King Stakh's Wild Hunt

Chapter The Nineteenth

And that is all. On the following day, for the first time, the sun together with a slight hoarfrost fell on the moss-covered castle walls. The tall grass was bestrewed with a cold white powder and was reddening under the first rays of the sun. And the walls were rose-coloured, they had even become younger, awakened from a heavy sleep that had reigned over them for three years. The bright window-panes looked young, pale rays shining on them, the earth at the walls was moist, and the grass was damp.

We were leaving. The carriage was standing in front of the castle and our modest belongings were being tied on behind it. I led Janoŭskaja out of the house. She was wrapped up in a light fur-coat and I sat beside her. We cast a last glance at the castle in which we had experienced pain and suffering and unexpectedly for ourselves had found love, such love that a man could, without regret, give up even his life for its sake.

“What do you think you will do with all this?” I asked. Janoŭskaja winced as if it were cold.

“The antique things I'll give away to museums, the rest let the mužyks take, the mužyks who rose in defence of their huts and saved me. The castle — let it be turned into a hospital, a school, or something like that.” And she smiled an ironical smile. “An entailed estate! How much blood, such a tangle of meanness, sordid crimes and intrigue. And for the sake of what? For a handful of gold… No, let's forget about it, about this entailed estate.”

I put my arms round her narrow shoulders.

“That's what I think, too. That's how to act. We don't need all this, now we have found each other.”

In the castle we left a new housekeeper — the widow I had once found with her child along the road. The other servants remained as they were.

And we sighed slightly when the castle disappeared behind the turning in the lane. The nightmare was over and done with.

When we rode out of the park onto the heather land along the Giant's Gap, and the gates closed behind us for the last time, and in the distance the burial mounds were already coming into sight, I saw a man standing at the roadside.

The man making long strides came up to meet us. He took the horse by the bridle, and we recognized Ryhor. He was standing in his leather coat, his entangled hair falling on his face and on his kind, childish eyes.

I jumped out of the carriage.

“Ryhor, my dear fellow, why didn't you come to take leave of us?”

“I wanted to meet you alone. It's hard for me after all we've done. You are right to leave. Here everything would remind you of the past.”

He stuck his hand in his pocket, blushed, and took out an earthenware doll.

“This is for you, Miss Nadzieja… Maybe you'll keep it near you… you'll remember…”

Nadzieja drew his head to her and kissed him on the forehead. Then she took off her earrings and put them in the dark wide palm of the hunter.

“For your future wife.”

Ryhor grunted, shook his head.

“So long… So long… The quicker you leave the better… or else you may see me whimpering like an old woman… You are children. I wish you the best of everything, the very best in the world.”

“Ryhor! My friend! Come away with us, you'll stay with us a while, while they're looking for Dubatoŭk and the others. Some good-for-nothing fellow might kill you here.”

Ryhor's eyes became severe, his jaw-muscles began to move.

“Huh, just let anyone try!”

And his hands gripped his long gun, his veins even swelled.

“I've a weapon in my hands. Here it is. Just let them try to take it! I won't leave. My domain is the forest. And this domain must be a happy one.”

“And I believe in that,” I said simply.

When we had ridden away, I again saw from the edge of the forest his big silhouette on the mound. Ryhor was standing against the background of a crimson sky with his long gun in his hands, the gun reaching above his head, and on him his closely-fitting leather-coat turned inside out. The wind was blowing his long hair about.

All day and all night we rode through forests. The following morning we were met by the sun, by wet, tall grass, by joy! It was only now that I began to understand the difference between the Janoŭski region and this land.

Enormous nests of storks and a sky-blue silence over the clean huts.

Then how was my lady from the eighteenth century to look at this new world, if even I, during such a short period, had forgotten all this?

I glanced at her who was to be my wife. Her eyes were wide open and happy, she pressed herself against me and from time to time sighed, as a child does after tears. I much desired that she should feel even better. And I bent to kiss her hand.

What worried me at this time and later, too, was her illness. Therefore I rented a small house with a garden on the outskirts of the city. The doctors said that everything would pass living a peaceful life. And indeed, it did pass, when we had been living together two months and she told me that we should have a child.

We surrounded each other with such a sea of kindness and attention, with such love, that even after seventy years I wonder at it as at a dream. Everywhere life was kind to us, even in Siberia where I found myself in 1902. She was more than just a wife, she was a friend until death.

We lived long and happily, as in the song:

But even now I sometimes see in a dream the grey heather and the stunted grass of the waste land, and King Stach's Wild Hunt leaping, dashing through the marshes. The horses' bits do not tinkle, the silent horsemen are sitting up straight in their saddles. Their hair, their capes, their horses' manes are waving in the wind, and a lonely star is burning overhead.

King Stach's Wild Hunt is racing madly across the earth in terrifying silence.

I awaken and think that its time is not yet over, not as long as gloom and darkness and cold, social inequality and dark horror exist on earth. Across the land, half drowned in fog, still clashes The Wild Hunt.