For the Right

by Karl Emil Franzos

"Is it thus?" cried the faithful youth; "then we will share your fate!" All the rest of them crying in chorus, "We will not forsake you!"

"I dare not dissuade you," said Taras, "it is not I, but the cause which claims your fealty!... Now the next question is, where shall we encamp ourselves? In the lowlands the military are on the look-out for us, and here we are in danger of the Huzuls. I propose we retire to our island fortress in the Wallachian bog. By the Crystal Springs, or indeed anywhere within the mountains the Huzuls would rout us out; I know them better even than you can know them. They were true to us while they were friends, they will be intense in their hatred now they are our enemies. But we are safe from them on that island, where we have the advantage, moreover, of being in the very midst of the country we would rid from oppression, and in a hiding-place we could hold against almost any odds. I do not deceive myself concerning the danger even there, but I know no better place."

They resolved, then, to venture into the lowlands the following morning, after which these homeless outcasts lay down by their horses, sleeping as calmly as though they had found rest by their own firesides knowing nothing of the dread burdens of life.

Two only were awake--Nashko, keeping watch outside the hamlet, and Taras, tossing on the bundle of straw that formed his couch. Sleep was far from the unhappy man, much as he longed for it; indeed it had but rarely come to him since that terrible hour, that last meeting in this very place, separating him for ever from wife and child. Alas! and what nameless agony tortured him in those hours that seemed an eternity to the sore heart within! It was then he heard those voices that would not be silenced, of regret not only concerning the lost happiness of his life, but of a far more terrible regret--of awful accusation, much as he fought against it when daylight and activity returned. The night winds moaned, sounding to him like the blending curses of a hundred voices, the never-silent reproaches of all those whom he had brought to their doom. And when he succeeded for a moment in turning his back upon the irredeemable past, fixing his relentless gaze on the life before him, the life he would have to tread, what was it but a glaring reality, a fearful outcome of the shadows behind?

He was glad of the first streak of daylight stealing into the barn, and, rising from his troubled rest, he went out into the cold grey morning, seeking the Jew, who walked to and fro at his post looking pale and wan like a belated ghost. He nodded sadly on beholding his friend.

"We shall not be able to mount for a couple of hours yet," said Taras. "Turn in now, and have a rest."

"I could not sleep," replied Nashko, "but I am stiff with the cold, and could scarcely ride without first stretching my limbs on the straw." And, handing him his gun, he went away.

Taras walked up and down, slowly at first, till the nipping cold forced him to a quicker pace. It was as dismal a morning of late autumn as could well be imagined. Cutting gusts of east wind kept hissing through the narrow valley, rattling in the gloomy fir-wood, and having their own cold play with the whirling snow-flakes. The sun must have risen by that time, but it was nowhere to be seen; a pale, cheerless light only, descending from the snow-capped mountains, showed the muddy road and its windings, with a look of hopelessness about it. Not a living creature anywhere, not a sound of animated being beyond the croaking of a solitary raven on a fir-tree near.

The unhappy man cast a listless glance at the dismal prophet. The raven is looked upon as a bird of ill-omen, but what of trouble yet untasted could its call forebode? Death? Nay, for would he not have welcomed it gladly! And yet, though he seemed to know the very sum of human suffering laid upon him by a terrible fate, even by his own awful will, there was an agony approaching him that very morning, the direst possibility of grief for his heart and soul, and that cheerless day was to be the saddest of all his sad life....

An hour might have passed, but daylight seemed as far off as ever, and the wind continued its play with the whirling snow-flakes, so that Taras did not perceive the approach of a horseman, who was fighting his way hither from Zabie, till he pulled up close by the hamlet. It was a puny, elderly figure, ill-at-ease evidently on his miserable horse, and shivering with the cold; for though his garment was bedizened abundantly with gaudy ribands and glittering tinsel, there was not a scrap of fur to yield comfort, his queer head-gear, a tricoloured fool's cap, being fully in keeping with his tawdry appearance. On his back, by a leathern strap, he carried--not a gun to betoken the mountaineer--but a wooden case, from which protruded the neck of a violin. Taras examined this strange horseman with not a little wonder, concluding presently that it was some sort of a mountebank seen about the village fairs in the lowlands, where they pick up a scanty living, now playing the fiddle, now performing some jugglery. But what gain might this artist be seeking in the wintry mountains?