The Parish Priest of Lipce’s intervention in Maciej Boryna’s household is a winter visitation that turns a routine blessing into an attempt to settle a domestic conflict. The priest challenges Maciej’s harsh treatment of Jagna and urges him to make peace with Antek Boryna. His counsel briefly changes the household’s outward conduct, but it cannot repair the distrust beneath it: Jagna continues to resent Maciej, and her secret meetings with Antek resume. The episode shows both the reach and the limits of the priest’s authority in Lipce, where religious admonition, family hierarchy, and village politics meet at the same threshold.

The winter visitation

A few days after Candlemas, Ambrozy announced that the priest would make his rounds the following day. The household prepared carefully. The chamber was aired, cobwebs swept away, and yellow sand scattered on the porch and in the hallway. Everyone dressed in their best clothes. Even Maciej went out to shovel snow, preferring the yard to the strain inside the house, where Jagna was scolding Józka Boryna.

The priest arrived by sleigh in a surplice worn over his fur coat, accompanied by two of the organist’s children dressed for Mass. He prayed in Latin, blessed the house and its buildings, and went through the farmstead blessing the livestock. Maciej carried the holy water while the priest prayed; the children followed with bells and carols, and the household formed a small procession behind them. The ritual extended the visit beyond the family’s quarrels: it placed the home, its work, and its animals within the parish’s religious observances.

Before the priest left, Maciej and the farmhand loaded his sleigh with half a bushel of oats and a quarter bushel of peas. The visit also brought the children into view. Józka and Witek the Stork-Keeper recited prayers well enough to surprise the priest. Witek explained that Kuba had taught them prayers and catechism, while Rocho had taught him the primer. The priest gave each child two small holy pictures and urged them to respect their elders, pray, and avoid sin.

A public warning and a private rebuke

The priest’s warning about sin was pointedly directed at Jagna. He spoke of divine judgment and repentance while looking at her, and she understood that the admonition concerned her. When Maciej returned, she left the room rather than meet the priest’s gaze. The household blessing had thus become an occasion for moral scrutiny as well as religious comfort: Jagna was addressed before the family, while the priest reserved his more specific intervention for a private conversation with Maciej.

Once they were alone, the priest raised the incident at the inn, which Maciej confirmed had happened in front of everyone. The priest reminded him that he had repeatedly urged people not to take their womenfolk to the inn. But he did not endorse Maciej’s response to the public humiliation. He told Maciej that punishing Jagna harshly was unjust and sinful, separating the question of her conduct from the justice of her husband’s treatment of her.

The priest then assigned responsibility for the confrontation chiefly to Antek. He said Antek had deliberately forced Jagna to dance in order to provoke a quarrel. The account, however, came to the priest through Dominikowa, on whose version he relied completely. His intervention therefore offers a judgment, but not an impartial reconstruction: it condemns Maciej’s harshness while accepting a report that casts Antek as the instigator. That judgment nevertheless gives Maciej a way to reconsider his conduct without requiring him to deny that the public scene had taken place.

Family discord and village politics

The private conversation widened from Jagna’s punishment to the estrangement between Maciej and Antek. The priest warned that their conflict was making the young man wayward. He had also heard that Antek frequented the inn and stirred younger men against their elders, and that opposition to the manor might be forming. Maciej said he knew nothing of such plotting, and did not want to discuss it further. The priest’s concern joined household peace to village order: in his view, a father-and-son dispute could intensify unrest beyond the family.

He urged Maciej to reconcile with Antek and presented peace as a practical as well as a moral good. He suggested that agreement among neighbors might even help the villagers reach an arrangement with the squire, whom he described as willing to come to terms. Maciej answered with a hostile proverb about a wolf-like neighbor, making clear that he did not share the priest’s confidence in the manor. The priest turned away rather than prolong the quarrel. His appeal for harmony could not overcome Maciej’s distrust of those who held power over the villagers’ interests.

A fragile change, not a reconciliation

The priest’s words did have an immediate effect. As Maciej reflected on the counsel and on the priest’s earnest assurances, he gradually softened his manner toward Jagna. For a time, the household returned to its former outward routine. Yet the earlier ease, lively bustle, and deep trust did not return. The apparent repair resembled a mended vessel that still leaked through cracks too small to identify: resentment and suspicion persisted under the surface.

Maciej continued to watch Jagna closely, unable to cast off his mistrust. Jagna remembered his temper and harsh words and simmered with a desire for revenge. His vigilance intensified the very hostility it was meant to contain; she hated him more and longed for Antek more urgently. Within days, she and Antek were meeting at the hayrick every few days. Witek the Stork-Keeper helped them, having lost sympathy for Maciej after the removal of the stork and attached himself to Jagna; Jagna’s better suppers and money from Antek strengthened that alliance. Jagustynka became their most important go-between, helping them avoid Maciej’s notice.

The intervention therefore achieves a limited change in conduct, not reconciliation. The priest can bless the household and challenge Maciej’s injustice, but his counsel neither resolves the affair nor restores confidence between husband and wife. Its aftermath is especially revealing: the household looks settled again, yet surveillance, resentment, and clandestine meetings continue. The scene makes religious authority consequential without presenting it as all-powerful; peace is urged from within the family, while the conditions that obstruct it remain firmly in place.