Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [88]
“Shameful hussy!” Dyudya sighed.
“So I swore at her and stamped my feet and took her into the hallway and latched the door and shouted at her: ‘Go back to your husband! Don’t shame me in front of people! Put the fear of God in your heart!’ And every day there were scenes like that. One morning I was standing in the yard near the stable and mending a bridle. Suddenly I looked up and saw her running through the little gate into my yard, barefoot, wearing only a petticoat, coming straight toward me. She took hold of the bridle and got smeared with rosin. She was trembling and weeping. ‘I can’t live with that brute! I can’t bear it! If you don’t love me, kill me!’ I lost patience and struck out at her with the bridle, and at that moment Vasya ran in through the gate shouting despairingly: ‘Don’t you hit her! Don’t you hit her!’ He went right up to her, and he was waving his arms and behaving like a madman, and then he began to beat her with his fists with all his strength, and then he threw her to the ground and stomped her. I tried to protect her, but he took the reins and gave her a thrashing, and all the time he was making little whinnying sounds like a colt: hee-hee-hee!”
“I’d take the reins and give you a taste of them!” Varvara muttered, moving away. “Torturing one of us women, you damned brutes!”
“Shut up, you jade!” Dyudya shouted at her.
“Hee-hee-hee!” Matvey Savvich went on. “Then one of the drivers came running up from his yard, I called out for my workman, and between us we were able to rescue Mashenka and carry her home. What a disgrace it was! That same evening I went to see how she was. She was lying in bed, wrapped up in bandages and compresses, with only her eyes and nose visible, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Well, good evening, Maria Semyonovna,’ I said, and got no answer. Vasya was sitting in the next room, holding his head in his hands and blubbering. ‘What a brute I am!’ he was saying. ‘I’ve ruined my life! Dear God, let me die!’ I sat for half an hour with Mashenka, and gave her some sound advice. I tried to put the fear of God in her. ‘Those who behave righteously,’ I said, ‘go to Paradise, but as for you—you will go to a Gehenna of fire, like all adultresses! Don’t resist your husband! Go down on your knees before him!’ But she said nary a word and did not blink an eyelid, and I might just as well have talked to a post. The next day Vasya fell ill with something like cholera, and during the evening I heard he was dead. Then they buried him. Mashenka did not go to the funeral—she did not want to let people see her shameless face and her bruises. But soon they were saying all over the place that Vasya had not died a natural death, but Mashenka had done away with him. The police soon heard about it. They dug up Vasya, slit him open, and found arsenic in his stomach. It was quite obvious he had been poisoned, so the police came and they took Mashenka away and the sweet innocent babe Kuzka, too. They put her in jail. The stupid woman had gone too far—God was punishing her! Eight months later she went on trial. She sat, I remember, on a low stool, wearing a gray gown with a white kerchief round her head, thin, pale, sharp-eyed, pitiable. Beside her there was a soldier holding a gun. She wouldn’t confess her guilt. There were some in the court who said she had poisoned her husband, and there were others