Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/54

48 by side; with a comb she smoothed their carelessly tangled young curls, and moistened them with her tears. She gazed at them with her whole being, with her every sense; she merged herself wholly in that gaze, and still she could not gaze enough. She had nourished them at her own breast, she had reared them and petted them; and now to see them only for an instant! "My sons! my darling sons, what will become of you? what awaits you?" she said, and tears stood in the furrows which disfigured her once beautiful face. In truth, she was to be pitied, as was every woman in that valorous epoch. She had lived only for a moment in love, only during the first fever of passion, only during the first flush of youth; and then her grim betrayer had deserted her for the sword, for his comrades and his carouses. She had seen her husband for two or three days in the course of a year, and then for a period of several years there had been no news of him. And when she had seen him, when they had lived together, what sort of a life had been hers? She had endured insults, even beatings; she had seen caresses bestowed merely out of pity; she had been a strange object amid that mob of heartless cavaliers, upon which the dissolute life of the Zaporozhe had cast a grim colouring of its own. Her pleasureless youth had flitted swiftly by; and her beautiful rosy cheeks and her bosom