with her marriage the Hukac family had ceased to exist for him. He seemed to have forgotten that he ever had had a daughter.
* * *
The wind blew from the north, frosty and keen, and merciless. The winter seemed to be trying to make up for lost time.
Svejnoha hurried home. His heart was very, very heavy; it seemed to him that he himself had stood upon those little bare feet distorted with cold—those dirty, blue, suffering little feet. Try as he would he could not rid himself of the thought that those little feet belonged to him. It followed him home and remained even after the flames burst forth merrily in his large tile stove. Those blue feet seemed graven on his mind.
Up and down, up and down the room he paced. One moment he smiled, then frowned, rearranged the earthen pots on the stove, blew on his hands, although they were not cold, and muttered to himself.
Finally a smile settled in the corners of his mouth, shone in his eyes and played queer antics in the wrinkles of his face. He rubbed his hands, hummed snatches of an old song, and having eaten with great relish a large bow! of soup, in which his culinary skill was wont to celebrate its highest triumphs, he started for town. History relates that he whistled all the way going there, and likewise when coming back, as if he were carrying a treasure in the broad pockets of his fur lined cloak, which, by the way, stuck out very queerly.
That day the village matrons whispered to their husbands to hand out what loose change they had, as St. Nicholas was to make his rounds again that year. Peace sat on their brows and joy filled their souls.
But one mother in the village grew pale as she heard the good news, so joyfully proclaimed in hut and mansion. Her heart shrunk within her, and she dared not turn her eyes to her boy, lest her looks betray the secret, and rouse in him vain expectations of some joyful surprise the next day. She trembled as she pressed her child’s head to her bosom, not daring to whisper to him: “To-morrow is St. Nicholas’s day, and he will bring you something nice.”
At times, when Nanka—poor, careworn, dragged out with toil and drudgery, but still a mother—could take Tonik upon her lap, and caress and talk to him, it seemed as if the great burden of want and sorrow rolled from her shoulders. It was then that she realized, if ever so dimly, that there was something else in life besides poverty and woe, something beautiful, like a star of hope over a fearful abyss; and this blessed something was what she saw in the eyes of her child, in the dimples of his cheeks, behind his half parted lips, where were crowded a chaos of words, no, not words, but syllables that were waiting to be selected and arranged into words.
To be sure, she had little time to spend caressing him; still, now and then, when her heart would not be silenced, she played with him and listened to his childish prattle, while her bosom swelled with motherly pride.
Nanka was not an unusual character—not at all. Such girls and women can be found in every village. With pretty faces and good figures they think of nothing but cows and chickens, butter and eggs; they talk of nothing but their housekeeping, cook gallon pots of soup—in short, live entirely in the physical.
The one event in Nanka’s life had been Hukac’s visit to her father, whom she honored and loved, and whose actions and thoughts she regarded as infallible. She was not in the habit of reflecting deeply upon any subject, and as her husband related the failure of his errand, it had seemed to her simple mind that her father was angry with them because they had managed so poorly; that he looked down on them, cast them aside, leaving them to poverty and misery as they deserved. Of higher motives that might influence one’s actions, Nanka knew nothing. It never occurred to her that her husband’s attempt to pawn her jewels to her father was an insult to the latter.
She had wept long, that night, when the
Vol. III5
