When we had somewhat warmed up at the fireplace, the old woman looked at us with her deep sunken eyes and said:
“Warmed up a bit? Good! You, young man, will go to sleep with Jan, it won't be comfortable for you here... Jan!”
Jan appeared. An almost blind old man about 60 years of age, with long grey hair, a nose as sharp as an awl, sunken cheeks, and a moustache reaching down to the middle of his chest.
At first I had been surprised that the old woman, alone with oven prongs in her hands, had not been afraid to open the door to two men who had appeared in the night from no one knew where, but after I had seen Jan, I understood that he had been somewhere in hiding and she had depended on him for help.
The help was “just grand”: in the hands of the old man I saw a gun. To be exact, it wasn't a gun: “a musket” would be a more correct name for the weapon the man was holding. It was approximately six inches taller than Jan himself, the gun barrel had notches in it and was bell-shaped at the end, the riflestock and butt-stock were worn from long handling, the slow match was hanging down. In a word its place was in an Armoury Museum. Such guns usually shoot as do cannon, and they recoil on the shoulder with such force that a person unprepared for the shock drops down like a sheaf on the ground.
And for some reason or other I thought with pleasure of the marvelous English six-shooter that was in my pocket.
Hardly able to move his unbending legs, Jan led the coachman to the door. I noticed that even his hands were trembling.
“Dependable aid for the mistress,” I thought.
But the mistress touched me by the shoulder and invited me to follow after her into the “apartments”. We passed through yet another small room, the old woman opened another door, and I quietly gasped in surprise and delight.
Meeting our gaze was a great entrance-hall, a kind of a drawing-room, a customary thing in ancient castles. And oh! The beauty there!
The room was so enormous that my gloomy reflection in the mirror somewhere on the opposite wall seemed no bigger than the joint of my little finger. The floor was made of oak “bricks” already quite worn, the exceptionally high walls were bordered at the edges with shining fretwork blackened by the years, the windows almost under the ceiling, small ones in deep lancet niches.
In the dark we had evidently hit on a side porch, for to the right of me was the front entrance: a wide door, also a lancet one, divided by wooden columns into three parts. The flowers, leaves and fruit carved on the columns were cracked with time. Behind the door in the depth of the vestibule was the entrance door, — a massive, oak door, bound by darkened bronze nails with square heads. And above the door an enormous dark window into the night and darkness. On the window a ship of forged iron, a masterpriece of workmanship.
I walked along the hall in amazement: what splendour, and how all had been neglected due to people's carelessness. There was massive furniture along the walls — it squeaked even in answer to footfalls. Here an enormous wooden statue of St. George, one of the somewhat naive creations of the Belarusian national genius, and at the feet of the statue a layer of white dust, as if someone had spread flour over it; this unique work had been spoiled by wood-lice. And here hanging down from the ceiling was a chandelier, also of surprising beauty, but with more than half of its pendants missing.
It might have seemed that no one lived here, were it not for an enormous fireplace, its flames lighting up the entrance-hall with an uncertain flickering light.
Almost in the middle of this splendid entrance-hall a marble staircase led up to the first floor, where everything was almost the same as on the ground floor — the same enormous room, even a similar fireplace also lit, except that on the walls the black wood (probably oak) alternated with shabby coffee-coloured damask wall-paper and on this wall-paper in all their splendour were portraits in heavy frames. And in addition near the fireplace there stood a small table and two armchairs.
The old woman touched me by the sleeve:
“Now I'll lead you to your room. It's not far from here along the corridor. And afterwards... perhaps you would like to have supper?”
I did not refuse, for I hadn't eaten anything all day.
“Well then, sir, wait for me...”
She returned in about ten minutes, a broad smile on her face, and in a confidential tone said to me:
“You know the village goes to bed early. But we here don't like to sleep, we try to go to bed as late as possible. And the mistress doesn't like visitors. I don't know why she suddenly consented to admit you into her house, and even lets you share her supper-table. (I hope, sir, you will excuse me). You are evidently the most worthy of all those who have been here in the last three years.”
“You mean then,” I said, surprised, “that you are not the mistress?”
“I'm the housekeeper,” the old woman answered with dignity. “I am the housekeeper. In the best of the best houses, in a good family, understand this, Mr. Merchant. In the very best of the best families. This is even better than being the mistress of a family not of the very best.”
“Then what family is this?” I asked imprudently. “And where am I?”
The old woman's eyes blazed with anger.
“You are in the castle of Marsh Firs. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself not to know the owners. They are the Janoŭskis. You understand, the Janoŭskis! You must have heard of them!”
I answered that I had, of course, heard of them. And this reassured the old woman.
With a gesture worthy of a queen, she pointed to an armchair, (approximately as queens do in the theatre when they point to the executioner's block ready for their unlucky lover: “There's your place, you ill-fated one”), asked to be excused and left me alone.
The change in the old woman surprised me greatly. On the ground floor she moaned and lamented, spoke with that expressive intonation of the people, on the first floor she immediately changed, became the devil alone knows what. Apparently, on the ground floor she was at home, whereas on the first she was nothing but the housekeeper, a rare guest, and changed correspondingly with the passage.
Remaining alone, I began to examine the portraits that gleamed on the walls. There were about seventy of them, some ancient and some quite new — and a sad sight they made.
Here a nobleman dressed in something like a sheepskin coat — one of the oldest pictures — his face the face of a peasant, broad, healthy, with thick blood in his veins.
And here another, this one already in a long silver-woven tunic with a girdle, a wide beaver collar falling across his shoulders (a sly proto-beast you were, young man!). Next to him a powerful-looking man with shoulders like stone and a sincere look about him, in a red cloak (at his head a shield with the family coat-of-arms, the top half smeared with black paint). And farther on, others just as strong, but with oily eyes, lopped off noses, their lips hard.
Beyond them portraits of women with sloping shoulders, women created for caresses. Faces were such that would have made an executioner weep. Most likely some of these women did actually lay their heads on the executioner's block in those hard times. It is unpleasant to think that these women took their food from their plates with their hands, and bedbugs made their nests in the canopies of their beds.
I stopped off at one of the portraits, fascinated by a strangely wonderful, incomprehensible smile, a smile which our old masters so inimitably painted. The woman looked at me mysteriously and with compassion.
“You, you little man,” her look seemed to say. “What have you experienced in life? Oh! If you could have seen the torches blazing on the walls of the hall during feasting and revelry, if you could have known the delight in kissing your lovers till they bled, to make two men fight a duel, to poison one, to throw another to the executioner, to aid your husband to fire from the tower at the attacking enemies, to send yet another lover to the grave for love of you, and then to take the blame on yourself, to lay your head with its white wide forehead and intricate hair-do on the block.”
I swear upon my honour that that is what she said to me, and although I hate aristocrats, I understood, standing before these portraits, what a fearful thing is “an ancient family”, what an imprint it leaves on its descendants, what a heavy burden their old sins and degeneration lay on their shoulders.
And I understood also that uncountable decades had flown by since the time when this woman sat for the painter. Where are they now, all these people with their hot blood and passionate desires, how many centuries have thundered over their decaying bones?
I felt the wind of the centuries whistling past my back, and the hair on my head stood on end.
And I felt also the cold that reigned in this house, a cold that even the fireplaces burning night and day could not drive out.
Enormous, gloomy halls with their dusty smell, with their creaking parquet floors, their gloomy corners, their eternal draughts, the smell of mice and dust and cold, such a cold that made your heart freeze, a cold that centuries had gone into making, a cold created by an entailed estate, the exclusive right of inheritance belonging to the eldest son, by an enormous, now impoverished and almost extinct family.
Oh! What a cold it was! If our late decadents, singing praises to the dilapidated castles of the gentry, were left here overnight, for just one night even, they would very soon ask to be taken out and put on the grass in the warm sunshine.
A brave rat ran diagonally across the hall. I winced.
I turned to more of the portraits. These portraits were of a later period. And altogether different. The men had a kind of a hungry look, a discontented look. Their eyes like those in old seladons, on their lips an incomprehensible, a subtle smile and unpleasant causticity. And the women were different: their lips too full of lust, their look mannered and cold. And very obvious were their hands, now much weaker hands: beneath their white skin, both in the men and the women, blue veins were visible. Their shoulders had become narrower and were thrust forward, while the expression on their faces showed a markedly increased voluptuousness.
Life, what cruel jokes you play on those who for centuries live an isolated life, and come into contact with the people only to bring bastards into the world!
It was difficult and unpleasant for me to look at all this. And again that feeling of a sharp, incomprehensible cold...
I did not hear any steps behind my back, it was as if someone had come flying through the air. I simply felt suddenly that someone was standing behind my back, looking at me. Then under the influence of this look, I turned around. A woman stood behind me, looking at me questioningly, her head slightly bent. I was stunned. It seemed to me as if the portrait that had just been talking to me, had suddenly come to life and the woman in it had stepped down from it.
I don't even know what they had in common. The one in the portrait (I looked around at it and saw that she was in her place) was tall, well-built, with a great reserve of vitality, merry, strong and beautiful. While this one was simply a puny creature.
Still there was a resemblance, a kind of super-resemblance that can force us to recognize two men in a crowd as being brothers, although they do not resemble each other: one a brunette and the other a blond. Yes, and here there was even more. Their hair exactly alike, their noses of the same form, their mouths with the same kind of slit and the same white even teeth. Added to this there was a general resemblance in the expression on their faces, something ancestral, eternal.
And nevertheless I had never before seen such an unpleasant-looking person. Everything alike and everything somehow different. Short of stature, thin as a twig, thighs almost undeveloped and a pitiable chest, light blue veins on the neck and hands, in which there seemed to be no blood at all — so weak she was, like a small stem of wormwood.