Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Other Stories / Леди Макбет Мценского уезда и другие повести. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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 surprised.

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 was still more surprised.

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 Filippych; 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.

“I am the late Boris Timofeich’s cousin,” she says, “and this is my nephew, Fyodor Lyamin.”

Katerina Lvovna received them.