Marysia said nothing, but took the jug by the ear and went toward the brick house; meanwhile it had grown dark out of doors.

CHAPTER XI.

ENDED MISFORTUNE.

The Great Bear had gone down already, and the triangle had risen, when the door squeaked in Repa's cottage; his wife came in quietly. She entered and stood as if fixed to the floor, for she thought that her husband would be sleeping as usual in the inn; but he was sitting on the box at the wall, with his fists resting on his knees, and looking at the floor. The coals were burning out in the chimney.

"Where hast thou been?" inquired Repa, gloomily.

Instead of answering, she fell on the floor, and lay before his feet, with great weeping and sobbing. "Vavron! Vavron!" cried she, "for thee it was that I yielded myself to shame. He deceived me, then abused and put me out. Vavron, have pity on me, at least thou, my heart! Vavron!

Vavron!"

Repa took his axe out of the box.

"No," said he, with a calm voice; "thy end has come at last, poor woman.

Take leave of this world now, for thou shalt see it no more; thou wilt not sit in the cottage any longer, poor woman; thou wilt lie in the churchyard--"

She looked at him with terror.

"Dost wish to kill me?"

"Well, Marysia," said he, "do not lose time for nothing; make the sign of the cross, and then will be the end; thou wilt not even feel it, poor thing."

"Vavron, wilt thou, indeed?"

"Lay thy head on the box."

"Vavron!"

"Lay thy head on the box!" cried he, with foam on his lips.

"Oh, for God's sake, save me! People! sa--"

A dull blow was heard, then a groan, and the blow of a head against the floor; then a second blow, a fainter groan; then a third, a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth blow. On the floor gushed a stream of blood; the coals in the chimney were quenched. A quiver passed through the woman from head to foot; then her body stretched, and was motionless.

Soon after a broad, bloody conflagration rent the darkness; the buildings of the mansion were blazing.

EPILOGUE.

And now I will whisper something in your ear, reader. They would not have taken Repa to the army. An agreement like the one in the inn was not sufficient. But you see peasants do not know these things; the "intelligence," thanks to neutrality also, not much! therefore Pan Zolzik, who knew a little of this, calculated that in every case the affair would drag on, and fear would throw the woman into his arms.

And that great man was not mistaken. You ask what happened to him? Repa, when he had set fire to the buildings of the mansion, was going to take vengeance on him, but at the cry of "Fire!" the whole village was up, and Zolzik escaped.

He continues in his office of secretary in Barania-Glova, and at present he has the hope of being chosen judge. He has just finished reading "Barbara Ubryk," and hopes that Panna Yadviga may press his hand any day under the table.

Whether those hopes of the judgeship and the pressure will be justified, the future will show.

THE ORGANIST OF PONIKLA.

The snow was dry, squeaking, and not over deep; but Klen had long legs, therefore he walked briskly over the road from Zagrabie to Ponikla. He went the more briskly because a good frost was coming, and he was dressed scantily in a short coat and a still shorter sheepskin overcoat above it, in black trousers and thin, patched boots. Besides, he had a hautboy in his hand; on his head a cap lined with the wind; in his stomach a couple of glasses of arrack; in his heart delight; and in his soul many causes for the delight.

That morning he had signed a contract with Canon Krayevski, as the future organist of Ponikla. Up to that time he had strolled about like any wretched gypsy, from inn to inn, from wedding to wedding, from fair to fair, from festival to festival, seeking profit with his hautboy, or on the organ, which he played better than any organist in that region.

Now he was to settle down at last and have a fixed life beneath his own roof. A house, a garden, a hundred and fifty rubles a year, other earnings on occasions, a personal position, almost half spiritual, an occupation in the service of God,--who would not respect such a station?

Not long since any Matsek in Zagrabie, or Ponikla, if settled on a few morgs of land, looked on Pan Klen as a nobody; now people would take off their hats to him. An organist and, moreover, in such an immense parish--that was not a bundle of straw! Klen had been sighing this long time for that position; but while old Melnitski lived, it was not to be thought of. The old man's fingers were stiff, and he played badly; but the canon would not send him away for anything, since he had been twenty years with him.

But when the "lysa" struck the old man so badly in the pit of the heart that in three days he died, Pan Klen did not hesitate to ask for the position, and the canon did not hesitate to give it, for a better organist could not be found in that region.

How such skill came to Pan Klen on the hautboy, the organ, and various other instruments which he understood, it was difficult to discover. He had not received the gift from his father, for his father, a man of Zagrabie, served during youth in the army, and did not work in his old age at music; he twisted hemp ropes, and played on no instrument beyond a tobacco-pipe, which was always between his mustaches.

From childhood Klen did nothing but listen wherever there was music.

While a stripling, he went to "blow the bellows" for Melnitski at Ponikla. Afterward, when certain musicians came to Zagrabie, he ran away with them. He strolled about whole years with that company. God knows where he played, surely wherever it happened: at fairs, weddings, and in churches; only when the company broke up, or died, did he return to Zagrabie, as poor as a church mouse, haggard, and living like a bird on a branch. He continued to play, sometimes for the public, sometimes for the Lord God.

And, though people reproached him with want of stability, he became famous. They said of him in Zagrabie and in Ponikla, "Klen, just Klen.

But when he begins to play it is no offence to the Lord, and it is a delight to man!" Others said to him, "Fear God, Pan Klen, what devil is sitting within thee?"

And in real fact some sort of devil was sitting in that thin wretch with long legs. During the life of Melnitski, whenever he took the old organist's place on great holidays and festivals, he sometimes forgot himself thoroughly at the organ. This would happen, especially in the middle of mass, when people in the church were absorbed in prayer, when the censers had sent incense over the whole nave, and everything living was singing, when Klen had let himself out, and the service, with the ringing of great and little bells, with the odor of myrrh, amber, and fragrant plants, with the gleaming of lights and the glitter of the monstrance, had so elevated every soul that the whole church seemed flying off on wings to the sky. The canon, now raising, now lowering the monstrance, closed his eyes in ecstasy, and Pan Klen did the same in the choir; and it seemed to him that the organ itself was playing; that voices from the tin pipes rose like waves, flowed like rivers, rushed like torrents, gushed like fountains, poured like rain; that they were filling the whole church; that they were under the dome, and before the altar, in the rolls of incense, in the light of the sun, and in the souls of the people,--some awful and majestic like thunder, others like the singing of people, speaking in living words, still others sweet, fine, like falling beads, or the trilling of nightingales. And after mass, Pan Klen came down from the choir dazed, with eyes staring, as if after sleep; but as a simple man, he said, and thought, that he had tired himself out. The canon in the sacristy put some money in his hand, and some praise in his ear; then he went out among the people, who were thronged around the church; and there they raised their hats to him, though he lived as a lodger in Zagrabie; and they admired him beyond measure.

But Pan Klen went in front of the church not to hear, "Hei! See! There goes Klen!" But he went to see that which was dearest to him in Zagrabie, in Ponikla, and in the whole world, Panna Olka, the daughter of the tile-maker of Zagrabie. She fastened into his heart like a wood-tick, with her eyes, which were like star-thistles, with her bright face, and her lips red as cherries.

Pan Klen himself, during the rare moments in which be looked on this world with sound judgment, and in which seeing that the tile-maker would not give him his daughter, thought that it would be better to let her go; but he felt, with terror, that he could not let her go; and with great alarm he repeated to himself, "Hei! she has got in! Thou wilt not pull her out with pincers!"

For her it was surely that he stopped wandering about, for her he lived; and when he played on the organ he thought that she was listening, and therefore he played better.

And she loving, to begin with, his "talent" for music, loved him afterward for himself; and that Pan Klen was for her the dearest of all, though he had a strange, dark face, eyes that were looking somewhere else, a scant coat, a still scanter overcoat, and legs as long and as slim as the legs of a stork.

But "the father," the tile-maker, though he, too, carried air in his pockets for the most part, was unwilling to give Olka to Klen. "Any one will look at the girl," said he; "why should such a fellow as Klen fix her fate?" and he hardly let the man into the house, and sometimes he would not let him in.

But when old Melnitski died, everything changed right away.

Klen, after signing the contract, went with all speed to the tile-maker's.

"I do not say," said the tile-maker to him, "that something must surely happen right away; but an organist is not a tramp." And, inviting him into the house, he treated him to arrack, and feasted him as a guest.

And when Olka came in, the father rejoiced with the young people because Klen had become a man; he would have his house, garden, and, next to the canon, would be the great person in Ponikla.

So Klen had sat with them from midday till evening, to his own great delight and to Olka's; and now he was returning by the road to Ponikla, on squeaking snow and in twilight.