Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/692

 254 In fact, he found none; on the contrary there was an increase of cattle, and from the small herd of mares there were colts, some from the Frisian war horses unusually large and powerful. There was a loss only in this, that some captives had fled, but not many, for they could flee only toward Silesia, and there the Germanized robber knights treated captives worse than did Polish nobles. But the enormous old house had inclined toward its fall considerably. The plaster had fallen; the walls and ceiling had grown crooked; and the larch beams, cut two hundred years or more before, had begun to rot. Throughout all the rooms, inhabited of old by the numerous Grady of Bogdanets, it leaked during the great summer rains. There were holes in the roof, which was covered by broad patches of green and reddish moss. The whole building had squatted and looked like an immense mouldering mushroom.

"With care it would last, for it began to decay only a little while ago," said the knight to old Kondrat, the head laborer, who in the absence of his lords looked after the property.

"I could live here till death," added Matsko after a time, "but Zbyshko needs a castle."

"For God's sake! A castle?"

"Hei! But why not?"

It was the darling idea of the old man to build a castle for Zbyshko and his future children. He knew that a noble who dwelt, not in an ordinary mansion, but behind a moat and a palisade, and who besides had a watch-tower where a guard gazed on the surrounding regions, was considered as somebody right away by his neighbors, and such a man managed more easily. Matsko did not desire much for himself at that time, but for Zbyshko and Zbyshko's sons he would not stop at little, all the more since their property had increased now considerably.

"Let him take Yagenka, and with her Mochydoly and the abbot's inheritance: no one in these parts could equal us then. God grant such an outcome!"

All this depended on one thing: would Zbyshko come home? that was uncertain and dependent again on God's mercy. Matsko said then in his mind, that for him it was needful to be in the best favor with the Lord God and not merely offend Him in nothing, but win Him in every way possible. With this intent he spared on the church of Kresnia neither wax nor game; and a certain evening when visiting at Zgorzelitse, he said,—