A Terrible Vengeance

VII

“It is I, my daughter! It is, I, my darling!” Katerina heard, as she revived and saw the old maidservant before her. The woman bent down and seemed to whisper to her, and stretching out her withered old hand, sprinkled her with water.

“Where am I?” said Katerina, sitting up and looking around her. “The Dnieper is splashing before me, behind me are the mountains… Where have you taken me, granny?”

“I have taken you out; I have carried you in my arms from the stifling cellar; I locked up the cellar again that you might not be in trouble with my lord Danilo.”

“Where is the key?” asked Katerina, looking at her girdle. “I don’t see it.”

“Your husband has taken it, to have a look at the sorcerer, my child.”

“To look! Granny, I am lost!” cried Katerina.

“God mercifully preserve us from that, my child! Only hold your peace, my little lady, no one will know anything.”

“He has escaped, the cursed Antichrist! Do you hear, Katerina, he has escaped!” said Danilo, coming up to his wife. His eyes flashed fire; his sword hung clanking at his side. His wife was like one dead.

“Has someone let him out, dear husband?” she brought out trembling.

“Yes, someone has—you are right: the devil. Look, where he was is a log chained to the wall. It is God’s pleasure, it seems, that the devil should not fear a Cossack’s hands! If any one of my Cossacks had dreamed of such a thing and I knew of it… I could find no punishment bad enough for him!”

“And if I had done it?” Katerina could not resist saying, and she stopped, panic-stricken.

“If you had done it you would be no wife to me. I would sew you up in a sack and drown you in mid-Dnieper…!”

Katerina could hardly breathe and she felt the hair stand up on her head.