entirely filled the window from which it had been leaning), disappeared with a jerk, and in its stead there came into view the figure of a woman. Said she contemptuously:

"See the visitation with which G.o.d has tried us, you men of faint hearts and indolent hands!"

The woman's hair was grey at the temples, and had resting upon it a silken cap which so kept changing colour in the sunlight as to convey to one the impression that her head was bonneted with steel, while in her face, picturesque but dark (seemingly blackened with smoke), there gleamed two pupil-less blue eyes of a kind which I had never before beheld.

"Fools," she continued, "how often have I not pointed out to you the necessity of cutting a wider s.p.a.ce between the timber and the cemetery?"

From a furrow above the woman's small but prominent nose, a pair of heavy brows extended to temples that were silvered over. As she spoke there fell a strange silence amid which save for the pony's pawing of the mire no sound mingled with the sarcastic reproaches of the deep, almost masculine voice.

"That again is the mother-in-law," was my inward reflection.