“There are, but of evil. There is to be a great muster of troops at Adrianople in the last days of winter.”
“I know that already. There are no tidings now save of evil—evil from the Commonwealth, evil from the Crimea and from Stambul.”
“But not altogether, for I myself bring such good tidings that if I were a Turk or a Tartar I should surely mention a present.”
“Well, then, you have fallen from heaven to me. Come, speak quickly, dispel my anxiety!”
“But if I am so frozen, your great mightiness, that the wit has stiffened in my head?”
The hetman clapped his hands, and commanded an attendant to bring mead. After a while they brought in a mouldy decanter, and candlesticks with burning tapers, for though the hour was still early, snowy clouds had made the air so gloomy that outside, as well as in the house, it was like nightfall.
The hetman poured out and drank to his guest; the latter, bowing low, emptied his glass, and said: “The first news is this, that Azya, who was to bring back to our service the captains of the Lithuanian Tartars and the Cheremis, is not called Mellehovich, he is a son of Tugai Bey.”
“Of Tugai Bey?” asked Pan Sobieski, with amazement.
“Thus it is, your great mightiness. It has come out that Pan Nyenashinyets carried him away from the Crimea while a child, but lost him on the road home; and Azya, falling into possession of the Novoveskis, was reared at their house without knowing that he was descended from such a father.”
“It was a wonder to me that he, though so young, was held in such esteem among the Tartars. But now I understand; and the Cossacks too, even those who have remained faithful to the mother,23 consider Hmelnitski as a kind of saint, and are proud of him.”
“That is just it, just it; I told Azya the same thing,” said Pan Bogush.
“Wonderful are the ways of God,” said the hetman, after a while; “old Tugai shed rivers of blood in our country, and his son is serving it—at least he serves it faithfully so far; but now I do not know whether he will not wish to taste Crimean greatness.”
“Now? Now he is still more faithful; and here my second tidings begin, in which it may be that strength and resource and salvation for the suffering Commonwealth are contained. So help me God, I forgot fatigue and danger in view of these tidings, so as to let them out of my lips at the earliest moment, and console your troubled heart.”
“I am listening eagerly,” said Pan Sobieski.
Bogush began to explain Azya’s plans, and presented them with such enthusiasm that he grew really eloquent. From time to time his hand, trembling from emotion, poured out a glass of mead, spilling the noble drink over the rim; and he spoke and spoke on. Before the astonished eyes of the grand hetman passed as it were clear pictures of the future; therefore thousands and tens of thousands of Tartars came for land and freedom, bringing their wives and children and their herds; therefore the astonished Cossacks, seeing the new power of the Commonwealth, bowed down to it obediently, bowed down to the king and the hetman; hence there was rebellion in the Ukraine no longer; hence raids, destructive as fire or flood, were advancing no longer on the old roads against Russia—but at the side of the Polish and the Cossack armies moved over the measureless steppes, with the playing of trumpets and the rattle of drums, chambuls of Tartars, nobles of the Ukraine.
And for whole years carts after carts were advancing, and in them, in spite of the commands of Khan and Sultan, were multitudes who preferred the black land of the Ukraine and bread to their former hungry settlements. And the power, hostile aforetime, was moving to the service of the Commonwealth. The Crimea became depopulated; their former power slipped out of the hands of the Khan and the Sultan, and dread seized them; for from the steppes, from the Ukraine, the new hetman of a new Tartar nobility looked threateningly into their eyes—a guardian and faithful defender of the Commonwealth, the renowned son of a terrible father, young Tugai Bey.
A flush came out on the countenance of Bogush; it seemed that his own words bore him away, for at the end he raised both hands and cried—
“This is what I bring! This is what that dragon’s whelp has brooded out in the wild woods of Hreptyoff! All that is needed now is to give him a letter and permission from your great mightiness to spread a report in the Crimea and on the Danube. Your great mightiness, if Tugai Bey’s son were to do nothing except to make an uproar in the Crimea and on the Danube, to cause misunderstandings, to rouse the hydra of civil war among the Tartars, to embroil some camps against others, and that on the eve of conflict, I repeat, he would render a great and undying service to the Commonwealth.”
But Pan Sobieski walked back and forth with long strides through the room, without speaking. His lordly face was gloomy, almost terrible; he strode, and it was to be seen that he was conversing in his soul—unknown whether with himself or with God.
At last thou didst open some page in thy soul, grand hetman, for thou gavest answer in these words to the speaker:—
“Bogush, even if I had the right to give such a letter and such permission, while I live I should not give them.”
These words fell as heavily as if they had been of molten lead or iron, and weighed so on Bogush that for a time he was dumb, hung his head, and only after a long interval did he groan out—
“Why, your great mightiness, why?”
“First,
