The talk was about the weather and the harvest. There was no getting the corn in. The landowner’s sheaves were sprouting in the fields. As soon as one started carting them, down came the rain again. The peasants had pretty well got theirs in, but the landowner’s corn was rotting like mad. And the mice in the sheaves were just dreadful!
Kornéy told of a field he had seen as he came along which was still full of sheaves.
The young housewife poured him out a fifth cup of the weak, pale yellow tea, and handed it to him.
“Never mind if it is your fifth, daddy, it will do you good,” said she, when he made as if to refuse it.
“How is it your arm is not all right?” he asked her, twitching his eyebrows, and carefully taking the full cup she handed him.
“It was broken when she was still a baby—her father wanted to kill our Agatha,” said the talkative old mother-in-law.
“What was that for?” asked Kornéy. And, looking at the young housewife’s face, he suddenly remembered Justin with his light blue eyes, and the hand in which he held his cup shook so that he spilt half the tea before he could set it on the table.
“Why, her father—who lived at Gáyi—was a man named Kornéy Vasílyef. He was well-to-do; and high and mighty with his wife. He beat her and injured the child.”
Kornéy was silent, glancing, from under his continually twitching black eyebrows, first at the husband and then at Agatha.
“What did he do that for?” asked he, biting a morsel off his piece of sugar.