Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/717

 Rh

and Yagenka lived in Mochydoly while old Matsko was building a castle for them in Bogdanets. He built it with toil, for he wished that the foundations should be of stone laid in lime mortar, and the watchtower of brick, which was difficult to procure in that neighborhood. During the first year he dug the moat, which work was rather easy, for the eminence on which the castle was to stand had been entrenched on a time, perhaps in days which were still pagan; hence he needed only to clear those depressions of trees and hawthorn bushes with which they were overgrown, and then extend and deepen them sufficiently. While digging, the men reached an abundant spring, which in no long time filled the moat, so that Matsko had to provide an exit for the excess of water. Then on the rampart he reared a palisade and began to collect building timber for the walls of the castle,—oak beams, so thick that three men could not embrace one of them, and larch, which rots neither under clay plaster nor under a turf covering. He set about raising those walls only after a year, although he had the assistance of men from Zgorzelitse and Mochydoly. But he set about it all the more earnestly since Yagenka had given birth to twins. Heaven opened before the old knight then, since there was some one for whom he might labor and bustle, and he knew that the race of the Grady would not perish, that "The Dull Horseshoe" would be moistened yet more than once in the blood of the enemy. To the twins were given the names Matsko and Yasko.

"They are boys," said the old man, "to be praised, such boys that in the whole kingdom there are not two to equal them—and it is not evening yet."

He loved them immediately with a great love, and as to Yagenka, she hid the world from him. Whoso praised her before his eyes could get anything from the old man. People really envied Zbyshko for having such a wife, and glorified her not merely for the wealth which she had brought, since she was as brilliant in that region as the most beautiful flower in a field. She had given her husband a great dowry; but she had given more than a dowry,