And with that they parted. The master returned towards the village, reading the immortal verses of Horace all the way along. But Ivan hastened towards the lonely forest hut, looking up from time to time at the yellow sky, the faded sun, and the long black cloud, and then glancing around him horror-stricken, to perceive that he cast no shadow either before or behind.
That sombre yellow light, how odd it was!—and then, too, that brown, copper-coloured cloud, which was gradually covering the whole earth, and enveloping the whole horizon with its broad sluggish wings like some huge bat-like monster of the Nether World! And the little black letters in the master's open book seemed to be dancing together in long dizzying rows, and this is what he read:
"... Pallida Mors
Aequo pede pulsat
Pauperum tabernas
Regumnque turres..."
CHAPTER XI.
THE FIRST SPARK.
Maria Kamienszka talked for the whole of a long hour with the General's wife.
She told her all she knew of that unhappy family, whose fate was bound up with the General's by such tragic memories.
She had learnt to know the disowned and rejected son as a gallant young officer in Galicia, and the relations which had sprung up between them were the tenderest imaginable.
The calamity which compelled the youth to fly had profoundly affected but not overwhelmed her, for Maria, with that virile determination which has so frequently distinguished the Polish women, had followed up the track of the vanished youth step by step, and when, at last, she had discovered him, she had devoted all the ingenuity of a loving heart to the desperate task of saving him.