In this storm of feelings, like an anchor of rest there suddenly flashed upon him the thought of the duel. “I must slay the Count, the scoundrel!” he cried, “I must perish or be avenged!” But for what? That he did not know himself. And that great burst of anger, as it had come over him in the twinkling of an eye, so it vanished away; he was seized anew by a deep sadness. He meditated whether his observation might not be true, that the Count and Zosia had some mutual understanding. “And what of that? Perhaps the Count sincerely loves Zosia; perhaps she loves him, and will choose him for her husband! By what right could I desire to break off that marriage; and, unhappy myself, to destroy the happiness of every one?”
He fell into despair and saw no other means except speedy flight. Whither? To the grave!
So, pressing his fist against his bent brow, he ran to the meadows, where, below, the ponds glittered, and took his stand above the one with marshy banks; in its greenish depths he buried his greedy gaze and drew into his breast with joy the swampy odours, and opened his lips to them; for suicide, like all wild passions, springs from the imagination: in the giddy whirling [pg 214] of his brain he felt an unspeakable longing to drown himself in the swamp.
But Telimena, guessing the young man's despair from his wild gestures, and seeing that he had run towards the ponds, although she burned with such just wrath against him, was nevertheless alarmed; in reality she had a kind heart. She had felt sorrow that Thaddeus dared to love another; she had wished to punish him, but she had not thought of destroying him. So she rushed after him, raising both her arms and crying: “Stop! What folly! Love me or not! Get married or depart! Only stop!——” But in his swift course he had far outstripped her; he already—was standing at the shore!
By a strange decree of fate, along that same shore was riding the Count, at the head of his band of jockeys; and, carried away by the charm of so fair a night, and by the marvellous harmony of that subaqueous orchestra, of those choruses that rang like Æolian harps (for no frogs sing so beautifully as those of Poland), he checked his horse and forgot about his expedition. He turned his ear to the pond and listened curiously; he ran his eyes over the fields, over the expanse of the heavens: he was evidently composing in his thoughts a nocturnal landscape.
In very truth, the neighbourhood was picturesque! The two ponds inclined their faces towards each other like a pair of lovers. The right pond had waters smooth and pure as a maiden's cheeks; the left was somewhat darker, like the swarthy face of a youth, already shaded with manly down. The right was encircled with glittering golden sand as if with bright hair; but the brow of the left bristled with osiers, and was tufted with [pg 215] willows: both ponds were clothed in a garment of green.
From them there flowed and met two streams, like hands clasped together: farther on the stream formed a waterfall; it fell, but did not perish, for into the darkness of the ravine it bore upon its waves the golden shimmer of the moon. The water fell in sheets, and on every sheet glittered skeins of moonbeams; the light in the ravine was dispersed into fine splinters, which the fleeing flood seized and carried off below, but from on high the moonbeams fell in fresh skeins. You might have thought that by the pond a nixie[157] was sitting, and with one hand was pouring forth a fountain from a bottomless urn, while with the other she cast sportively into the water handfuls of enchanted gold that she took from her apron.
Farther on, the brook, running out from the ravine, wound over the plain, and became quiet, but one could see that it still flowed, for along its moving, shimmering surface the quivering moonlight twinkled. As the fair serpent of Zmudz called giwojtos, though, lying amid the heather, it seems to slumber, still crawls along, for by turns it shows silver and golden, until it suddenly vanishes from the eye in the moss or ferns; so the brook wound and hid among the alders, which showed black on the far horizon, raising their light forms, indistinct to the eye, like spirits half seen and half in mist.
Between the ponds in the ravine a mill was hidden. As an old guardian who is spying on two lovers and has heard their talk together, grows angry, storms, shakes his head and hands and stutters out threats against them; so that mill suddenly shook its brow overgrown with moss and twirled around its many-fingered fist: [pg 216] hardly had it begun to clatter and stir its sharp-toothed jaws, when at the same moment it deafened the love talk of the ponds, and awoke the Count.
The Count, seeing that Thaddeus had approached so near the spot where he had halted under arms, shouted: “To arms! Seize him!” The jockeys rushed forward, and, before Thaddeus could comprehend what was happening to him, they had already caught him; they ran towards the mansion and poured into the yard. The mansion awoke, the dogs barked, the watchmen shouted, the Judge rushed out half clad; he saw the armed throng and thought that they were robbers until he recognised the Count. “What does this mean?” he asked. The Count flashed his sword over him, but, when he saw that he was unarmed, his fury grew cool.