CHAPTER LVIII.
Four days later, on the Assumption of the Most Blessed Lady, which was also Marynia’s name’s[13] day, the Bigiels and Svirski went to Buchynek. They did not find Marynia at home, for she was at vespers in the church of Yasmen with Pani Emilia. When Pani Bigiel learned this, she followed them with the whole crowd of little Bigiels. The men, left alone, began to talk of the event of which for a number of days the whole city had been talking,—that was of the attempted suicide of the poet Zavilovski.
“I went to see him to-day three times,” said Bigiel; “but Panna Helena’s servants have the order to admit no one except the doctors.”
“As for me,” said Pan Stanislav, “this is the first day on which I have not been able to visit him; but during the previous days I spent a number of hours with him regularly. I tell my wife that I am at the counting-house on business.”
“Tell me how it happened,” said Bigiel, who wanted to know all the details, so as to consider them exactly afterward in his fashion.
“It happened this way,” said Pan Stanislav. “Ignas told me that he was going to the institution, to his father. I was glad, for I judged that that would keep him away from his thoughts. I took him, however, to the gate, and he promised to visit me next day. Meanwhile it turned out that he wanted to be rid of me, so as to shoot himself undisturbed.”
“Then you were not the first to find him?”
“No; I suspected nothing of that kind, and I should have looked for him next day. Luckily Panna Helena came at the mere news that the marriage was broken.”
“I informed her,” said Svirski, “and she took the matter to heart so much that I was astonished. She had a forewarning, as it were, of what would follow.”
“She is a wonderful person,” said Pan Stanislav. “I have not been able to learn how it happened; but she found him; she saved him; she called in a whole circle of doctors, and finally gave command to take him to her house.”