Basia pressed Zagloba with delight; and the little knight, seeing how much she wished to stay, said,—
“Let us go to the chambers.”
They went in; but the place was full of lime-dust, which the cannon-balls had raised by shaking the walls. It was impossible to stay there, so they went out again, and took their places in a niche made when the old gate had been walled in. Pan Michael sat there, leaning against the masonry. Basia nestled up to him, like a child to its mother. The night was in August, warm and fragrant. The moon illuminated the niche with a silver light; the faces of the little knight and Basia were bathed in its rays. Lower down, in the court of the castle, were groups of sleeping soldiers and the bodies of those slain during the cannonade, for there had been no time yet for their burial. The calm light of the moon crept over those bodies, as if that hermit of the sky wished to know who was sleeping from weariness merely, and who had fallen into the eternal slumber. Farther on was outlined the wall of the main castle, from which fell a black shadow on one half of the courtyard. Outside the walls, from between the bulwarks, where the janissaries lay cut down with sabres, came the voices of men. They were camp followers and those of the dragoons to whom booty was dearer than slumber; they were stripping the bodies of the slain. Their lanterns were gleaming on the place of combat like fireflies. Some of them called to one another; and one was singing in an undertone a sweet song not beseeming the work to which he was given at the moment:—
“Nothing is silver, nothing is gold to me now,
Nothing is fortune.
Let me die at the fence, then, of hunger,
If only near thee.”
But after a certain time that movement began to decrease, and at last stopped completely. A silence set in which was broken only by the distant sound of the hammers breaking the cliffs, and the calls of the sentries on the walls. That silence, the moonlight, and the night full of beauty delighted Pan Michael and Basia. A yearning came upon them, it is unknown why, and a certain sadness, though pleasant. Basia raised her eyes to her husband; and seeing that his eyes were open, she said,—
“Michael, you are not sleeping.”
“It is a wonder, but I cannot sleep.”