Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/78

54 that one might suppose the house burning. But along streets near the market were large houses of red brick, or entirely of stone, lofty, ornamented with plates and the cross charm on the walls. They stood one at the side of the other, like soldiers in line, some wide, others narrow, as narrow as nine ells, but erect, with arched ceiling—often with the picture of the Passion, or with the image of the Most Holy Virgin over the gate. On some streets were two rows of houses, above them a strip of sky, below a street entirely paved with stones, and on both sides as far as the eye could see, shops and shops, rich, full of the most excellent, ofttimes wonderful or wholly unknown goods, on which Matsko, accustomed to continual war and taking of booty, looked with an eye somewhat greedy. But the public buildings brought both to still greater astonishment; the church of the Virgin Mary in the square, then other churches, the cloth market, the city hall with an enormous "cellar" in which they sold Schweidnitz beer, cloth shops, the immense mercatorium intended for foreign merchants, also a building in which the city weights were kept, barber-shops, baths, places for smelting copper, wax, gold, and silver, breweries, whole mountains of kegs around the so-called Schrotamt,—in a word, plenty and wealth, which a man unacquainted with the city, even though the wealthy owner of a "town," could not imagine to himself.

Povala conducted Matsko and Zbyshko to his house on Saint Ann Street, commanded to give them a spacious room, intrusted them to attendants, and went himself to the castle; from which he returned for supper rather late in the evening with a number of his friends. They used meat and wine in abundance and supped joyously; but the host himself was somehow anxious, and when at last the guests went away he said to Matsko,—

"I have spoken to a canon skilled in writing and in law; he tells me that insult to an envoy is a capital offence. Pray to God, therefore, that Lichtenstein make no complaint."

When they heard this both knights, though at supper they had in some degree passed the measure, went to rest with hearts that were not so joyous. Matsko could not sleep, and some time after they had lain down he called to his nephew,—

"Zbyshko!"

"But what?"