With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz (big ebook reader .txt) 📕

Lithuanian!” cried Zagloba. “Am I not right in making fun of him, since he doesn’t know human speech? What did you wish to say? You circle round and round, like a rabbit about her nest, but cannot come to a point.”

“What did you really hear?” asked Skshetuski.

“Well, since for that⁠—they say that the prince has shed too much blood. He is a great leader, but knows no measure in punishment, and now sees, it seems, everything red⁠—red in the daytime, red at night, as if a red cloud were surrounding him⁠—”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” shouted Zatsvilikhovski, with rage. “Those are old wives’ tales. There was no better master for the rabble in time of peace; and as to his knowing no mercy for rebels⁠—well, what of that? That is a merit, not an offence. What torments, what punishments, would be too great for those who have deluged the country in blood, who have given their own people captive to Tartars, who know neither God, king, country, nor authorities? Where will you show me such monsters as they, where such cruelties as they have perpetrated on women and little children? Where can you find such criminal wretches? For them the empaling stake and the gallows are too much. Tfu, tfu! You have an iron hand, but a woman’s heart. I saw how you whined, when they were burning Pulyan, that you would rather have killed him on the spot. But the prince is no old woman; he knows how to reward and how to punish. What is the use of telling me such nonsense?”

“But I have said, father, that I don’t know,” explained Pan Longin.

The old man puffed for a long time yet, and smoothing his milk-white hair, muttered: “Red, h’m! red⁠—that’s news. In the head of him who invented that it is green, and not red!”

A moment of silence followed, but through the windows came the uproar of the revelling nobles. Little Volodyovski broke the silence reigning in the room.

“Well, father, what do you think can be the matter with our prince?”

“H’m!” said the old man, “I am not his confidant, therefore I do not know. He is thinking of something, he is struggling with himself⁠—a hot battle of some kind⁠—it cannot be otherwise; and the greater the soul, the fiercer the torture.”

The old knight was not mistaken; for in that same hour the prince, the leader, the conqueror, lay in the dust in his own quarters, before the crucifix, and was fighting one of the most desperate battles of his life.

The guards at the castle of Zbaraj called out midnight, but Yeremi was still conversing with God and with his own lofty soul. Reason, conscience, love of country, pride, perception of his own power and great destiny, were turned into combatants within his breast, and fought a stubborn battle with one another, from which his breast was bursting, his head was bursting, and pain contorted all his limbs. Now, in spite of the primate, the chancellor, the senate, the generals, against the will of the government, the regular soldiers, the nobles, the foreign troops in private service, were going over to that conqueror⁠—in one word, the whole Commonwealth was placing itself in his hands, taking refuge under his wings, committing its fortune to his genius, and in the person of its choicest sons was crying: “Save, for you alone can save!” In one month or in two there will be at Zbaraj one hundred thousand warriors, ready for a struggle to the death with the serpent of civil war. Here pictures of a future surrounded with light immeasurable, of glory and power, began to pass before the eyes of the prince. Those who wished to pass him by and subdue him are trembling, and he takes those iron legions and leads them into the steppes of the Ukraine, to victories and triumphs such as history has not yet known. The prince feels in himself corresponding power, and from his shoulders wings shoot forth like the wings of the archangel Michael. And at that moment he turns into such a giant that the whole castle, all Zbaraj, all Russia, cannot contain him. As God lives, he will rub out Hmelnitski, he will trample the rebellion, he will bring back peace to the fatherland! He sees extended plains, legions of troops; he hears the roar of artillery. A battle! a battle! Victory unheard of, unparalleled! Legions of bodies, hundreds of banners, cover the bloodstained steppe, and he tramples on the body of Hmelnitski, and the trumpets sound victory, and that sound flies from sea to sea. The prince rises, rushes up, extends his hands to Christ, around whose head is a mild purple light. “Oh, Christ, Christ!” he cries, “thou knowest, thou seest that I can; tell me that I should do this.”

But Christ hung his head on his breast, and was as silent, as sorrowful as if he had been crucified the moment before.

“To thee be the praise!” cried the prince. “Non mihi, non mihi, sed nomini tuo da gloriam! To the glory of the faith of the Church and of all Christianity! Oh, Christ, Christ!” And a new image opened before the eyes of the hero. That career was not ended by the victory over Hmelnitski. The prince, having destroyed the rebellion, grows strong on its body. He becomes gigantic in power. Legions of Cossacks are joined to legions of Poles, and he goes farther⁠—strikes the Crimea, reaches the terrible dragon in his den; he erects the cross where hitherto bells had never called the faithful to prayer. He will go also to those lands which the princes Vishnyevetski have already trampled with the hoofs of their horses, and will extend the boundaries of the Commonwealth, and with them the Church, to the remotest corners of the earth. Where then is the limit to this impetus, where the bounds to this glory, power, and strength? There are none whatever.

The pale light of the moon falls into the chamber