Then he began to fancy that he must have been guilty of some sin for which he was now being punished. Though he recalled to mind all his past life, though he magnified every little misdemeanour, still he could not find anything worthy of such a punishment. He had kept all the fasts; he had gone to church whenever he had been able to do so; he had lighted a sufficient number of candles to the saints to secure their protection. If, at times, he had been guilty of cursing, of calling the blessed Virgin Mary opprobrious names, he only had done so as a mere habit, as everybody else does, quite unintentionally. The priest—at confession—had always admonished him against this bad habit; but he had duly done penance for these trifling sins, and he had got the absolution.
He asked himself why he was so unlucky. He had not fallen in love with his neighbour's wife, nor asked for impossible things. Why could not life run on smoothly for him, as it did for everybody else? What devil had prompted him to leave his ship at a time when he might have been quietly asleep? Then the thought struck him that, after all, this was only a bewildering dream, from which he would awake and laugh at on the morrow.
He got up, walked about his narrow cell, feeling his way in the darkness. Alas! this was no dream.
Then he thought of his parents; he pictured to himself the grief they would feel at hearing of his misfortune. His mother's heart would surely burst should he be found guilty and be condemned to be hanged. And his father—would he, too, believe him to be a murderer?
He again sank on his knees, and uttered a prayer; not the usual litanies which he had been taught, but a Kyrie Eleison, a cry for help rising from the innermost depths of his breast.
The darkness of the prison was so oppressive that it seemed to him as if his prayer could never go through those massive stone walls; therefore, instead of being comforted, doubt and dread weighed heavily upon him. In that mood he recalled to his mind all the incidents of a gloomy story which had once been related to him about a little Venetian baker-boy, who, like himself, had been found guilty of manslaughter. This unfortunate youth had been imprisoned, cruelly tortured, and then put to death. When it was too late, the real murderer confessed his guilt; but then the poor boy was festering in his grave.
Still, he would not despair, for surely Uros must, on the morrow, hear of his dreadful plight, and then he would use every possible and impossible means to save him.
But what if the ship started on the morrow, leaving him behind, a stranger in an unknown town?
The tears which had been gathering in his eyes began to roll down his cheeks in big, burning drops, and now that they began to flow he could not stop them any more. He crouched in a corner, and, as the cold, grey gloaming light of early dawn crept through the grated window of his cell, his heavy eyelids closed themselves at last; sleep shed its soothing balm on his aching brain.
Not long after Milenko had gone on shore, Uros woke suddenly from his sleep. He had dreamt that a short, dark-haired, swarthy, one-eyed man, with a face horribly pitted by small-pox, was murdering his friend; and yet it was not Milenko either, but some one very much like him.