'Yonder is a light,' said Constanza at last, as the poor horses became unmanageable from fright and weariness. 'It is from the cottage of old Wenzel, the woodman.'
'If we could reach that,' said Father Cassimer, 'and leave the horses to their fate: it is our only chance.'
No one contradicted the priest's arrangement, for his last words were felt to be true—though a pang passed over Constanza's face at the thought of leaving our brave and faithful horses to the wolves: but louder rose the howls behind us, as Metski urged on with all his might, and far above all went the shout of Father Cassimer (he had the best lungs in that province): 'Ho, Wenzel! open the door to us for God's sake!'
We heard the old man reply, sent one well-aimed volley in among the wolves, and as they recoiled, man and woman leaped from the sledge—for our Polish girls are active—and rushed into the cottage, when old Wenzel instantly double-barred the door. It was woful to hear the cry of pain and terror from our poor horses as we deserted them; the next instant the wolves were upon them. We saw them from the window, as thick as ever flies stuck on sugar. How we fired upon them, and with what good-will old Wenzel helped us, praying all the time to every saint in the calendar, you may imagine! But still their numbers were increasing; and as a pause came in the fearful din, we plainly heard through the still air the boom of our own great bell, ringing for the midnight mass. At that sound, Father Cassimer's countenance fell for the first time. He knew the bellman was a poor half-witted fellow, who would not be sensible of his absence; and then he turned to have another shot at the wolves.
Shots were by this time getting scarce among us. There was not a man had a charge left but old Wenzel, who had supplied us as long as he could; but at length, loading his own gun with his last charge, he laid it quietly in the corner, saying one didn't know what use might be for it, and he never liked an empty gun.
Wenzel was the son of a small innkeeper at Grodno, but after his father's decease, which occurred when he was a child, his mother had married a Russian trader, who, when she died, carried the boy to Moscow. There Wenzel bade fair to be brought up a Russian; but when a stepmother came home, which took place while he was still a youth, he had returned to his native country, built himself a hut in the woods of Lithuania, and lived a lonely hunter till the time of my story, when he was still a robust, though gray-haired man. Some said his Muscovite parents had not been to his liking; some that he had found cause to shoot a master to whom they apprenticed him at Moscow; but be that as it might, Wenzel hated the Russians with all his heart, and never scrupled to say that the gun which had served him so long would serve the country too if it ever came to a rising. So much for Wenzel's story, by way of explaining what followed; but as I stood beside him that night at the hut's single crevice of a window, I could have given Poland itself for ammunition enough to do service on the wolves. They had now left nothing but the bones of our horses, which they had dragged round and round the cottage, with a din of howlings that almost drowned our voices within. Then they seized on the bodies of their own slain companions, which were devoured to the very skins; and still the gathering was going on. We could see them coming in troops through the open glades of the forest, as if aware that some human prey was in reserve. The hut was strongly built of great pine-logs, but it was fearful to hear them tearing at the door and scratching up the foundations. The bravest among us got terrified at these sounds. Metski loudly avowed his belief that the wolves were sent upon us as a punishment for hunting on Christmas-eve, and fell instantly to his prayers. Wenzel flung a blazing brand among them from the window, but they did not seem to care for fire; and three of them were so near leaping in, that he drove to the log-shutter and gave up that method of defence. None of the party appeared so far overcome with terror as Count Theodore: his spirit and prudence both seemed to forsake him. When the wolves began to scratch, he threw himself almost on his face in the corner, and kept moaning and praying in Russian, of which none of us understood a syllable but old Wenzel. Emerich and I would have spoken to him, but the woodman stopped us with a strange sign. Count Theodore had taken the relic of some saint from a pocket-book which he carried in his breast, and was, in Russian fashion as I think, confessing his sins over it; while his sister sat silent and motionless by the fire, with livid face and clasped hands. It was burning low, but I saw the woodman's face darken. He stepped to the corner and took down his gun, as I believed, to take the last shot at the wolves; but Count Theodore was in his way. He levelled it for an instant at the prostrate man, and before I could speak or interpose, the report, followed by a faint shrill shriek from the Russian, rang through the hut. We rushed to him, but the count was dead. A bullet had gone right through the heart.
'My gun has shot the count, and the wolves will leave us now,' said Wenzel coolly. 'I heard him say in his prayers that a Finn, now in the Siberian mines, had vowed to send them on him and his company wherever he went.'
As the woodman spoke, he handed to Count Emerich, with a hoarse whisper, a bloody pocket-book, taken from the dead body, and turning to Juana, said something loud and threatening to her in the Russian tongue; at which the lady only bowed her head, seeming of all in the hut to be the least surprised or concerned at the death of her brother. As for us, the complicated horrors of the night had left us stunned and stupified till the rapid diminution of the wolfish din, the sounds of shots and voices, and the glare of flambeaux lighting up the forest, brought most of us to the window. The wolves were scouring away in all directions, there was a grayness in the eastern sky, for Christmas-day was breaking; and from all sides the count and my uncle's tenantry, with skates and sledges, guns and torches, were pouring to the rescue as we shouted to them from the cottage.
They had searched for us almost since midnight, fearing that something terrible had detained Father Cassimer and his company from mass. There were wonderfully few wolves shot in the retreat, and we all went home to Count Emerich's house, but not in triumph, for with us went the body of the Russian, of which old Wenzel was one of the bearers. The unanimous determination we expressed to bring him to justice as a murderer, was silenced when Emerich shewed us in confidence a letter from the Russian minister, and a paper with all our names in a list of the disaffected in Upper Lithuania, which he had found in Theodore's pocket-book. After that, we all affirmed that Wenzel's gun had gone off by accident; and on the same good Christmas-day, Count Emerich, with a body of his retainers, escorted the Lady Juana to a convent at the other end of the province, the superior of which was his aunt. There she became a true Catholic, professed, and, as I was told, turned to a great saint. There is a wooden cross with his name, and a Latin inscription on it, marking Count Theodore's grave, by our old church on the edge of the forest. No one ever inquired after him, and the company of that terrible night are far scattered. My uncle and his sons all died for the poor country. The young cousins are married to German doctors in Berlin. Constanza and her brother are still single, for aught I know, but they have been exiles in America these fifteen years. Father Cassimer went with them, after being colonel of a regiment which saw hard service on the banks of the Vistula; and it may be that he is still saying mass or hunting occasionally in the Far West.
The last time I saw Wenzel and Metski was in the trenches at Minsk, where they had a tough debate regarding our adventure in the forest: the woodman insisting it was the Finn's spell that brought the wolves in such unheard-of numbers, and the peasant maintaining that it was a judgment on our desecration of Christmas-eve. For my own part, I think the long storm and a great scarcity of food had something to do with it, for tales of the kind were never wanting in our province. The wolf-gathering, however, saved us a journey to Siberia: thanks to old Wenzel. And sometimes yet, when any strange noise breaks in upon my sleep even here in England, I dream of being in his wild hut in the forest and listening to the wolfish voices at the door.