The Knights of the Cross

Therefore, a long time passed before he approached the penitential robe, and said: "How can I do otherwise? Christ, Thou knowest they will kill the innocent child, if I do not do all they order. And Thou also knowest that I would not do that for the sake of my own life! Disgrace is a distasteful thing!... distasteful!--but Thou also wast disgraced of old. Well then, in the name of the Father and of the Son...."

He then bent down, put on the robe in which were cut the openings for the head and hands, then he tied around his neck the scabbard of his sword, and dragged himself to the gate.

He did not find it open; but now it was immaterial to him whether they opened it sooner or later. The castle sank into nocturnal silence, only the guards called now and then to each other on the bastions. In the tower near the gate there was light in one window high up; the others were dark.

The night hours flew one after another, on the sky appeared the crescent moon and threw light upon the gloomy walls of the castle. It became so quiet that Jurand was able to hear his own heart-beats. But he stiffened and became entirely petrified, as if his soul were taken from him, and took no account of anything. One thought remained with him, that he had ceased to be a knight, Jurand of Spychow, but what he was he did not know.... Sometimes it also seemed to him that in the middle of the night death was coming to him across the snow from those hanged men that he had seen in the morning....

Suddenly he quivered and awoke entirely.

"O gracious Christ! what is that?"

From the high window in the adjacent tower, the sounds of a lute, hardly heard at first, reached his ear. Jurand, while on the way to Szczytno, was sure that Danusia was not in the castle, and yet this sound of the lute at night aroused his heart in an instant. It seemed to him that he knew those sounds, and that nobody else was playing but she--his child! his darling.... He therefore fell upon his knees, clasped his hands to pray, and listened shivering, as in a fever.

Just then a half-childish and as if ardently longing voice began to sing: "Had I the dear little wings Of a gosling, I would fly To Jasiek at Szlonsk."

Jurand wished to reply, to utter the dear name, but his words were imprisoned in his throat, as if an iron band squeezed them. A sudden wave of pain, tears, longing, suffering, collected in his breast; be therefore cast himself down with his face in the snow and began in ecstasy to call upon heaven in his soul, as if in thankful prayer: "O Jesus! I hear my child once again! O Jesus!" ...