“Well, what is to be done?” asked Father Vassili, smiling.
“Now I should like to promise something different. I will lay a fast on myself, never to eat another bit of meat until I die.”
“I can’t bear the sight of it, and have weaned myself from eating it.”
“A difficult vow,” said Father Vassili with another smile, “must be replaced by something as difficult or more difficult, but you have chosen the easiest. Isn’t there anything that it would be hard for you to carry out? Think again!”
Vassilissa thought, and said there was nothing.
“I would gladly go, if I were not so stout.”
“How can your vow be eased?” said Father Vassili, thinking aloud. “What do you live on?”
“On tea, coffee, mushroom soup, potatoes....”
“That is nearly as bad,” she sighed, “as going to Kiev. What am I to live on?”
It seemed to her that he was laughing, and indeed he did laugh when he saw her face.
“You don’t like it,” he said. “But make the sacrifice.”
“What good does it do me, and to eat meat is not fasting, Father.”
“Eat it on the days when it may be eaten. The good it will do is that you will lay on less fat. In six months you are absolved of your vow.”
She went away in some distress, and began to execute the priest’s instructions the next day, turning her nose sadly away from the steaming coffee that she brought her mistress in the morning.
In about ten days Marfinka returned in company with her fiancé and his mother. Vikentev and she brought their laughter, their gaiety and their merry talk into the quiet house. But within a couple of hours after their arrival they had become quiet and timid, for their gaiety had aroused a melancholy echo, as in an empty house. A mist lay on everything. Even the birds had ceased to fly to the spot where Marfinka fed them; swallows, starlings and all the feathered inhabitants of the park were gone, and not a stork was to be seen flying over the Volga. The gardener had thrown away the withered flowers; the space in front of the house, usually radiant and sweet with flowers, now showed black rings of newly-dug earth framed in yellowish grass. The branches of some of the trees had been enveloped in bast, and the trees in the park became barer with every day. The Volga grew darker and darker, as if the river were preparing for its icy winter sleep.