ches?
MOSI. Till you die I will not let you rest. As long as you live I will
gnaw at you like a worm, for you deserve it for your villany. What!
Haven't you committed every crime? You robbed your brother of his
inheritance; you cheated your partner; you have repudiated debts, and
held others to false debts. Haven't you set your neighbors' stores on
fire? If people knew everything they would hang you. But the world is
stone-blind, and so you walk God's earth in peace. Good-by! I would like
to go to Ossep and warn him against you; for if he falls into your
clutches he is lost.
SCENE IV
BARSSEGH. Yes, yes; go and never come back.
KHALI. I wish water lay in front of him and a drawn sword behind.
BARSSEGH. This fellow is a veritable curse!
KHALI. Yes, he is, indeed.
BARSSEGH. The devil take him! If he is going to utter such slanders, I
hope he will always do it here, and not do me harm with outsiders.
KHALI. You are to blame for it yourself. Why do you have anything to do
with the good-for-nothing fellow?
BARSSEGH. There you go! Do I have anything to do with him? He is always
at my heels, like my own shadow.
KHALI. Can't you forbid him to enter your doors?
BARSSEGH. So that he will not let me pass by in the streets? Do you
want him to make me the talk of the town?
KHALI. Then don't speak to him any more.
BARSSEGH. As if I took pleasure in it! It is all the same to him whether
one speaks to him or not.
KHALI. What are we to do with him, then?
BARSSEGH [_angrily_]. Why do you fasten yourself on to me like a gadfly?
Have I not trouble enough already? [_Beating his hands together_.] How
could you let him escape? You are good for nothing!
KHALI. What could I do, then, if you were stingy about the money? If you
had promised the 10,000 rubles, you would have seen how easily and
quickly everything would have been arranged.
BARSSEGH. If he insists upon so much he may go to the devil. For 10,000
rubles I will find a better man for my daughter.
KHALI. I know whom you mean. Give me the money and I will arrange the
thing to-day.
BARSSEGH [_derisively_]. Give it! How easily you can say it! Is that a
mulberry-tree, then, that one has only to shake and thousands will fall
from it? Don't hold my rubles so cheaply; for every one of them I have
sold my soul twenty times.
KHALI. If I can only get sight of that insolent Salome, I'll shake a
cart-load of dirt over her head. Only let her meet m
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