He answered not a word, nor did he indeed feel any resentment now; for the time, all bitterness had left him. He plodded on slowly through the darkness, stopping at times to look around him on the village, bright with many a lighted window, at which, and at the lowly huts that rose on every side, he gazed in bewilderment, as though he had never seen them before. In those hedgerows, those orchards, those lights, resided a strange spell, which somehow chained him to the spot. It was incomprehensible, but he experienced a resistless power that had seized hold of him and bound him to the land—which made him bow his neck to the yoke, and filled him with an inexplicable dread.
He eyed those lamplit windows, and terror possessed his soul. They were all watching him, he thought; they were peering at him, following him, to fetter and enslave him with adamantine chains. He was no longer able to flee, nor to move, nor to cry out. He leaned back against a tree; and there, crushed with anguish, he listened … and heard—from all the homesteads, the shadows around them, the fields, nay, even the heavens themselves—those same words of pitiless condemnation, now ratified by the whole population of Lipka!
“It is just! it is just!” he said, huskily, humbled to the dust, and from the inmost depths of his miserable heart, struck with mortal fear of that almighty Power—the Voice of the Many.
By degrees all the lights went out, and the village fell asleep. It drizzled still, and drops pattered from the drooping trees. Occasionally a dog would utter a short bark, in the midst of the stillness that reigned everywhere. Then Antek, returning to complete consciousness, suddenly started to his feet.
“Yes, he spoke justly; he said the truth as it was in him. But I will not let the other go scot-free—not I! Blood of a dog! whatever happens, he shall pay!”
His words were a frenzied shriek, and he shook his fist at Lipka and at the whole world.
Settling his cap on his head, he made again for the tavern.
XIII
Spring was drawing nigh. March had come, with its own most foul weather—quagmiry, chilly, foggy; with its daily falls of sleet, its daily thick, shaggy, dingy mists, creeping along over the fields, and quenching all light so thoroughly that the whole day, from grey dawn to dusky twilight, was equally dark. Or, if at rare intervals the sun peered, half drowned, out of those sombre abysses, it was but for the space of one Ave Maria; and ere one’s soul could rejoice in the splendour, one’s body in the warmth of it, down came the dusk once more upon the world, down swept the winds afresh, and the “fog and filthy air” resumed their reign.
Folk were sorely troubled at this, for they had lived in hope that, after a week or two, spring would get the upper hand and make amends for all they had suffered. And, meantime, the roofs let the rain in, the water came through walls and windows, and poured on every side. In despair they saw it creep in from the fields, fill all the ditches even to brimming over, make the roads gleam and glitter like waterways, come round through the hedgerows, and stand about the farmyards in deep miry pools. And as the snow continued to melt and the rain to fall, the thawed ground soon softened to such a degree that in many farmyards there were mud-pits without number at noontide, and folk had to lay boards outside the huts, or bridge the approaches with trusses of straw.
Nor were the nights less unbearable, with their downpours and their black darkness—so thick that one might fancy light had gone out forever. Few lit fires in the evening: weary of the wretched weather, all went to bed at nightfall—and Lipka was in palpable obscurity. True, in a few huts they assembled to spin: there the windows gleamed, and the low chant of the “Lamentations” quavered, together with other mournful hymns on the sufferings of Jesus. They were accompanied by the blasts, the pattering rain, and the trees lashing one against the other through the enclosures.
No wonder if Lipka was lost in this sea of slush: the huts were so lowly, they scarce rose out of the ground where they crouched, dank, dingy, wretched to look upon. And, as to the lands and gardens and roads and sky, there was so much water everywhere that no one could distinguish anything from anything else.
The weather was bleak, besides; it chilled the very bones, and few cared to meet it. The blasts blew, the rain pattered, the trees rocked in a solitude; for all the voices heard, Lipka might as well have been a place of the dead. Only the cattle lowed sometimes over their empty mangers; or cocks fell a-crowing; or ganders, parted from their brooding mates, would cry aloud and indignantly.
The days were longer; but this only made the time hang more heavily on people’s hands. No one had any work to do, except the few who laboured at the sawmill or carried timber for the miller from the forest. The others lounged about the cabins, sitting at their neighbours’ till the day dragged on to its close. Some of the older men took to getting ploughs, or harrows, or other such implements, ready for spring; but the work went on slowly and lifelessly, all being equally exasperated by the foul weather. And troubled at heart, besides; for the lands sown in autumn were in a pitiful state; and—especially in the low-lying fields—parts of the crops were frozen. Some of the farmers, too, were getting to the end of their provender, and famine was looking in at the byres. Others had found that all their stock of potatoes was frost-nipped. Others, again, had their huts full of sick folk; and for many the days of starvation which often usher
