From Poland there came, it is true, the most favorable news. The success of the Swedes surpassed all expectation. Provinces yielded one after another; in Great Poland Swedes ruled as in Sweden; in Warsaw, Radzeyovski governed; Little Poland offered no resistance; Cracow might fall at any moment; the king, deserted by the army and the nobles, with confidence in his people broken to the core, went to Silesia; and Karl Gustav himself was astonished at the ease with which he had crushed that power, always victorious hitherto in war with the Swedes.
But just in that ease had Radzivill a foreboding of danger to himself; for the Swedes, blinded by triumph, would not count with him, would not consider him, especially because he had not shown himself so powerful and so commanding as all, not excepting himself, had thought him.
Will the Swedish King give him then Lithuania, or even White Russia? Will he not prefer to pacify an eternally hungry neighbor with some eastern slice of the Commonwealth, so as to have his own hands free in the remnants of Poland?
These were the questions which tormented continually the soul of Prince Yanush. Days and nights did he pass in disquiet. He conceived that Pontus de la Gardie would not have dared to treat him so haughtily, almost insultingly, had he not thought that the king would confirm such a manner of action, or what is worse, had not his instructions been previously prepared.
“As long as I am at the head of some thousands of men,” thought Radzivill, “they will consider me; but when money fails, when my hired regiments scatter, what then?”
And the revenues from his enormous estates did not come in. An immense part of them, scattered throughout Lithuania and far away to Polesie or Kieff, lay in ruins; those in Podlyasye the confederates had plundered completely. At times it seemed to the prince that he would topple over the precipice; that from all his labor and plotting only the name traitor would remain to him,—nothing more.
Another phantom terrified him—the phantom of death, which appeared almost every night before the curtain of his bed, and beckoned with its hand, as if wishing to say to him, “Come into darkness, cross the unknown river.”
Had he been able to stand on the summit of glory, had he been able to place on his head, even for one day, for one hour, that crown desired with such passion, he might meet that awful and silent phantom with unterrified eye. But to die and leave behind evil fame and the scorn of men, seemed to that lord, who was as proud as Satan himself, a hell during life.
More than once then, when he was alone or with his astrologer, in whom he placed the greatest trust, did he seize his temples and repeat with stifled voice,—
“I am burning, burning, burning!”