For the Right

by Karl Emil Franzos

CHAPTER XXI.

["VENGEANCE IS MINE."]

It was a sad, humble funeral. The blasts of October moaned in the valley, and the rain hissed and wept. For which reason the villagers preferred to remain indoors when the little bell called them early in the morning to attend the body to its resting-place, the charitable among them murmuring a prayer for the dead. "She needs it," they said, "having laid hands on herself!" For which reason, also, the judge and the elders had insisted that she must be buried by the outer wall of the cemetery, although the honest pope had tried his utmost to show them that the girl deserved their pity, even their admiration, rather than their contempt. But the villagers clung to their opinion, and all the priest could do was to take care that she should be buried with full church honours. If no one else were willing he, at least, would consign her to her grave reverently. He appeared at the mortuary chapel soon after eight o'clock, followed by some half-dozen mourners, and started back dismayed on beholding a band of armed and wild-looking men, evidently waiting for the funeral. But he proceeded with his sacred duly bravely, and felt touched not a little on perceiving how fervently these ill-famed outlaws joined in the prayer he offered up by the grave.

Having ended, Taras came forward, begging him to read three masses for the maiden they had buried. He promised, but refused the money the captain was offering him.

"You may take it without fear," said Taras, smiling sadly, "it is honestly acquired--we rob no man."

The priest gave a searching glance in the face before him, which looked old and anguished with the burden of sorrow this man had borne. "I believe you," he said, "but permit me to do a good work for this poor girl without taking reward."

Taras made no answer, but bowing low, he kissed the priest's hand reverently. The good man, seeing him so deeply moved, took courage to whisper a word urged by his deepest heart. "You poor, misguided man," he said, gently, "how long will you go on like this?"

"As long as there is need for it," said Taras, in a tone equally low, but none the less firm and decided. "I have been kept from wrong so far, but I see much of it about me."

The pope could but shake his head mournfully, and went his way. Taras and his men remaining yet a while in the cemetery to say their prayers by the newly-made grave. Nashko only stood aside, gazing at them fixedly, and his eyes glowed with a terrible fire.

But a pitiful scene awaited these men on leaving the graveyard--the old innkeeper and his wife standing without, weeping and sobbing; forbidden by the strictness of their faith to pass within an enclosure at the entrance of which there was a crucifix, they had abstained from coming nearer, but from a distance had endeavoured to do honour to the dead after their own fashion.

Taras went up to the old Jew. "You have done what you could," he said, "and we thank you."

"What is the use of making words," cried Froïm, passionately. "I know I have done what I could, but I could not save her! I'm a poor old Jew, but you are a strong, hale Christian, and if I were you I'd make the rascal rue it dearly."

"This is the very thing I am going to do," returned Taras, quietly. "I shall go straight to the Black Water to accuse him to his father. And if Hilarion will not bring him to due punishment, I shall do so."

And the band mounted, turning their horses' heads westwards, towards the towering peaks of the Czernahora. They stopped for the night at the hamlet of Magura, reaching the settlement early the following day.

The patriarch appeared to have expected them, for his eldest son made haste to invite Taras into his sire's presence, Hilarion receiving him with the same dignified complacency with which he had parted from him the week before. "You have come to call for justice against that young son of mine; but I have anticipated it, and punished him as he deserves."

"And what is his punishment?" inquired Taras.

"I have sent him to a distant pasture, where he will have to stay till I give him leave to return, and I shall take good care not to do so before the spring. This will furnish him with leisure to consider his folly."

"Folly!" exclaimed Taras, bitterly.

"Yes, folly!" repeated the patriarch, pointedly. "Was she the only pretty girl to be had? He ought to have seen that Tatiana had no taste for him, but his vanity blinded him; it was sheer folly."

"But I call it a crime," cried Taras, hotly; "a mean, dastardly crime!"

The old man nodded. "I expected to hear you say this," he said calmly; "but you are wronging the youth. You must bear in mind that he is a Huzul. And, besides, how should he have foreseen that the girl would drown herself? I suppose that even in the lowlands suicide for such a reason is rarely heard of; but up here, I swear to you, such desperation in a girl is utterly unknown. If you will bear this in mind, you cannot accuse him of anything worse than folly."

"It was a dastardly crime," repeated Taras. "A man acting thus by a poor defenceless girl dishonours himself, and ought to be dealt with accordingly."

"Do you expect me to understand that I should order my son to have his hair cut off as a sign that he is no longer fit for the society of the brave and honourable of his kind?"

"I do," replied Taras, fiercely; "I even demand it. And if you refuse, I must carry out the punishment myself."

There was a long pause of silence. Taras stood erect, fully expecting to meet with the old man's indignant denial. But Hilarion preserved an unperturbed calm, closing his eyes as one in deep thought. Now and then he would nod his head like one arriving at a conclusion, and presently he touched a small gong by his side. His eldest son entered. "Call hither the clansmen, young and old, as many of them as are about the settlement, and request the followers of this man also to enter my house. Let all hear my decision."

The spacious room presently began to fill, the Huzuls thronging in first, Taras's men following. And when silence had settled the aged patriarch again nodded to himself, and thereupon he rose from his seat, holding in his hand an intertwining twig of willow--for Taras had interrupted some quiet occupation of his--and with solemn voice he began:

"Listen to me, ye men of my people, for I, Hilarion, called the Just, to whom you look for guidance, have cause to speak to you. Mark it well, and tell others if need be ... You all were present when this man of the lowlands, Taras, whom they call the avenger, first came to me; and you know how I received him. You witnessed our solemn covenant; how we swore friendship to one another, not only for to-day or to-morrow, but partaking of each other's blood as a sign that it shall never be broken while the red life-stream pulses through our veins. I have kept this sacred vow; but he just now has wronged it grievously, casting insult, nay, shame, on me by insisting that a member of my own house shall be punished, not because I say so, but because he wills it, and threatening that he himself will carry out such punishment if I fail to do so. It is my own flesh and blood, even my youngest son Julko, whom he will have dishonoured."

A cry of indignation burst from the Huzuls, and they turned upon Taras.

"Silence!" commanded the old man. "I have called you to hear what I have to say, and for nothing else.... But what I say is this: a man who can thus insult me no longer can be my friend and brother." He held up the twig in his hand. "He and I have been as this branch of willow, closely intertwined; but henceforth we are severed, and there is nought to heal the disruption!" He broke the twig, casting the parts from him, one to his right and one to his left.

"Urrahah!" shouted the Huzuls; but again the patriarch enforced silence, and, turning to Taras, he said:

"You are no longer my friend, but a man who has offered me deadly insult; yet the sacred law of our fathers lays it upon me never to forget that we partook of one another's blood! I therefore may not, and will not, have recourse to active enmity beyond what you yourself will force me to by further affront. It were sufficient affront, however, if a man who has acted as you have done should continue to insult me by his presence! For which reason I banish you from this settlement, and from these mountains, to the extent of my authority. You will leave the settlement at once, withdrawing from my reach within these mountains in three days. And let me warn you that none of you shall ever see the lowlands again if, after this, you dare brave the presence of my people. It is not on my son's account that I thus threaten you, for I shall take care to inform him of your intentions, putting him on his guard, and the Huzul lives not who fears his enemy when once he knows him! It is not in order to protect him, therefore, that I have said this, but simply because you have so deserved it. And now be gone!"

"I go," replied Taras; "but I call God and all here present to witness that you are disgracing yourself and me. I will not avenge it, for I also will remember the friendship we had sworn. But as for your son Julko, I shall know how to find him and visit his wrong on him, like any other evildoer."

The fury of the Huzuls knew no bounds, and Taras would have been lost had the aged Hilarion himself not stepped between him and the indignant clansmen, enabling him and his followers to leave the house and mount their horses, the wild cries of their hitherto confederates pursuing them as they rode away.

It was a sad departure, and with heavy hearts the little band returned through the dreary landscape to the hamlet of Magura. What should they do now, and whither turn their steps? Dark and gloomy lay the future before them, but none of the men uttered a word of complaint.

Having reached the hamlet and seen to their horses' needs, Taras gathered his men about him.

"I would not for a moment delude you with fair speeches," he said; "you know for yourselves how matters stand. Just answer me one question: Will you stay with me, or go your way? I could not upbraid any one whose courage failed him to continue this life of ours. It has been full of hardships hitherto; it will be almost unendurable now that the Huzuls also are against us."

"Tell us about yourself, hetman," said Wassilj Soklewicz; "what are you going to do?"

"I must continue to the end," replied Taras; "it is not for me to fail in my duty, even if you all forsake me. I shall endeavour to win other followers."

"Is it thus?" cried the faithful youth; "then we will share your fate!" All the rest of them crying in chorus, "We will not forsake you!"

"I dare not dissuade you," said Taras, "it is not I, but the cause which claims your fealty!... Now the next question is, where shall we encamp ourselves? In the lowlands the military are on the look-out for us, and here we are in danger of the Huzuls. I propose we retire to our island fortress in the Wallachian bog. By the Crystal Springs, or indeed anywhere within the mountains the Huzuls would rout us out; I know them better even than you can know them. They were true to us while they were friends, they will be intense in their hatred now they are our enemies. But we are safe from them on that island, where we have the advantage, moreover, of being in the very midst of the country we would rid from oppression, and in a hiding-place we could hold against almost any odds. I do not deceive myself concerning the danger even there, but I know no better place."

They resolved, then, to venture into the lowlands the following morning, after which these homeless outcasts lay down by their horses, sleeping as calmly as though they had found rest by their own firesides knowing nothing of the dread burdens of life.

Two only were awake--Nashko, keeping watch outside the hamlet, and Taras, tossing on the bundle of straw that formed his couch. Sleep was far from the unhappy man, much as he longed for it; indeed it had but rarely come to him since that terrible hour, that last meeting in this very place, separating him for ever from wife and child. Alas! and what nameless agony tortured him in those hours that seemed an eternity to the sore heart within! It was then he heard those voices that would not be silenced, of regret not only concerning the lost happiness of his life, but of a far more terrible regret--of awful accusation, much as he fought against it when daylight and activity returned. The night winds moaned, sounding to him like the blending curses of a hundred voices, the never-silent reproaches of all those whom he had brought to their doom. And when he succeeded for a moment in turning his back upon the irredeemable past, fixing his relentless gaze on the life before him, the life he would have to tread, what was it but a glaring reality, a fearful outcome of the shadows behind?

He was glad of the first streak of daylight stealing into the barn, and, rising from his troubled rest, he went out into the cold grey morning, seeking the Jew, who walked to and fro at his post looking pale and wan like a belated ghost. He nodded sadly on beholding his friend.

"We shall not be able to mount for a couple of hours yet," said Taras. "Turn in now, and have a rest."

"I could not sleep," replied Nashko, "but I am stiff with the cold, and could scarcely ride without first stretching my limbs on the straw." And, handing him his gun, he went away.

Taras walked up and down, slowly at first, till the nipping cold forced him to a quicker pace. It was as dismal a morning of late autumn as could well be imagined. Cutting gusts of east wind kept hissing through the narrow valley, rattling in the gloomy fir-wood, and having their own cold play with the whirling snow-flakes. The sun must have risen by that time, but it was nowhere to be seen; a pale, cheerless light only, descending from the snow-capped mountains, showed the muddy road and its windings, with a look of hopelessness about it. Not a living creature anywhere, not a sound of animated being beyond the croaking of a solitary raven on a fir-tree near.

The unhappy man cast a listless glance at the dismal prophet. The raven is looked upon as a bird of ill-omen, but what of trouble yet untasted could its call forebode? Death? Nay, for would he not have welcomed it gladly! And yet, though he seemed to know the very sum of human suffering laid upon him by a terrible fate, even by his own awful will, there was an agony approaching him that very morning, the direst possibility of grief for his heart and soul, and that cheerless day was to be the saddest of all his sad life....

An hour might have passed, but daylight seemed as far off as ever, and the wind continued its play with the whirling snow-flakes, so that Taras did not perceive the approach of a horseman, who was fighting his way hither from Zabie, till he pulled up close by the hamlet. It was a puny, elderly figure, ill-at-ease evidently on his miserable horse, and shivering with the cold; for though his garment was bedizened abundantly with gaudy ribands and glittering tinsel, there was not a scrap of fur to yield comfort, his queer head-gear, a tricoloured fool's cap, being fully in keeping with his tawdry appearance. On his back, by a leathern strap, he carried--not a gun to betoken the mountaineer--but a wooden case, from which protruded the neck of a violin. Taras examined this strange horseman with not a little wonder, concluding presently that it was some sort of a mountebank seen about the village fairs in the lowlands, where they pick up a scanty living, now playing the fiddle, now performing some jugglery. But what gain might this artist be seeking in the wintry mountains?

"What a mercy," cried the horseman, "to fall in with a living creature at last! How long shall I have to struggle on, tell me, before reaching the Dembronia Forest?"

"What on earth do you want there?" asked Taras, surprised. "You would find only wolves to make merry at your bidding, if that is it--why, the forest is utterly uninhabited!"

"Then I am better informed than you," retorted the fiddler; "the avenger and his band are in the forest, if no one else is."

"Do you want him?"

"To be sure, and badly! The poor wretch of a girl, I believe, would claw my eyes out if I did not fetch him as I promised."

"What girl? But you may save yourself farther trouble--I am the avenger."

"You!" cried the man, crossing himself quickly. But coming a little closer, he peered with a half-fearful curiosity into the hetman's sorrowful face. "You might be he, certainly," he muttered; "you look exactly as they told me, and poor Kasia said I could not possibly mistake the terrible gloom on your face. I suppose I had better believe you, and you must come with me, else that wretched girl will die of her remorse."

"What girl? what is it? Where am I wanted? Do speak plainly!"

"At the inn at Zabie. She'd have come to you instead of asking you to come to her--I mean Kasia, my sister's daughter--she says it is killing her, and she must not die without telling you."

"Telling me what? Has she any complaints to make against any wrong-doer?"

"No; she has done that once too often already, and is grievously sorry for it now. It is not you, though, who are to blame--nor in fact, is she, poor thing--but her sweetheart, Jacek, that good-for-nothing rascal; if you can pay him out for it, 'twere well if you did. For it was a damned lie, all that story at Borsowka----"

"At Borsowka?'" exclaimed Taras, staggering. "At Borsowka!" he repeated hoarsely. And clutching the fiddler with his strong hand, he dragged him from the saddle and shook him till the poor creature gasped for breath. "Speak the truth!... Is it that Marinia who sent you?"

"You are strangling me! Help!" groaned the fiddler. "It is not my fault ... help!... murder!"

At this moment Nashko, who had heard the cry, came out, followed by the others.

"What is it?" they inquired, and the Jew, taking in the situation, endeavoured to free the agonised messenger from the captain's powerful grasp.

"Aren't you rather hard on him?" he whispered to his friend. "What has he come for?"

But Taras, letting go his hold, stared about him like one demented, and a shriek burst from him--"A horse! for God's sake, a horse!" His men moved not, utterly confounded. But he broke away, dragging a horse from the barn, the first he could lay hold on, and mounting it without saddle or bridle dashed away in the direction of Zabie as fast as the frightened animal could carry him.

Two hours later he stopped by the inn. The horse was done for. He cared not, but rushed up to old Froïm, who came to meet him. "Where is she?" he cried, wildly.

"Who? the sick woman?" inquired the innkeeper. "We made up a bed for her in the little lean-to."

Another minute and Taras stood by the couch. The girl had greatly changed since that terrible night. She looked as though she had passed through an illness, and her eyes were deep in their sockets. "Ah," she moaned, "you have come, and I may tell you. It has left me no peace day or night. I ran away from Jacek to look for my uncle Gregori, that he might try and find you, for he was always...."

"Be quick about it," interrupted Taras. "I want to know the truth!"

"Ah! do not look at me with those eyes," cried the unhappy girl, hiding her face in her hands, and indeed the man bending over her was fearful to behold. "I want to tell you ... I wish I had never done it, but they made me!"

"Be quick about it!" repeated Taras, hoarsely. "You are not Marinia Bertulak, and no peasant girl from Borsowka. Your name is Kasia, and you keep company with jugglers?"

"Yes, yes! I am Kasia Wywolow."

"And you lied to me in that night, all of you?"

"Yes, we did; the old baron only spoke the truth. The man who pretended to be my father was Jacek, with whom I have been going about to fairs; and the other one was a farm labourer, Dimitri Buliga, and not the village judge...."

"And why did you deceive me?"

"It was all Karol's doing. We, Jacek and I, fell in with him at the merry-making here at Zabie, and he talked us over; after which he went to Borsowka, where he bribed the coachman and prevailed on Dimitri to play the judge. He said he knew exactly how to set about it to make you believe the story ... he had an old grudge against the poor baron, who years ago brought him to punishment for theft. He stole away from you as soon as the deed was done, dividing the spoils with Jacek and Dimitri, who waited for him at Kotzman. But I suffered agony with remorse, and it brought me here."

"That will do," said Taras, faintly; "thank you." And he staggered from the room. The old innkeeper came upon him presently where he lay in a merciful swoon.

It was late in the afternoon when his men came after him, and with them the fiddler Gregori. They had not been able to gather the full truth from the bewildered messenger, but they had understood sufficiently to know that Karol Wygoda had deceived them shamefully, and it had filled their honest hearts with indignant grief. But pity for their unhappy leader was uppermost, for they felt rather than knew how fearfully the discovery must affect him; and since he had left no orders, they waited hour after hour, with growing anxiety, thinking he might return; and as he did not, they now came to seek him.

"Yes, he is here," said old Froïm, sorrowfully, in answer to Nashko's inquiry, "and I think he is seriously ill. I do not know what that young woman may have told him," he added under his breath, "but it must have been something very awful; for he fainted right out, and when I had managed to bring him to again, he just said: 'I must go my way to the gallows now,' and never another word has crossed his lips. I have tried to rouse him, but he is like a stone, staring blankly; it could not be worse if he had buried wife and child. I have spoken to him, I have implored him, but not a sign is to be got from him. Will you try it?--he may yield to your words."

Nashko told his companions what the old Jew had said, and they all agreed. "Try and rouse him," they said, "tell him that to us he is as noble and just as before. How should he, how should we, in God's eyes, be guilty of this blackguard Karol's wickedness!"

Nashko took heart and entered the little room, where Froïm had prepared a couch for the stricken hetman, but he was unable to deliver the men's message. For no sooner had he closed the door than Taras turned to him, saying huskily, but firmly: "Please leave me to myself till to-morrow morning; I must think it over; not for my own sake, for I know what I have to do, but for yours--I would like to counsel each of you for the best I can hardly collect my thoughts as yet, it is as though I had been struck with lightning. Let me come to myself first. I daresay Froïm will find a night's lodging for you; and to-morrow--yes, to-morrow morning when the day has risen, I will see you." Taras seemed fully determined, and Nashko could but yield.

The following day early, when the men had gathered in the great empty bar-room, Taras came among them. They had not seen him for a space of four-and-twenty hours, but the havoc wrought in his appearance seemed the work of years. He was fearfully altered, looking like an old man now, overcome with life's distress.

"Dear friends," he said, speaking very calmly and kindly, "I pray you listen to me, but do not try to turn me from my firm resolve. I release you one and all from the fealty you have sworn to me. I am your leader no longer. Please God, this will be the last time that you will see me; I have prayed to Him earnestly to let my life and the yielding up of its every hope be sufficient atonement. Yes, I have pleaded with Him in mercy to let your ways be far from mine; for the path I have to tread will now take me to Colomea, to prison, and thence to the final doom."

A cry of horror interrupted him. "For God's sake," they cried, "what is it that has come to you?"

"Not thus, if you love me," he said, gently, warding them off. "I have followed the voice of my own heart so far, let me follow it still. That voice has deceived me hitherto, leading me to misery and crime; it is speaking well this day for the first time! Yet, be very sure, I was not wrong in saying that the plain will of God required Right and Justice to be upheld in this world; not wrong in accusing those of their shortcomings whose sacred duty it is to see that justice rules here below, but who do not carry out this duty to its fullest, holiest meaning. My mistake was this, that I fancied this unfulfilled duty could by the will of God devolve upon me or any other individual man. To be sure I who sacrificed all earthly happiness at the shrine of justice, who became a murderer in blind love of the right, and now go to the gallows--I most not be unjust, not even against myself, and therefore I say it was a natural mistake. For what more natural than to argue: Since they will not guard the right whose bounden duty it is, I will do so, who am strong at heart and pure of purpose! But, nevertheless, it was a grievous mistake. I see it now. I still believe in that grand, holy ladder of His making which is intended to join earth to heaven; but plainly it is not His will, even if some of its steps at times be rotten, that any single man should take upon himself to make up in his own poor strength for any failings in that glorious institution for working out the divine will. It were proud, sinful presumption in any man, and I have done evil in His sight, not merely in disregarding what mischief must accrue if others followed my example, but chiefly on account of the awful delusion that I was above erring, and that my judgments must needs be just! And how did I come to imagine this? Because I chose to believe that the Almighty must keep me from foiling--me, His servant, the righteous, justice-loving Taras. It was just my pride! The magistrates, the courts, might err, but I never! And yet how great is the danger if the carrying out of justice be vested in any individual man!--the work I have undertaken could not but end like this! I believed I was doing right, and I have been utterly confounded. The Baron of Borsowka was a righteous man, and I, who presumed to judge him, have been his murderer."

"But that was not your fault; you were deceived by Karol!" they cried.

"I was," replied Taras; "yet the guilt rests with me for not examining into the charge more carefully. Why did I refuse his urgent request to send for witnesses to the village? I am his murderer. I, and no one else; and since I have judged falsely in his case, how can I be sure that I have not done so in others? But, be that as it may, I am an assassin, and it behoves me to expiate my crime, submitting to those whom God has called to judge any evildoer in the land. I am going to Colomea to give myself up."

Vainly they strove to turn him from his resolve. He kept repeating: "I follow the voice within, and it has begun to speak truth." With heavy hearts they perceived it was utterly useless to plead with him, and listened to his last farewell. He enjoined them to separate at once and to begin a new life each for himself in different parts of the country. He had a word of sympathy, of advice for each. "Forty florins are still in my possession," he added, producing the sum; "it is all I have left of the money contributed by honest peasants towards my work. Take it and divide it fairly. Let it be the same with the proceeds of your arms and horses."

And he took leave of them, of each man separately, the Jew being last. "Nashko," he said, "I have yet a request to make of you. You love me, I know, and I am about to die. Will you grant it?"

"Surely," said the Jew, with tear-stifled voice.

"I know your intentions with regard to Julko," said Taras, "and I know the reason.... But I ask you to forbear, and to leave these mountains without bringing him to his due."

"The thought of revenge was sweet," said the Jew, "but I will do your desire."

"Whither will you betake yourself?" asked Taras. "I was able to advise them all, but I know not what to say to you; besides, your judgment is better than mine."

"I shall go away--far, far away," said Nashko. "I have heard that in following the sun through many lands you reach the wide sea at last, and crossing the sea you reach a country where a man is a man, and no one inquires into his creed. I shall try for that country, and if so be that I get there----"

"God speed you!" said Taras, deeply moved, "for your heart is honest and you have been true to me. So have you all: the Almighty watch over your lives!"

He left the room and, seeking his horse, he sped away from his friends towards the lowlands, vanishing from their gaze.