“Here is my pupil!” cried he, kissing her hand, “the house mistress! my golden Marynia! Aha! the birds have come back to the old nest. But how beautiful she is always, as God is true,—a young lady, just a young damsel to look at, though I know that there is a son in the house.”
Marynia was blushing from delight; but at that moment the Zazimskis approached, with their six children, and with them also Pan Gantovski, called commonly “Little Bear,” the former unsuccessful rival for Marynia, and the incomplete slayer of Mashko. Gantovski approached awkwardly and with some confusion, as if dazzled by Marynia’s beauty, and seized with sorrow for the happiness which had missed him. In fact, Marynia greeted him with comic awkwardness; but Pan Stanislav stretched his hand to him in friendliness, with the magnanimity of a conqueror, and said,—
“Oh, I find here acquaintances even from years of childhood. How are you?”
“In the old fashion,” answered Gantovski.
But Pan Yamish, who was in excellent humor, said, looking teasingly at the young man,—
“He has his cares in regulating peasant privileges.”
Gantovski grew still more confused, for the whole neighborhood was talking of those troubles. For some years the poor fellow had been barely able to live in that Yalbrykov of his. The regulation of peasant privileges and the selling of timber might have brought him to the open road at length, when in opposition to all the conditions, which more than once had been near settlement, there rose the eternal unchangeable reproach on the part of his Yalbrykov neighbors that “the lord heir rides on a white horse, fires from pistols, and looks into the girls’ eyes.”
Gantovski, though accustomed from years of youth to various country troubles, lost at times his patience and cried out in genuine despair,—
“Well, dog blood! what has one to do with the other? May the brightest thunderbolts shake every one of you!”
But after such a convincing dictum, the Yalbrykov peasant representatives assembled as usual a new mature council, and, after a careful consideration of everything, for and against, announced again, while scratching the backs of their heads, that all would be right, but that “the lord heir rides on a white horse, fires from pistols, and looks at the girls.”