For two days Auntie Dasha went about with a tear-stained and heavily powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking towards the icon. And it was impossible to make out what was the matter with her. But at last she made up her mind, went in to Vera, and said in a casual way:
“The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the tenant hasn’t paid his rent. Will you let me pay it out of the fifteen thousand your papa left you?”
All day afterwards Auntie Dasha spent in making cherry jam in the garden. Alyona, with her cheeks flushed with the heat, ran to and from the garden to the house and back again to the cellar.
When Auntie Dasha was making jam with a very serious face as though she were performing a religious rite, and her short sleeves displayed her strong, little, despotic hands and arms, and when the servants ran about incessantly, bustling about the jam which they would never taste, there was always a feeling of martyrdom in the air. …
The garden smelt of hot cherries. The sun had set, the charcoal stove had been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still lingered in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new labourer, a young soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was, by her express orders, making new paths. He was cutting the turf with a spade and heaping it up on a barrow.
“Where were you serving?” Vera asked him.
“At Berdyansk.”
“And where are you going now? Home?”
“No,” answered the labourer. “I have no home.”
“But where were you born and brought up?”