Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/605

 Rh be a worthy deed and dear to God to destroy him? Ei! I should like to challenge him to the death. We have no weapons, it is true, but five miles from here, in my lord's house at Vartsimov, they will give the wretch a sword, or an axe, and I will fight with him. God grant me victory and then I will cut him up, as is proper, and bury his head in a dung heap!" So spoke Tolima to himself, and, looking greedily at the German, he moved his nostrils, as if catching the odor of fresh blood. And he was forced to struggle with his desire grievously, to fight with himself sternly, till, remembering that Yurand had granted the prisoner life and freedom, not to the boundary merely, but beyond it, and that if he should slay him the holy act of his lord would be defeated, and the reward for it in heaven be decreased, he overcame himself at last, reined in his horse, and said,—

"Here is our boundary, and to yours it is not distant. Go in freedom; if remorse does not choke thee, and God's thunderbolts do not strike, nothing threatens thee from people!"

Then Tolima turned about, and Siegfried rode on with a certain wild petrifaction in his face, without answering a word, and as if not hearing that any one had spoken. He went on by a road now wider, and was as if sunk in a dream.

The cessation in the storm was brief, and the clearness of short duration. It grew so dark again that one might have thought that the gloom of night had fallen on the world. The clouds sank almost to the tops of the pinetrees. From above came an ominous growl, and as it were an impatient hiss and the quarrelling of thunders which the angel of the storm was restraining yet. But lightning illuminated from moment to moment with a blinding glitter the awful sky and the terrified earth, and then was to be seen a broad road lying between two black walls of forest; advancing along the middle of that road, was a lone man on horseback. Siegfried rode forward half conscious, devoured by fever. Despair was eating his soul from the time of Rotgier's death; the crimes which he had committed through revenge, the remorse, the terrifying visions, the tortures of his soul had dimmed his mind for a time to such a degree that only with the greatest effort did he defend himself from madness, and even at moments he gave way to it. Recently the toils of the journey, under the firm hand of Hlava, the night passed in the prison of Spyhov, and the