Now were their souls quite melted within them by the volcanic enthusiasm of their host; their blood seethed hot, reason was almost giving way, their hearts were beating with the wildest frenzy. For them, every movement now seemed a dance, every cry a song, and every look a glance of ecstasy!
And so it went on all night long, and even till morning. But the day rose, dull and still: the rays of dawn appeared together with dense dreary masses of clouds. Ere the sun had risen, the world grew very dark and dismal. And then the snow came down: at first whirling, fluttering, scanty—as when the needles fall from pine-trees on a windy day; until it set to falling in earnest.
Then, as though coming through a sieve, the snow descended in perpendicular flakes, straight down, equally dealt out, monotonous, noiseless, covering roofs, trees, and hedges, and all the land, as with an enormous covering of white feathers.
The wedding was really at an end at last. True, they were to meet again at the tavern in the evening, “to wind up”; but for the present they decided to return home.
Only the bridesmen and bridesmaids, with the band to lead them, drew up in the porch and sang in unison a short song, in which, declaring themselves the devoted servants of the wedded couple, they wished them good night—in the morning!
It was then that Kuba laid his soul at the sacred feet of the Lord Jesus. …
Winter
I
Winter had come.
In the first days, it was but trying its strength—wrestling with the autumn, and howling far away in the livid distance, like some ravenous monster.
Now dawned those chilly glacial days, days of dismal and mournful dejection, lit with a dribbling feeble light; corpse-like days, when the birds flew away to the woods with cries of dread, and the waters babbled fearsomely, rolling sluggishly on, as if palsied by the terror of the cold; and the very countryside seemed to shudder, and all that was therein to look in awe towards the north and its unfathomable depths of clouds.
As yet the nights were as those in autumn, full of dreary sighs and soughs; sounds as of struggling, and sudden hushes; the howl of dogs; the cracking snaps of freezing timber; the sad voices of shelter-seeking birds; horrible calls from weird woodlands and crossways, invisible in the dark; and the beating of eerie wings, and shadows lurking beneath the walls of the stupefied cottagers.
At evening, from time to time, the huge crimson bulk of the setting sun would still peer out of the west, going down ponderously—a globe of molten iron, whence bloodred floods would gush forth, with smoke-like pitch-black vapours rising round them, looking like a grand and gloomy conflagration.
They said: “The winter is growing harder, and ill winds will be rising soon.”
And indeed the winter did grow harder—every day, every hour, every minute.
Directly after the fourth of December (the day of St. Barbara, patroness of a holy death), the first of the winter gales began blowing in short whiffling puffs. They skimmed along the ground, with a baying like that of hounds hot on a trail. They bit into the ploughed fields, snarled about the bushes, worried the snowdrifts, tore at the orchard boughs, swept along the highways, sniffed in the streams; and here and there, with but little ado, they ruined every thatch and fence that was in poor condition. After which they fled, still baying, away to the forest lands; and after them out of the dusk came the great winds on the very same evening, their long sharp tongues lolling out of their wheezy jaws.
All night they blew, howling across the fields like packs of famished wolves. They did their work well, too. Ere morning the stark hardened earth had been quite stripped of its tattered and scattered covering of snow; only in places, in hollows and ditches, could a few white rags be seen on the fences. The fields too had some shiny white spots left; but the roads lay frozen deep—as it were, petrified—and the frost had bitten profoundly into the soil with its keen fangs, so that it resounded with a metallic ring like iron. But with the morning, the gales fled to hide in the woods, where they lurked, tremulous and shuddering.
The sky, too, was now overcast, ever with darker clouds, which came creeping up out of every cavern, raising heads of monstrous size, stretching forth long lean flanks, throwing their grey manes to the winds, baring gigantic discoloured teeth, and coming on in mighty battalions.—From the north: black, huge, all shredded and tattered, piled in tiers, branching out like a score of overthrown forests, one upon the other, separated by deep chasms, and with—so it seemed—great streaks scattered over them of greenish ice, as it were: these rushed forward with wild might and a dull murmuring sound. From the west: those advanced slowly—livid, enormously swollen bulks, which in places shone bright as fire; and they rolled one after another, more and more persistent in their long advance, not unlike flocks of great birds. From the east came sailing flattened, rusty-hued masses of vapour, monotonously the same, and forbidding to the eye as mouldering carcasses that drip with tainted gore. From the south, too, were wafted ancient-looking clouds, reddish dark in hue, recalling clods of peat, striped and motley to see, though dingy and dull, as if vermin burrowed within them. There were also clouds floating on high, seeming to descend from the pale quenched orb of the sun, and forming dingy wisps, or spreading out in manifold tints, as embers that are dying. And they all came forward, built up mountains of prodigious height, and concealed all the sky under a black seething flood of squalor and grime.
The whole land had suddenly turned to darkness; a dull silence
