, and buried his face in his
hands; when he uncovered it it wore an expression of great sadness and
despair. The Count, though he did not know what all this meant, when he
looked at the face of the old man felt a certain emotion, and pressed his
hand. The silence lasted for a moment; then the old man broke it, shaking
his uplifted right hand:--

"There can be no agreement, my boy, between the Soplica and the blood of
the Horeszkos; in you flows the blood of the Horeszkos; you are a kinsman
of the Pantler by your mother the Mistress of the Hunt, whose mother was
the child of the second daughter of the Castellan,38 who was, as is well
known, the maternal uncle of my lord. Now listen to a story of your own
family, which took place in this very room and no other.

"My late lord the Pantler, the first gentleman of the district, a rich man
and of noted family, had but one child, a daughter beautiful as an angel;
so not a few of the gentry and the young notables paid their court to the
Pantler's daughter. Among the gentry there was one great roistering blade,
a fighting bully, Jacek Soplica, who was called in jest the Wojewoda; in
truth he was of great influence in the wojewodeship, for he had absolute
authority over the whole family of the Soplicas and controlled their three
hundred votes according to his will, although he himself possessed nothing
except a little plot of ground, a sabre, and great mustaches that
stretched from ear to ear. So the Pantler often invited this ruffian to
his place and entertained him there, especially at the time of the
district diets, in order to make himself popular among the fellow's
kinsmen and partisans. The mustachioed champion was so much elated by his
courteous reception that he took it into his head that he might become his
host's son-in-law. He came to the castle more and more frequently, even
when uninvited, and finally settled down among us as if in his own home,
and it seemed that he was on the point of declaring himself; but they
remarked this, and served him at the table with black soup.39 It may very
well be that the Pantler's daughter had taken a fancy to the Soplica, but
that she kept it a deep secret from her parents.

"Those were the times of Kosciuszko; my lord supported the Constitution of
the Third of May,40 and was already gathering the gentry in order to go to
the aid of the Confederates, when suddenly the Muscovites encircled the
castle by night; there was barely time t