Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/26

20. Things went on in this fashion—the priest, unless already reduced to a moral jelly by previous experiences, must have been quite shocked by his power with God—for six or seven years. Then one of the sons proposed something which bettered his mother's teaching—a crime against which Marfa herself revolted; and he also fell out with his brothers. So far, the authorities had never been able to catch Marfa and her gang in the very act of crime, as would be necessary if they were to deal with her effectively. Now, this son secretly gave information in proper quarters as to the time when Marfa and his brothers, with their minions, were intending to "go a-hunting" (as Marfa was wont, pleasantly, to express it), and she was captured, tried, condemned and exiled to Siberia. This third son, who had refrained from taking part in her final "hunt," after betraying her and his brothers, remained the sole heir of the ancestral estate. But he did not reign over it long. His mother, at her departure into exile, had cursed him. Burdened with this curse, he fell into melancholy, and committed suicide. Evidently he, like the priest of Kosáchya Dubróva, was afflicted with a complicated case of conscience.

In the famous Epic Songs of Russia, composed, probably, in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, the greatest of the Bogatýri (Heroes), Ilya