Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - Potop - The Deluge (1898 translation by Jeremiah Curtin) - Vol 2.djvu/663

Rh "Why is Pan Gosyevski to remain in Jmud, and why must I go to the south?"

Vyershul shrugged his shoulders: "Ask the hetman in Brest for his reason; I answer nothing."

All at once terrible anger seized Pan Andrei by the throat. His eyes flashed, his face was blue, and he cried with a shrieking voice; "I will not go from here! Do you understand?"

"Is that true?" asked Vyershul. "My office was to deliver the order; the rest is your affair. With the forehead, with the forehead! I wished to beg your company for a couple of hours, but after what I have heard I prefer to look for another."

Then he wheeled his horse and rode off.

Pan Andrei sat again under the cross, and began to look around on the sky, as if wishing to take note of the weather. The attendant drew back some distance with the horses, and stillness set in all around.

The morning was clear, pale, half autumnal, half wintry. The wind was not blowing, but from the birch bushes growing at the foot of the crucifix the last leaves were dropping noiselessly, yellow and shrivelled from frost. Countless flocks of crows and jackdaws were flying over the forest; some were letting themselves down with mighty cawing right there near the crucifix, for the field and the road were covered with corpses of Swedes still unburied. Pan Andrei looked at those dark birds, blinking his eyes; you would say that he wanted to count them. Then he closed his lids and sat long without motion; at last he shuddered, frowned; presence of mind came back to his face, and he began to speak thus to himself, —

"It cannot be otherwise! I will go in two weeks, but not now. Let happen what may. It was not I who brought Rakotsy, I cannot! What is too much is too much! Have I hammered and pounded but little, passed sleepless nights in the saddle, shed my own blood and that of other men? What reward for this? If I had not received the first letter, I should have gone; but both have come in one hour, as if for the greater pain, the greater sorrow. Let the world perish, I will not go! The country will not be lost in two weeks; and besides the anger of God is evidently on it, and it is not in the might of man to oppose that, O God! the Hyperboreans [Northern Russians], the Swedes, the Prussians, the Hungarians, the Transylvanians, the Wal-