Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/619

 Rh "I sought her till I found her and freed her, but she preferred God to Spyhov."

And pain broke him utterly, for he fell on Yurand's breast, embraced him, and groaned out,—

"O Jesus! O Jesus! O Jesus!"

At this sight the hearts of the armed attendants were enraged, and they fell to beating their shields with their spears, not knowing how to express in another way their pain and their desire for vengeance. The women raised a lament, they wailed one louder than another, they put their aprons to their eyes, or covered their heads with them altogether, and called in heaven-piercing voices: "Ei! misfortune! misfortune! For thee there is gladness, for us only weeping. Ei! misfortune! Death has cut thee down! The Skeleton has seized thee! Oi! oi!"—while some of them, bending their heads backward and closing their eyes, cried: "Was it evil for thee with us, O dearest flower; was it evil? Thy father is left in great mourning, while thou art there in God's chambers! Oi! oi!" Others again told the dead woman that she had not pitied her father or her husband in their tears and loneliness. And this wail of theirs and this weeping were expressed in a half chant, for those people could not express their pain otherwise.

At last Yurand, withdrawing from Zbyshko's arms, reached out his staff in sign that he wished to go to Danusia. That moment Tolima and Zbyshko caught him by the arms and led him to the litter; there he knelt by the body, passed his hand over it from the forehead to the hands of his dead daughter, which were crossed, and he inclined his head repeatedly, as if to say that that was his Danusia and no other, that he knew his own child. Then he embraced her with one arm, and the other, which had no hand, he raised upward; all present answered in the same way, and that dumb complaint before God was more eloquent than any words of sorrow. Zbyshko, whose face after the momentary outburst grew again perfectly rigid, knelt on the other side, silent, resembling a stone statue; round about it became so still that the chirping of the field crickets was heard and the buzz of each passing fly.

At last Father Kaleb sprinkled Danusia, Zbyshko, and Yurand with holy water, and began "Requiem æternam." After the hymn he prayed aloud a long time; during the prayer it seemed to the people that they heard the voice of a prophet, for he begged that the torture of that innocent