Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/718

 280 for she had given immense love, and beauty which dazzled the eyes of men, and noble manners, and a vigor of such sort that many a knight could not boast of the like. It was nothing for her some days after childbirth to rise up to house management, and then go to hunt with her husband, or to hurry on horseback from Mochydoly to Bogdanets and return before midday to Yasko and Matsko. So her husband loved her as the sight of his eyes, old Matsko loved her, she was loved by the servants for whom she had a humane heart, and in Kresnia, when she entered the church on Sunday, she was greeted by murmurs of admiration and homage. Her former worshipper, the quarrelsome Stan of Rogov, had married the daughter of a free landtiller. Stan after mass used to visit the inn with old Vilk, and, having drunk somewhat, say to the old man: "Your son and I cut each other up more than once because of her, and we wanted to marry the lady, but that was just like reaching for the moon in heaven." Others declared aloud that one might look for another such woman only at the king's court in Cracow. In addition to her wealth, beauty, and refinement people honored also her incomparable health and vigor, and there was only one opinion on this point: "that she was the first woman who had ever planted a bear with a fork in the forest, and she had no need to crack nuts with her teeth; she put them on the table pressed them in her hand suddenly and cracked them as if they had been crushed with a stone." So she was praised in the parish of Kresnia and in the neighboring villages, and even in Sieradz, the chief town of the province.

But while envying Zbyshko of Bogdanets because he had won her, men did not wonder over much, for he too was illustrious by such military fame as no one else in that region. The younger possessors and nobles related to one another all the stories touching Germans whose souls Zbyshko had "shelled out" of them in battles under Prince Vitold, and on trampled earth in duels. They said that no man had ever escaped him, that in Malborg he had unhorsed twelve knights, among others Ulrich, the Grand Master's brother; finally, that he was able to meet even knights of Cracow, and that the invincible Zavisha Charny himself was a well-wishing friend of his. Some were unwilling to give faith to such uncommon stories; but even those men, when it was a question whom the neighborhood ought to choose, should it come to rivalry between Polish and foreign