Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/704

 266 "The young lord has come home!"

Zbyshko had come home indeed, but he was strange in some way: not only had he grown thin and was tanned by the winds of the fields and seemed suffering, but he was also indifferent and of few words. Hlava, who, with his wife, had come also, spoke for Zbyshko and for himself. He said that the young knight's expedition had found success evidently, for he had placed on the tomb of Danusia and her mother in Spyhov a whole bundle of peacock and ostrich plumes from knights' helmets. He had brought back captured horses and suits of mail, two of which were of very great value, though terribly hacked with blows of swords and axes. Matsko was burning with curiosity to know everything in detail from the lips of his nephew, but the latter merely waved his hand and answered in single syllables, and the third day he fell ill and was forced to his bed. It appeared that his left side had been battered and that two of his ribs had been broken, these, being badly set, "hindered" him in walking and in breathing. The injuries received in his encounter with the bison were felt also, and to complete the breaking up of his strength the journey from Spyhov was added. All this of itself was not terrible, for the man was young, and as sound as an oak-tree; but at the same time he was possessed by immense weariness of some kind, as if all the toils which he had ever gone through had begun now to move through his bones for the first time. Matsko thought, to begin with, that after two or three days' rest in bed all would pass, but the opposite had happened. There was no help from rubbing with ointments, or smoking with herbs, which the local shepherd recommended, nor from the decoctions sent by Yagenka and the priest of Kresnia: Zbyshko grew weaker and weaker, more and more wearied, more and more gloomy.

"What is the matter with thee? Wouldst thou like something, perhaps?" inquired the old knight.

"I want nothing: all things are the same to me," replied Zbyshko.

In this way, day followed day. Yagenka, coming to the idea that this was perhaps something more than an ordinary cough, and that the young man must have some secret which was crushing him, fell to urging Matsko to try once more to discover what that could be.

Matsko consented without hesitation, but after thinking a while he said,—