“Cease—cease—cowards all!” he shouted in a commanding tone of voice. “What persecution goes on here?”
“The man and the woman and boy are workers in magic, wizards and a witch,” said the leader roughly. “Keep your hands off, for we are admonishing them.”
“Wizards and witches—fiddlesticks!” shouted the newcomer, pulling himself up in the wagon until he stood beside Pan Andrew. “This is but an excuse for some such deed of violence as this city has seen too much of in the past twelve months. To attack an honest man—for to any but a blind man he appears as honest—a weak woman, and a defenseless boy—Cowards all, I say! Disperse, or I will call the King’s guards to disperse you.”
“It is Jan Kanty himself,” said one of the rioters in a loud whisper that all about him heard. “I’m off, for one.” And throwing his stick to the ground he took to his heels.
If there had been no magic in Pan Andrew, his wife, or his boy, there was magic in the name of Jan Kanty, and a very healthy magic, too, for at once every hat in that crowd came off, and men began to look askance at each other as if caught in some shameful thing.
“The good Jan Kanty,” was whispered on every side, and in the briefest second imaginable the crowd had melted until there remained not one person, not even the leader of the ruffians who had begun the attack.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOOD JAN KANTY
Among the most remarkable personages of Krakow’s age of glory in the fifteenth century was a certain scholar-priest by the name of Jan Kanty. He had been educated at the University of Krakow in the period of late Scholasticism when the chief teachings were still mere expositions of the Seven Arts of which Grammar was the king. However, a full life and much contact with men had made Jan Kanty a well-rounded man. He loved learning for its own sake, but he honored most of all its precepts and its application to life, and he gave himself over in his cell-like quarters on the lower floor of the old University building, now long since destroyed by fire, to the creation of new points of view on old subjects, to comments on the conduct and opinions of the masters and doctors of the university at the great church councils of Europe, and to an intellectual chronicle of his age.
His life was saintly and his cell was as much visited, perhaps, as is his shrine in the magnificent old university library to-day. The peasants loved him especially, and this was rather curious since the men from the farms rarely sought the advice of the men of the university; they were, in fact, somewhat shy of the dispensers of higher learning. They were not shy of Jan Kanty, however. They came to Krakow to ask his opinion on the weather in the seasons of grains and vegetables, they called upon him for decisions in disputes between landowners, they consulted him concerning the proper kind of food for their live stock, they questioned him on all problems having to do with morals or religion, and they accepted his rulings with as much finality and satisfaction as if they had been the rulings of Heaven.
Therefore his name was one to be reckoned with everywhere, inside the city and out. He hated above all things cruelty of man against man, or of man against something helpless, a horse, or a dog, or a child. And when he saw one man and a woman and a boy of honest features and good appearance harassed by some hundred men, he did not hesitate but rushed into the midst of the flying stones without regard to his own safety or comfort.