Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/85

Rh recovered it by putting on old robes of the queen. Trustworthy witnesses affirmed that with their own ears they had heard Christ speaking to her from the altar. Foreign monarchs gave her honor on their knees; even the insolent Knights of the Cross respected her, and feared to offend her. Pope Boniface IX. called her a saint and the chosen daughter of the Church. The world considered her acts, and remembered that that was a child of the house of Anjou and of the Polish Piasts; that she was a daughter of the powerful Ludvik; that she was reared at the most brilliant of courts; that she was the most beautiful of maidens in the kingdom; that she had renounced happiness, renounced a maiden's first love, and married as queen the "wild" prince of Lithuania, so as to bend with him to the foot of the Cross the last pagan people in Europe. What the power of all the Germans, the power of the Knights of the Cross, their crusading expeditions, and a sea of blood had not effected, her single word had effected. Never had apostolic labor been joined with such devotion; never had woman's beauty been illuminated by such angelic goodness and such quiet sorrow.

Therefore minstrels in all the courts of Europe celebrated her; knights from the most remote lands came to Cracow to see that "Polish Queen;" her own people, whose strength and glory she had increased by her alliance with Yagello, loved her as the sight of their eyes. Only one great grief had weighed upon her and the nation,—God through long years had refused posterity to this His chosen one.

But when at last that misfortune had passed, the news of the implored blessing spread like lightning from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to the Carpathians, and filled all people of the immense commonwealth with delight. It was received joyfully even at foreign courts, but not at the capital of the Knights of the Cross. In Rome they sang a "Te Deum." In Poland the final conviction was reached that whatever the "holy lady" might ask of God would be given beyond doubt.

So people came to implore her to ask health for them; deputations came from provinces and districts, begging that in proportion as the need might be she would pray for rain, for good weather, for crops, for a favorable harvest, a good yield of honey, for abundance of fish in the lakes, and beasts in the forests. Terrible knights from border castles and towns, who, according to customs received from the Germans, toiled at robbery or war among themselves, at one reminder