At the Mass, when with uplifted arms he turned from the altar to the people, in order to pronounce, “The Lord be with you,” he often turned as skilfully—with a [pg 33] single movement—as if he were executing a right-about-face at the command of his captain; and he pronounced the words of the liturgy to the people in the same tone as an officer standing before a squadron: the boys who served him at the mass remarked this. Robak was also better versed in political affairs than in the lives of the saints; and when he was riding about gathering alms he often tarried in the district town. He had a multitude of interests: now he received letters, which he never opened in the presence of strangers; now he sent off messengers, but whither and for what he did not say; often he stole out by night to the squires' mansions, and continually whispered with the gentry; he trudged through all the neighbouring villages, and in the taverns talked not a little with the village boors, and always of what was going on in foreign lands. Now he came to arouse the Judge, who had already been an hour asleep; surely he had some tidings.
BOOK II.—THE CASTLE
ARGUMENT
Hunting the hare with hounds—A guest in the castle—The last of the retainers tells the story of the last of the Horeszkos—A glance into the garden—The girl among the cucumbers—Breakfast—Pani Telimena's St. Petersburg story—New outbreak of the quarrel over Bobtail and Falcon—The intervention of Robak—The Seneschal's speech—The wager—Off for mushrooms.
Who among us does not remember the years when, as a young lad, with his gun on his shoulder, he went whistling into the fields, where no rampart, no fence blocked his path; where, when you overstepped a boundary strip, you did not recognise it as belonging to another! For in Lithuania a hunter is like a ship upon the sea; wherever he will, and by whatever path he will, he roams far and wide! Like a prophet he gazes on the sky, where in the clouds there are many signs that the hunter's eye can see; or like an enchanter he talks with the earth, which, though deaf to city-dwellers, whispers into his ear with a multitude of voices.
There a land rail calls from the meadow—it is vain to seek it, for it flees away through the grass like a pike in the Niemen; there above your head sounds the bell of early spring, the lark, hidden as deeply in the sky; there an eagle rustles with its broad wings through the airy heights, spreading terror among sparrows as a comet among stars; or a hawk, hanging beneath the [pg 35] clear blue vault, flutters its wings like a butterfly impaled on a pin, until, catching sight in the meadow of a bird or a hare, it swoops upon it from on high like a falling star.
When will the Lord God permit us to return from our wanderings, and again to dwell upon our ancestral fields, and to serve in the cavalry that makes war on rabbits, or in the infantry that bears arms against birds; to know no other weapons than the scythe and the sickle, and no other gazettes than the household accounts!
Over Soplicowo arose the sun, and it already fell on the thatched roofs, and through the chinks stole into the stable; and over the fresh, dark-green, fragrant hay of which the young men had made them a bed there streamed twinkling, golden bands from the openings of the black thatch, like ribbons from a braid of hair; and the sun teased the faces of the sleepers with its morning beams, like a village girl awakening her sweetheart with an ear of wheat. Already the sparrows had begun to hop and twitter beneath the thatch, already the gander had cackled thrice, and after it, as an echo, the ducks and turkeys resounded in chorus, and one could hear the bellowing of the kine on their way to the fields.