Ever riding farther, he had hastened greatly, night and day, to escape from those prophecies, to find at last some place of rest, some man who would pour into his spirit even one drop of consolation. But he found every moment greater fall, every moment greater despair. At last the words of Count Veyhard filled that cup of bitterness and gall; they showed to him clearly this, which hitherto was an undefined feeling, that not so much the Swedes, the Northerners, and the Cossacks had killed the country, as the whole people.
“The mad, the violent, the malicious, the venal, inhabit this land,” repeated Kmita after Count Veyhard, “and there are no others! They obey not the king, they break the diets, they pay not the taxes, they help the enemy to the conquest of this land. They must perish.
“In God’s name, if I could only give him the lie! Is there nothing good in us save cavalry; no virtue, nothing but evil itself?”
Kmita sought an answer in his soul. He was so wearied from the road, from sorrows, and from everything that had passed before him, that it grew cloudy in his head. He felt that he was ill and a deathly sickness seized possession of him. In his brain an ever-growing chaos was working. Faces known and unknown pushed past him,—those whom he had known long before and those whom he had met on this journey. Those figures spoke, as if at a diet, they quoted sentences, prophecies; and all was concerning Olenka. She was awaiting deliverance from Kmita; but Count Veyhard held him by the arms, and looking into his eyes repeated: “Too late! what is Swedish is Swedish!” and Boguslav Radzivill sneered and supported Count Veyhard. Then all of them began to scream: “Too late, too late, too late!” and seizing Olenka they vanished with her somewhere in darkness.
It seemed to Pan Andrei that Olenka and the country were the same, that he had ruined both and had given them to the Swedes of his own will. Then such measureless sorrow grasped hold of him that he woke, looked around in amazement and listening to the wind which in the chimney, in the walls, in the roof, whistled in various voices and played through each cranny, as if on an organ.
But the visions returned, Olenka and the country were blended again in his thoughts in one person whom Count Veyhard was conducting away saying: “Too late, too late!”
So Pan Andrei spent the night in a fever. In moments of consciousness he thought that it would come to him to be seriously ill, and at last he wanted to call Soroka to bleed him. But just then dawn began; Kmita sprang up and went out in front of the inn.
The first dawn had barely begun to dissipate the darkness; the day promised to be mild; the clouds were breaking into long stripes and streaks on the west, but the east was pure; on the heavens, which were growing pale gradually, stars, unobscured by mist, were twinkling. Kmita roused his men, arrayed himself in holiday dress, for Sunday had come and they moved to the road.
After a bad sleepless night, Kmita was wearied in body and spirit. Neither could that autumn morning, pale but refreshing, frosty and clear, scatter the sorrow crushing the heart of the knight. Hope in him had burned to the last spark, and was dying like a lamp in which the oil is exhausted. What would that day bring? Nothing!—the same grief, the same suffering, rather it will add to the weight on his soul; of a surety it will not decrease it.
He rode forward in silence, fixing his eyes on some point which was then greatly gleaming upon the horizon. The horses were snorting; the men fell to singing with drowsy voices their matins.