"I do," replied Taras, fiercely; "I even demand it. And if you refuse, I must carry out the punishment myself."
There was a long pause of silence. Taras stood erect, fully expecting to meet with the old man"s indignant denial. But Hilarion preserved an unperturbed calm, closing his eyes as one in deep thought. Now and then he would nod his head like one arriving at a conclusion, and presently he touched a small gong by his side. His eldest son entered. "Call hither the clansmen, young and old, as many of them as are about the settlement, and request the followers of this man also to enter my house. Let all hear my decision."
The s.p.a.cious room presently began to fill, the Huzuls thronging in first, Taras"s men following. And when silence had settled the aged patriarch again nodded to himself, and thereupon he rose from his seat, holding in his hand an intertwining twig of willow--for Taras had interrupted some quiet occupation of his--and with solemn voice he began:
"Listen to me, ye men of my people, for I, Hilarion, called the Just, to whom you look for guidance, have cause to speak to you. Mark it well, and tell others if need be ... You all were present when this man of the lowlands, Taras, whom they call the avenger, first came to me; and you know how I received him. You witnessed our solemn covenant; how we swore friendship to one another, not only for to-day or to-morrow, but partaking of each other"s blood as a sign that it shall never be broken while the red life-stream pulses through our veins. I have kept this sacred vow; but he just now has wronged it grievously, casting insult, nay, shame, on me by insisting that a member of my own house shall be punished, not because I say so, but because he wills it, and threatening that he himself will carry out such punishment if I fail to do so. It is my own flesh and blood, even my youngest son Julko, whom he will have dishonoured."
A cry of indignation burst from the Huzuls, and they turned upon Taras.
"Silence!" commanded the old man. "I have called you to hear what I have to say, and for nothing else.... But what I say is this: a man who can thus insult me no longer can be my friend and brother." He held up the twig in his hand. "He and I have been as this branch of willow, closely intertwined; but henceforth we are severed, and there is nought to heal the disruption!" He broke the twig, casting the parts from him, one to his right and one to his left.
"Urrahah!" shouted the Huzuls; but again the patriarch enforced silence, and, turning to Taras, he said:
"You are no longer my friend, but a man who has offered me deadly insult; yet the sacred law of our fathers lays it upon me never to forget that we partook of one another"s blood! I therefore may not, and will not, have recourse to active enmity beyond what you yourself will force me to by further affront. It were sufficient affront, however, if a man who has acted as you have done should continue to insult me by his presence! For which reason I banish you from this settlement, and from these mountains, to the extent of my authority. You will leave the settlement at once, withdrawing from my reach within these mountains in three days. And let me warn you that none of you shall ever see the lowlands again if, after this, you dare brave the presence of my people. It is not on my son"s account that I thus threaten you, for I shall take care to inform him of your intentions, putting him on his guard, and the Huzul lives not who fears his enemy when once he knows him! It is not in order to protect him, therefore, that I have said this, but simply because you have so deserved it. And now be gone!"
"I go," replied Taras; "but I call G.o.d and all here present to witness that you are disgracing yourself and me. I will not avenge it, for I also will remember the friendship we had sworn. But as for your son Julko, I shall know how to find him and visit his wrong on him, like any other evildoer."
The fury of the Huzuls knew no bounds, and Taras would have been lost had the aged Hilarion himself not stepped between him and the indignant clansmen, enabling him and his followers to leave the house and mount their horses, the wild cries of their hitherto confederates pursuing them as they rode away.
It was a sad departure, and with heavy hearts the little band returned through the dreary landscape to the hamlet of Magura. What should they do now, and whither turn their steps? Dark and gloomy lay the future before them, but none of the men uttered a word of complaint.
Having reached the hamlet and seen to their horses" needs, Taras gathered his men about him.
"I would not for a moment delude you with fair speeches," he said; "you know for yourselves how matters stand. Just answer me one question: Will you stay with me, or go your way? I could not upbraid any one whose courage failed him to continue this life of ours. It has been full of hardships. .h.i.therto; it will be almost unendurable now that the Huzuls also are against us."
"Tell us about yourself, hetman," said Wa.s.silj Soklewicz; "what are you going to do?"
"I must continue to the end," replied Taras; "it is not for me to fail in my duty, even if you all forsake me. I shall endeavour to win other followers."
"Is it thus?" cried the faithful youth; "then we will share your fate!"
All the rest of them crying in chorus, "We will not forsake you!"
"I dare not dissuade you," said Taras, "it is not I, but the cause which claims your fealty!... Now the next question is, where shall we encamp ourselves? In the lowlands the military are on the look-out for us, and here we are in danger of the Huzuls. I propose we retire to our island fortress in the Wallachian bog. By the Crystal Springs, or indeed anywhere within the mountains the Huzuls would rout us out; I know them better even than you can know them. They were true to us while they were friends, they will be intense in their hatred now they are our enemies. But we are safe from them on that island, where we have the advantage, moreover, of being in the very midst of the country we would rid from oppression, and in a hiding-place we could hold against almost any odds. I do not deceive myself concerning the danger even there, but I know no better place."
They resolved, then, to venture into the lowlands the following morning, after which these homeless outcasts lay down by their horses, sleeping as calmly as though they had found rest by their own firesides knowing nothing of the dread burdens of life.
Two only were awake--Nashko, keeping watch outside the hamlet, and Taras, tossing on the bundle of straw that formed his couch. Sleep was far from the unhappy man, much as he longed for it; indeed it had but rarely come to him since that terrible hour, that last meeting in this very place, separating him for ever from wife and child. Alas! and what nameless agony tortured him in those hours that seemed an eternity to the sore heart within! It was then he heard those voices that would not be silenced, of regret not only concerning the lost happiness of his life, but of a far more terrible regret--of awful accusation, much as he fought against it when daylight and activity returned. The night winds moaned, sounding to him like the blending curses of a hundred voices, the never-silent reproaches of all those whom he had brought to their doom. And when he succeeded for a moment in turning his back upon the irredeemable past, fixing his relentless gaze on the life before him, the life he would have to tread, what was it but a glaring reality, a fearful outcome of the shadows behind?
He was glad of the first streak of daylight stealing into the barn, and, rising from his troubled rest, he went out into the cold grey morning, seeking the Jew, who walked to and fro at his post looking pale and wan like a belated ghost. He nodded sadly on beholding his friend.
"We shall not be able to mount for a couple of hours yet," said Taras.
"Turn in now, and have a rest."
"I could not sleep," replied Nashko, "but I am stiff with the cold, and could scarcely ride without first stretching my limbs on the straw."
And, handing him his gun, he went away.
Taras walked up and down, slowly at first, till the nipping cold forced him to a quicker pace. It was as dismal a morning of late autumn as could well be imagined. Cutting gusts of east wind kept hissing through the narrow valley, rattling in the gloomy fir-wood, and having their own cold play with the whirling snow-flakes. The sun must have risen by that time, but it was nowhere to be seen; a pale, cheerless light only, descending from the snow-capped mountains, showed the muddy road and its windings, with a look of hopelessness about it. Not a living creature anywhere, not a sound of animated being beyond the croaking of a solitary raven on a fir-tree near.
The unhappy man cast a listless glance at the dismal prophet. The raven is looked upon as a bird of ill-omen, but what of trouble yet untasted could its call forebode? Death? Nay, for would he not have welcomed it gladly! And yet, though he seemed to know the very sum of human suffering laid upon him by a terrible fate, even by his own awful will, there was an agony approaching him that very morning, the direst possibility of grief for his heart and soul, and that cheerless day was to be the saddest of all his sad life....
An hour might have pa.s.sed, but daylight seemed as far off as ever, and the wind continued its play with the whirling snow-flakes, so that Taras did not perceive the approach of a horseman, who was fighting his way hither from Zabie, till he pulled up close by the hamlet. It was a puny, elderly figure, ill-at-ease evidently on his miserable horse, and shivering with the cold; for though his garment was bedizened abundantly with gaudy ribands and glittering tinsel, there was not a sc.r.a.p of fur to yield comfort, his queer head-gear, a tricoloured fool"s cap, being fully in keeping with his tawdry appearance. On his back, by a leathern strap, he carried--not a gun to betoken the mountaineer--but a wooden case, from which protruded the neck of a violin. Taras examined this strange horseman with not a little wonder, concluding presently that it was some sort of a mountebank seen about the village fairs in the lowlands, where they pick up a scanty living, now playing the fiddle, now performing some jugglery. But what gain might this artist be seeking in the wintry mountains?
"What a mercy," cried the horseman, "to fall in with a living creature at last! How long shall I have to struggle on, tell me, before reaching the Dembronia Forest?"
"What on earth do you want there?" asked Taras, surprised. "You would find only wolves to make merry at your bidding, if that is it--why, the forest is utterly uninhabited!"
"Then I am better informed than you," retorted the fiddler; "the avenger and his band are in the forest, if no one else is."
"Do you want him?"
"To be sure, and badly! The poor wretch of a girl, I believe, would claw my eyes out if I did not fetch him as I promised."
"What girl? But you may save yourself farther trouble--I am the avenger."
"You!" cried the man, crossing himself quickly. But coming a little closer, he peered with a half-fearful curiosity into the hetman"s sorrowful face. "You might be he, certainly," he muttered; "you look exactly as they told me, and poor Kasia said I could not possibly mistake the terrible gloom on your face. I suppose I had better believe you, and you must come with me, else that wretched girl will die of her remorse."
"What girl? what is it? Where am I wanted? Do speak plainly!"
"At the inn at Zabie. She"d have come to you instead of asking you to come to her--I mean Kasia, my sister"s daughter--she says it is killing her, and she must not die without telling you."
"Telling me what? Has she any complaints to make against any wrong-doer?"
"No; she has done that once too often already, and is grievously sorry for it now. It is not you, though, who are to blame--nor in fact, is she, poor thing--but her sweetheart, Jacek, that good-for-nothing rascal; if you can pay him out for it, "twere well if you did. For it was a d.a.m.ned lie, all that story at Borsowka----"
"At Borsowka?"" exclaimed Taras, staggering. "At Borsowka!" he repeated hoa.r.s.ely. And clutching the fiddler with his strong hand, he dragged him from the saddle and shook him till the poor creature gasped for breath. "Speak the truth!... Is it that Marinia who sent you?"
"You are strangling me! Help!" groaned the fiddler. "It is not my fault ... help!... murder!"
At this moment Nashko, who had heard the cry, came out, followed by the others.
"What is it?" they inquired, and the Jew, taking in the situation, endeavoured to free the agonised messenger from the captain"s powerful grasp.
"Aren"t you rather hard on him?" he whispered to his friend. "What has he come for?"
But Taras, letting go his hold, stared about him like one demented, and a shriek burst from him--"A horse! for G.o.d"s sake, a horse!" His men moved not, utterly confounded. But he broke away, dragging a horse from the barn, the first he could lay hold on, and mounting it without saddle or bridle dashed away in the direction of Zabie as fast as the frightened animal could carry him.
Two hours later he stopped by the inn. The horse was done for. He cared not, but rushed up to old From, who came to meet him. "Where is she?"
he cried, wildly.
"Who? the sick woman?" inquired the innkeeper. "We made up a bed for her in the little lean-to."
Another minute and Taras stood by the couch. The girl had greatly changed since that terrible night. She looked as though she had pa.s.sed through an illness, and her eyes were deep in their sockets. "Ah," she moaned, "you have come, and I may tell you. It has left me no peace day or night. I ran away from Jacek to look for my uncle Gregori, that he might try and find you, for he was always...."
"Be quick about it," interrupted Taras. "I want to know the truth!"
"Ah! do not look at me with those eyes," cried the unhappy girl, hiding her face in her hands, and indeed the man bending over her was fearful to behold. "I want to tell you ... I wish I had never done it, but they made me!"
"Be quick about it!" repeated Taras, hoa.r.s.ely. "You are not Marinia Bertulak, and no peasant girl from Borsowka. Your name is Kasia, and you keep company with jugglers?"