“You have the mind of a chancellor,” added Mirski, “for this will disturb their plans.”
“Surely we should act thus,” said Pan Michael. “I will set them free to-morrow; but to-day I do not wish to know of anything, for I am dreadfully wearied. It was as hot in the village as in an oven! Uf! my arms are paralyzed completely. The officer could not go to-day in any case, for his face is cut.”
“But in what language shall we tell them all this? What is your counsel, father?” asked Pan Yan.
“I have been thinking of that too,” answered Zagloba. “Kovalski told me that there are two Prussians among his dragoons who know how to jabber German, and are sharp fellows. Let them tell in German,—which the Swedes know of course, after fighting so many years in Germany. Kovalski is ours, soul and body. He is a man in a hundred, and we will have no small profit from him.”
“Well done!” said Volodyovski. “Will some of you, gentlemen, be so kind as to see to this, for I have no voice in my throat from weariness? I have told the men that we shall stay in this grove till morning. The villagers will bring us food, and now to sleep! My lieutenant will see to the watch. ’Pon my word, I cannot see you, for my eyes are closing.”
“Gentlemen,” said Zagloba, “there is a stack of hay just outside the birches; let us go to the stack, we shall sleep like susliks, and to the road on the morrow. We shall not come back to this country, unless with Pan Sapyeha against Radzivill.”
CHAPTER XX.
In Lithuania a civil war had begun, which, with two invasions of the Commonwealth and the ever more stubborn war of the Ukraine, filled the measure of misfortune.
The army of the Lithuanian quota, though so small in number that alone it could not offer effectual resistance to any of the enemies, was divided into two camps. Some regiments, and specially the foreign ones, remained with Radzivill; others, forming the majority, proclaimed the hetman a traitor, protested in arms against joining Sweden, but without unity, without a leader, without a plan. Sapyeha might be its leader, but he was too much occupied at that time with the defence of Byhovo and with the desperate struggle in the interior of the country, to be able to take his place immediately at the head of the movement against Radzivill.
Meanwhile the invaders, each considering a whole region as his own, began to send threatening messages to the other. From their misunderstandings might rise in time the salvation of the Commonwealth; but before it came to hostile steps between them there reigned the most terrible chaos in all Lithuania. Radzivill, deceived in the army, determined to bring it to obedience through force.