“But if the monks defend themselves?”
The count laughed. “In this country no man will defend himself, and today no man is able. There was a time for defence—now it is too late.”
“Too late,” repeated Lisola.
The conversation ended there. After supper they went away. Kmita remained alone. This was for him the bitterest night that he had spent since leaving Kyedani. While listening to the words of Count Veyhard, Kmita had to restrain himself with all his power to keep from shouting at him, “Thou liest, thou cur!” and from falling on him with his sabre. But if he did not do so, it was unhappily because he felt and recognized truth in the words of the foreigner—awful truth burning like fire, but genuine.
“What could I say to him?” thought he; “with what could I offer denial except with my fist? What reasons could I bring? He snarled out the truth. Would to God he were slain! And that statesman of the emperor acknowledged to him that in all things and for all defence it was too late.”
Kmita suffered in great part perhaps because that “too late” was the sentence not only of the country, but of his own personal happiness. And he had had his fill of suffering; there was no strength left in him, for during all those weeks he had heard nothing save, “All is lost, there is no time left, it is too late.” No ray of hope anywhere fell into his soul.
Ever riding farther, he had hastened greatly, night and day, to escape from those prophecies, to find at last some place of rest, some man who would pour into his spirit even one drop of consolation. But he found every moment greater fall, every moment greater despair. At last the words of Count Veyhard filled that cup of bitterness and gall; they showed to him clearly this, which hitherto was an undefined feeling, that not so much the Swedes, the Northerners, and the Cossacks had killed the country, as the whole people.
“The mad, the violent, the malicious, the venal, inhabit this land,” repeated Kmita after Count Veyhard, “and there are no others! They obey not the king, they break the diets, they pay not the taxes, they help the enemy to the conquest of this land. They must perish.
“In God’s name, if I could only give him the lie! Is there nothing good in us save cavalry; no virtue, nothing but evil itself?”
Kmita sought an answer in his soul. He was so wearied from the road, from sorrows, and from everything that had passed before him, that it grew cloudy in his head. He felt that he was ill and a deathly sickness seized possession of him. In his brain an ever-growing chaos was working. Faces known and unknown pushed past him—those whom he had known long before and those whom he had met on this journey. Those figures spoke, as if at a diet, they quoted sentences, prophecies; and all was concerning Olenka. She was awaiting deliverance from Kmita; but Count Veyhard held him by the arms, and looking into his eyes repeated: “Too late! what is Swedish is Swedish!” and Boguslav Radzivill sneered and supported Count Veyhard. Then all of them began to scream: “Too late, too late, too late!” and seizing Olenka they vanished with her somewhere in darkness.
It seemed to Pan Andrei that Olenka and the country were the same, that he had ruined both and had given them to the Swedes of his own will. Then such measureless sorrow grasped hold of him that he woke, looked around in amazement and listening to the wind which in the chimney, in the walls, in the roof, whistled in various voices and played through each cranny, as if on an organ.
But the visions returned, Olenka and the country were blended again in his thoughts in one person whom Count Veyhard was conducting away saying: “Too late, too late!”
So Pan Andrei spent the night in a fever. In moments of consciousness he thought that it would come to him to be seriously ill, and at last he wanted to call Soroka to bleed him. But just then dawn began; Kmita sprang up and went out in front of the inn.
The first dawn had barely begun to dissipate the darkness; the day promised to be mild; the clouds were breaking into long stripes and streaks on the west, but the east was pure; on the heavens, which were growing pale gradually, stars, unobscured by mist, were twinkling. Kmita roused his men, arrayed himself in holiday dress, for Sunday had come and they moved to the road.
After a bad sleepless night, Kmita was wearied in body and spirit. Neither could that autumn morning, pale but refreshing, frosty and clear, scatter the sorrow crushing the heart of the knight. Hope in him had burned to the last spark, and was dying like a lamp in which the oil is exhausted. What would that day bring? Nothing!—the same grief, the same suffering, rather it will add to the weight on his soul; of a surety it will not decrease it.
He rode forward in silence, fixing his eyes on some point which was then greatly gleaming upon the horizon. The horses were snorting; the men fell to singing with drowsy voices their matins.
Meanwhile it became clearer each moment, the heavens from pale became green and golden and that point on the horizon began so to shine that Kmita’s eyes were dazzled by its glitter. The men ceased their singing and all gazed in that direction, at last Soroka said—
“A miracle or what?—That is the west, and it is as if the sun were rising.”
In fact, that light, increased in the eyes: from a point it became a ball, from a ball a globe; from afar you would have said that someone had hung above the earth a giant star, which was scattering rays immeasurable.
Kmita and his men looked with amazement on
