Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/151

Rh turned toward the richly-spread table : "I will swear!" he muttered.

His eye sparkled with dying fire, while the Official stretched out his hand to him and again placed him on his knees. He began to take the oath!

Then a phantom like an angel, with a veiled brow, detached himself from space, and with outspread wings shielded the crucifix, and as long as the oath lasted, the angel thus held himself before the cross. But none of them could see him. When the last word of the oath expired, and the famished body, rising, tottered away, the face of the angel grew ghastly in its pallor, and rending the veil, he cried: "A soul, Lord, has perished!"

This cry transpierced the heart of the Young Man, and he bowed his head under the weight of an insupportable grief.

When he again raised his eyes, he was surrounded by darkness, in the midst of which he saw unburied bones and cemeteries full of gibbets on which already swung their victims dimly floating, and they multiplied and sailed on, one after the other, like the gathering clouds of a tempest. Like whirlwinds of autumn leaves they drifted on above with mournful sighs; thousands of voices joined the funereal murmur; the sobs of women, the wails of children, and the hoarser groans of men! But the Shade of Dante spake to them and said: "Unfortunate as you are, your hour will surely come, and you will live with a double immortality; your own, and the immortality of those who have ruined you! For, from the nothingness to which they are destined, a spirit will be disengaged which will pass into you. Calm yourselves, then, O ye unfortunate!"

But as he spake, his own tears flowed.

And returning towards the surface of the earth, they repassed through the Armed People, who were already under arms in rows like countless statues. The blast of the trumpet and the roll of the drum, in monotonous rhythm, meted out to them time and life. Some were marched off to rest, others, stolid as stones, marched up to replace them. Some, placed in guard of prisoners, who, too weak to stand, were stretched upon the ground, watched