“Before Pan Babinich!” answered she, courtesying with great ceremony.
“Would that I might meet him at a sword’s length!”
“Then you would surely lie a sword’s depth in the ground; but do not call the wolf from the forest.”
Sakovich, in fact, did not call that wolf with sincerity; for though he was a man of incomparable daring, he felt a certain, almost superstitious, dread of Babinich,—so ghastly were the memories that remained to him after the recent campaign. He did not know, besides, how soon he would hear that terrible name.
But before that name rang through all Jmud, there came in time other news,—for some the most joyful of joyful, but for Sakovich most terrible,—which all mouths repeated in three words throughout the whole Commonwealth,—
“Warsaw is taken!”
It seemed that the earth was opening under the feet of traitors; that the whole Swedish heaven was falling on their heads, together with all the deities which had shone in it hitherto like suns. Ears would not believe that the chancellor Oxenstiern was in captivity; that in captivity were Erskine, Löwenhaupt, Wrangel; in captivity the great Wittemberg himself, who had stained the whole Commonwealth with blood, who had conquered one half of it before the coming of Karl Gustav; that the king, Yan Kazimir, was triumphing, and after the victory would pass judgment on the guilty.
And this news flew as if on wings; roared like a bomb through the Commonwealth; went through villages, for peasant repeated it to peasant; went through the fields, for the wheat rustled it; went through the forest, for pine-tree told it to pine-tree; the eagles screamed it in the air; and all living men still the more seized their weapons.
In a moment the defeat of Girlakol was forgotten around Taurogi. The recently terrible Sakovich grew small in everything, even in his own eyes. Parties began again to attack bodies of Swedes; the Billeviches, recovering after their last defeat, passed the Dubisha again, at the head of their own men and the remainder of the Lauda nobles.
Sakovich knew not himself what to begin, whither to turn, from what side to look for salvation. For a long time he had no news from Prince Boguslav, and he racked his head in vain. Where was he, with what troops could he be? And at times a mortal terror seized him: had not the prince too fallen into captivity? He called to mind the prince’s saying that he would turn his tabor toward Warsaw, and that if they would make him commandant over the garrison in the capital, he would prefer to be there, for he could look more easily on every side.