King Stakh's Wild Hunt

“I don't need your two shots! I don't want them!” I screamed like a baby, and almost stamped my feet. “I give them to him as a gift!”

My second and some other gentleman whose entire face consisted of an enormous turned-up nose and unshaven chin carried him off somewhere.

“He can have these two shots for himself!”

Only now did I understand what an awful thing it is to kill a person. Better, probably, just to give up the ghost yourself. And not because I was such a saint. Quite another thing if it's a skirmish, in battle, in a burst of fury. While here a dark room and a man who is hiding from you as a rat from a fox-terrier. I fired both pistols right at the wall, threw them down on the ground and left.

After some time, when I entered the room in which the quarrel had taken place, I found the company sitting at table again.

Varona had been put to bed in one of the distant rooms under the care of Dubatoŭk's relatives. I wanted to go home immediately, but they would not let me. Dubatoŭk seated me at his side and said: “It's alright, young man. It's only nerves that are to blame. He's alive. He'll get well. What else do you need? And now he'll know how to behave when he meets real people. Here — drink this… One thing I must say to you, you are a man worthy of the gentry. To be so devilishly cunning, and to wait so courageously for all the three shots — not everyone is able to do that. And it is well that you are so noble — you could have killed him with the two remaining bullets, but you didn't do that. Now my house to its very last cross is grateful to you.”

“But nevertheless it's bad,” said one of the gentlemen. “Such self-control — it's simply not human.”

Dubatoŭk shook his head.

“Varona's to blame, the pig. He picked the quarrel himself, the drunken fool. Who else, besides him, would have thought of screaming about money? You must have heard that he proposed to Nadzieja, and got a refusal for an answer. I'm sure that Mr. Andrej is better provided for than the Janoŭskis are. He has a head on his shoulders, has work and hands, while the last of their family, a woman, — has an entailed estate where one can sit like a dog in the manger and die of hunger sitting on a trunk full of money.”

And he turned to everybody:

“Gentlemen, I depend upon your honour. It seems to me that we should keep silent about what's happened. It does no credit to Varona — to the devil with him, he deserves penal servitude, but neither does it do any credit to you or the girl whose name this fool allowed himself to utter in drunken prattle… Well, and the more so to me. The only one who behaved like a man is Mr. Biełarecki, and he, as a true gentleman, will not talk indiscreetly.”

Everybody agreed. And the guests, apparently, could hold their tongues, for nobody in the district uttered a word about this incident.

When I was leaving, Dubatoŭk detained me on the porch:

“Shall I give you a horse, Andrej?”

I was a good horseman, but now I wanted to take a walk and come to myself somewhat after all the events that had taken place. Therefore I refused.

“Well, as you like…”

I took my way home through the heather waste land. It was already the dead of night, the moon was hidden behind the clouds, a kind of sickly-grey light flooded the waste land. Gusts of wind sometimes rustled the dry heather and then complete silence. Enormous stones stood here and there along the road. A gloomy road it was. The shadows cast by the stones covered the ground. Everything all around was dark and depressing. Sleep was stealing on me and the thought frightened me that a long road lay ahead: to go round the park, past the Giant's Gap. Perhaps better to take the short cut again across the waste land and look for the secret hole in the fence?

I turned off the road and almost immediately fell into deep mud; I was covered with dirt, got out onto a dry place, and then again got into dirt and finally came up against a long and narrow bog. Cursing myself for having taken this roundabout way, I turned to the left to the undergrowth on the river bank (I knew that dry land had to be there, because a river usually dries the earth along its banks), I soon came out again onto the same path along which I had walked on my way to Dubatoŭk's place, and finding myself half a mile away from his house, walked off along the undergrowth in the direction of Marsh Firs. Ahead, about a mile and a half away, the park was already visible, when some incomprehensible presentiment forced me to stop — maybe it was my nerves strung to such a high pitch this evening by the drinking and the danger, or perhaps it was some sixth sense that prompted me that I was not alone in the plain.