"You, I had thought, with your broad shoulders and deep chest, your massive head that should have gone with a tall stature, not with those short, sturdy limbs; with your thick red hair, that should have been black for that matter, with your wide-set, yellow eyes, you would be a real puzzle to one who did not recognize in you equal mixtures of the fair, stalwart, and muscular Slav with the bilious-sanguine, thick-set, wiry Turanian. Your pedigree would no doubt bear me out; there is as much of the Magyar as of the Pole in your anatomy. Athlete, and yet a tangle of nerves; a ferocious brute at bottom, I dare say, for your broad forehead inclines to flatness, under your bristling beard your jaw must protrude, and the base of your skull is ominously thick. And, with all that, capable of ideal transports; when that girl played and sang to-night I saw the swelling of your eyelid veins, and how that small, tenacious, clawlike hand of yours twitched. You would be a fine leader of men—but God help the wretches in your power!
"So had I mused upon him. Yet I confess that when we came into closer contact with each other even I was not proof against the singular courtesy of his manner and his unaccountable personal charm.
"Our conversation soon grew interesting; to me as a matter of course, and evidently to him also. A few general words led to interchange of remarks upon the country we were both visitors in and so to national characteristics—Pole and Irishman have not a few in common, both in their nature and history. An observation which he made, not without a certain flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the teeth, on the Irish type of female beauty, suddenly suggested to me a stanza of an ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood imagery, of alternating ferocity and voluptuousness. This I quoted to the astounded foreigner, in the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation in question.
"When I left Rathdrum the baron's last words to me were that if I ever thought of visiting his country otherwise than in books he held me bound to make Yany, his Galician seat, my headquarters of study.
"From Czernowicz, therefore, where I stopped some time, I wrote, received in due time a few lines of prettily worded reply, and ultimately entered my sled in the nearest town to, yet at a most forbidding distance from, Yany, and started on my journey thither.
"The undertaking meant many long hours of undulation and skidding over the November snow, to the somniferous bell-jangle of my dirty little horses; the only impression of interest being a weird gipsy concert I came in for at a miserable drinking-booth half buried in the snow where we halted for the refreshment of man and beast. Here, I remember, I discovered a very definite connection between the characteristic run of the tsimbol, the peculiar bite of the Zigeuner's bow on his fiddle-string, and some distinctive points of Turanian tongues—in other countries, in Spain for instance, your gipsy speaks differently on his instrument. But, oddly enough, when I later attempted to put this observation on paper I could find no word to express it."
A few of our company evinced signs of sleepiness, but most of us who knew Marshfield, and that he who could, unless he had something novel to say, be as silent and retiring as he now evinced signs of being copious, awaited further with patience. He has his own deliberate way of speaking, which he evidently enjoys greatly, though it be occasionally trying to his listeners.
"On the afternoon of my second day's drive, the snow, which till then had fallen fine and continuous, ceased, and my Jehu, suddenly interrupting himself in the midst of some exciting wolf story, quite in keeping with the time of year and the wild surroundings, pointed to a distant spot against the grey sky to the north-west, between two wood-covered folds of ground—the first eastern spurs of the great Carpathian chain.
"'There stands Yany,' said he.
"I looked at my far-off goal with interest. As we drew nearer, the sinking sun, just dipping behind the hills, tinged the now distinct frontage with a cold, copperlike gleam, but it was only for a minute; the next the building became nothing more to the eye than a black irregular silhouette against the crimson sky.