“Now, Seryozhechka, come here, come, darling,” she beckoned the clerk to her.
Sergei shook his curls and boldly sat down by his mistress.
“Oh, Lord! My God! What is this? What are you doing, you barbarians!?” cried Zinovy Borisych, turning all purple and getting up from his chair.
“What? You don’t like it? Look, look, my bright falcon, how beautiful!”
Katerina Lvovna laughed and passionately kissed Sergei in front of her husband.
At the same moment, a deafening slap burned on her cheek, and Zinovy Borisych rushed for the open window.
VIII
“Ah … Ah, so that’s it! … Well, my dear friend, thank you very much. That’s just what I was waiting for!” Katerina Lvovna cried. “Now it’s clear … it’s going to be my way, not yours …”
In a single movement she pushed Sergei away from her, quickly threw herself at her husband, and before Zinovy Borisych had time to reach the window, she seized him by the throat from behind with her slender fingers and threw him down on the floor like a damp sheaf of hemp.
Having fallen heavily and struck the back of his head with full force against the floor, Zinovy Borisych lost his mind completely. He had never expected such a quick denouement. The first violence his wife used on him showed him that she was ready for anything, if only to be rid of him, and that his present position was extremely dangerous. Zinovy Borisych realized it all instantly in the moment of his fall and did not cry out, knowing that his voice would not reach anyone’s ear, but would only speed things up still more. He silently shifted his eyes and rested them with an expression of anger, reproach, and suffering on his wife, whose slender fingers were tightly squeezing his throat.
Zinovy Borisych did not defend himself; his arms, with tightly clenched fists, lay stretched out and twitched convulsively. One of them was quite free; the other Katerina Lvovna pinned to the floor with her knee.
“Hold him,” she whispered indifferently to Sergei, turning to her husband herself.
Sergei sat on his master, pinning down both his arms with his knees, and was about to put his hands around his throat under Katerina Lvovna’s, but just then he cried out desperately himself. Seeing his offender, blood vengeance aroused all the last strength in Zinovy Borisych: with a terrible effort, he tore his pinned-down arms from under Sergei’s knees and, seizing Sergei by his black curls, sank his teeth into his throat like a beast. But that did not last long: Zinovy Borisych at once uttered a heavy moan and dropped his head.
Katerina Lvovna, pale, almost breathless, stood over her husband and her lover; in her right hand was a cast-iron candlestick, which she held by the upper end, the heavy part down. A thin trickle of crimson blood ran down Zinovy Borisych’s temple and cheek.
“A priest,” Zinovy Borisych moaned dully, throwing his head back with loathing as far as he could from Sergei, who was sitting on him. “To confess,” he uttered still more indistinctly, trembling and looking from the corner of his eye at the warm blood thickening under his hair.
“You’ll be all right like this,” Katerina Lvovna whispered.
“Well, no more dawdling with him,” she said to Sergei. “Squeeze his throat well and good.”
Zinovy Borisych wheezed.
Katerina Lvovna bent down, pressed her own hands to Sergei’s hands, which lay on her husband’s throat, and put her ear to his chest. After five quiet minutes, she stood up and said: “Enough, he’s had it.”
Sergei also stood up and let out a long breath. Zinovy Borisych lay dead, with a crushed throat and a gashed temple. Under his head on the left side was a small spot of blood, which, however, was no longer pouring from the clotted wound stopped up with hair.
Sergei carried Zinovy Borisych to the cellar under the floor of the same stone larder where he himself had been locked up so recently by the late Boris Timofeich and returned to the room upstairs. Meanwhile, Katerina Lvovna, having rolled up the sleeves of her bed jacket and tucked her skirt up high, was carefully washing off with a soapy sponge the bloodstain left by Zinovy Borisych on the floor of his bedroom. The water was not yet cold in the samovar from which Zinovy Borisych had steamed his little merchant’s soul in poisoned tea, and the stain was washed away without a trace.
Katerina Lvovna took the copper basin and soapy sponge.
“Light, here,” she said to Sergei, going to the door. “Lower, hold it lower,” she said, carefully studying all the floorboards over which Sergei had dragged Zinovy Borisych to the cellar.
In only two places on the painted floor were there two tiny spots the size of a cherry. Katerina Lvovna rubbed them with the sponge and they disappeared.
“That’ll teach you to sneak up on your wife like a thief and spy on her,” said Katerina Lvovna, straightening up and glancing in the direction of the larder.
“Finished off,” said Sergei, and he jumped at the sound of his own voice.
When they returned to the bedroom, a thin red strip of dawn was cutting across the east and, lightly gilding the blossom-covered apple trees, peeked through the green slats of the garden fence into Katerina Lvovna’s room.
The old clerk, a short coat thrown over his shoulders, crossing himself and yawning, came trudging through the yard from the shed to the kitchen.
Katerina Lvovna carefully drew the shutter closed and looked Sergei over attentively, as if she wished to see into his soul.
“So now you’re a merchant,” she said, laying her white hands on Sergei’s shoulders.
Sergei made no reply.
His lips were trembling, he was shaking feverishly. Katerina Lvovna’s lips were merely cold.
After two days, Sergei had big calluses on his hands from the pick and heavy spade; but Zinovy Borisych was laid away so nicely in his cellar that, without the help of his widow or her lover, no one would have been able to find him before the general resurrection.
IX
Sergei went around with his neck wrapped in a crimson scarf and complained of a swelling in his throat. Meanwhile, before the traces left on Sergei by Zinovy Borisych’s teeth had healed, Katerina Lvovna’s husband was missed. Sergei himself began speaking of him even more often than others. He would sit by the gate in the evening with other young fellows and say: “Really, lads, how is it the master hasn’t turned up yet?”
The young fellows were also wondering.
And then news came from the mill that the master had hired horses and gone home long ago. The driver who had taken him said that Zinovy Borisych had seemed to be in distress, and had dismissed him somehow strangely: about two miles from town, near the monastery, he got off the cart, took his bag, and walked away. Hearing this story, everybody wondered still more.
Zinovy Borisych had vanished, and that was that.
A search was made, but nothing was discovered: the merchant had vanished into thin air. From the testimony of the arrested driver, it was learned only that the merchant had gotten out by the monastery on the river and walked away. The matter was never clarified, but meanwhile Katerina Lvovna, in her position as a widow, lived freely with Sergei. There were random surmises that Zinovy Borisych was here or there, but Zinovy Borisych still did not return, and Katerina Lvovna knew better than anyone that it was quite impossible for him to return.
A month went by like that, and another, and a third, and Katerina Lvovna felt herself heavy.
“The capital will be ours, Seryozhechka; I have an heir,” she said to Sergei, and she went to complain to the town council that, thus and so, she felt she was pregnant, and the business was stagnating: let her take charge of it all.
A commercial venture should not go to waste. Katerina Lvovna was her husband’s lawful wife: there were no apparent debts, which meant they ought to let her. And so they did.
Katerina Lvovna lived like a queen; and at her side Sergei was now called Sergei Filipych; and then smack, out of nowhere, came a new calamity. Somebody wrote to the town headman from Livny saying that Boris Timofeich had not traded all on his own capital, that more money than his own had been invested in the business, the money of his young nephew Fyodor Zakharovich Lyamin, and that the matter had to be looked into and not left in the hands of Katerina Lvovna alone. The news came, the headman talked about it with Katerina Lvovna, and then a week later, bang, an old lady arrives from Livny with a little boy.