For the Right. Karl Emil Franzos

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      The lawyer no doubt could have given an answer to this question--a sad, painful answer--but somehow he felt he had better be silent. He contented himself with assuring this man, who seemed a very child in the ways of the world, that he would not fail in his most faithful endeavour, and set about the matter at once, moved by a feeling he scarcely could analyse. The appeal was on its way to the upper court at Lemberg before Taras and his servant had reached their upland home.

      They were nearing the Pruth in the evening of the following day when the sound of bells came floating towards them, and a red glow appeared through the dusk where the ground sloped away in the direction of Prinkowce. "Something on fire!" cried the man, pulling up the horses.

      Taras peered through the twilight, and, bowing his head, he crossed himself piously. "Drive on," he said; "it is the torches at the cemetery. They are burying the pope."

      And it was so. Father Martin had died that morning, and they were laying him to his rest already, as they are wont in the mountains. There was no great show of mourning, poor Praxenia's sorrow, perhaps, being the only honest sadness evoked. "Ah!" she kept sobbing, "if it were not for that sermon, he might be here to conduct his own funeral! It is the sermon he died of, and not old age, as the apothecary said." But the peasants had their own idea concerning the cause of his death. "It is the wretched schnaps Avrumko has introduced," they said. "If the rascal gave us unwatered stuff, we might live a hundred years, like our fathers before us."

      Slight as the feeling of mourning was, it ye sufficed to turn the people's thoughts into a different channel, the loss of the pope thus acting as a palliative to the loss of the law-suit; and the question who should be Father Martin's successor was discussed with real interest. It was not mere curiosity which stirred them, for in the person of the pope a good deal of a parish's fate is bound up in those parts, and the congregation has no voice in the matter. They can but wait and see. But the men of Zulawce were soon relieved of any anxiety, and had every reason to be satisfied.

      Not a mouth had passed when the desolate manse once more was inhabited, and it was a young pope who had come to pitch his pastoral tent in the upland parish, having till then been curate-in-charge of Borkowka, a village in the plain. Leo Woronczuk was his name, and it spoke well for him that his late parishioners accompanied him in procession as far as the wooden bridge over the Pruth, where Taras, at the head of the peasants, stood waiting to receive him. But what pleased his new flock more than anything was the fact that the stalwart young shepherd did not arrive singly, but with a blooming wife--the most good-natured of popadjas, to all appearance--and three round-cheeked, chubby little boys. For the Galician peasants are apt to be prejudiced against a pope who is either a bachelor or a widower, or, worse still, a monk of the Order of St. Basil, thinking it impossible for such a one to enter into the every-day joys and sorrows of his people, or to understand their more earthly needs.

      Now, Father Leo had a heart for these things, and this not only because he himself was blessed with a wife and three jolly little boys! He was no brilliant star in the theological heavens, no paragon of superhuman virtues; he was a simple village priest--a man among men--with warm-hearted sympathies; and if his intellectual horizon did not extend immeasurably beyond that of his peasants, he at any rate had a clear-headed perception of all ordinary points and bearings within that sphere. It was not without diffidence that he accepted his new charge, influenced chiefly by the peremptory need of income, his late curacy having been sadly inadequate in this respect, considering the growing wants of his family; and, if the truth must be told, the bad reputation of that upland parish, which might have tempted a priestly soul of more enthusiastic ambition, only tended to discourage him; he, poor man, not feeling himself divinely commissioned to make up for the many years' failings of his predecessor. He would far rather have been called to shepherd a people of a less demoralised kind than appeared to be the case here, where a number of men, on the very face of things, were guilty of wilful perjury. But once having accepted the charge devolved upon him by his superiors, he had made up his mind, like a brave man, to do his duty as best he could, be it pleasant or otherwise.

      And he made it his first aim to look into the apparent want of integrity among the people; to discover, if possible, who might be trusted and who not. He set about it quietly, without thrusting himself into people's confidence; nor did he think it necessary to frighten them into a higher state of morality by firing their imagination with grievous accounts of the punishment to come. His sermons were peculiarly simple, suitable in every way to the hearers' daily life--"a peasant almost could preach like that," said the people when he had dismissed them without once thumping the pulpit. But they discovered by degrees that, if his eloquence did not come down upon them thunderously, there was that in his words which might cling to them like good and sensible advice; while, on the other hand, he, not a little to his joy, could see that these people, after all, were not so black as they had been painted. Leaving the one vice out of the question, which in that country is as common as air and water--the wretched tendency to drunkenness--the worst these highlanders could be accused of was their defiant spirit so apt to break out into violence.

      The pope soon found that they were not without a conscience, and that they had a true feeling of right and wrong, though it might be somewhat dulled by the unpruned egotistical instincts of human nature left to its own luxuriance. Not many weeks had passed before Father Leo was sure in his own mind which had been the perjured party on that fatal day in September, but he avoided individual accusation. Nor was it more than a moral certainty with him, as though he could take his oath that the black cross had not always stood in the centre of the contested field. But however strongly he felt in his honest mind that a vile wrong had been committed--robbing a poor, untaught, and easily misguided people not only of their property but, what was worse, of their good conscience--he yet repressed his wrath, and never by word or look showed the mandatar how entirely he abhorred him. Nor was this reserve the outcome of mere selfish prudence, but rather of a wise perception that he could do more for the furthering of right and justice and the peace of his people in thus forcing the miscreant at the manor house to observe a show of good will.

      Hajek, indeed, was deceived. He thought he had taken the measure of the new pope in believing him to be an honest but rather blockheaded parson, whom he treated accordingly with a certain amount of flattery, and even of deference. The mandatar would graciously yield a point whenever Father Leo, on behalf of the people, petitioned for a respite, or even for the lessening of an irksome tribute, assuring him that he was quite as anxious as himself to maintain the peace of the parish. The fact was, that while the suit yet hung in the balance, and a further examining of witnesses was a prospect to be dreaded, it was important that the village priest should think of him as an honourable man, not prone to harsh dealings, far less to open violence, or such a thing as an instigation to perjury.

      Thus Taras by degrees found an unexpected ally in the pope, nay more, a true-hearted friend. The saddened man would not have looked for such happiness, and when the unsought gift had come to him he met it almost timorously. It was a good honest friendship which sprang up between these two equally honourable, yet entirely different natures; but a friendship which, for all its truth, left the last word unspoken, because neither of them, whatever their mutual sympathy, was able to enter into, the inmost depth of the other's being.

      But the more the pope saw of the judge, the greater was his joy at having met such a man upon earth, a man so guileless and spotless, in whom selfishness was not, who seemed guided only by his own sense of justice and duty, and whose strength was the outcome of his great faith in the moral equity upholding this structure of a world. "A true, godly man," the pope would say to himself; but somehow the heretical thought would follow, "Why, this man does not even need the Christian's belief in a future life in order to be what he is." This feeling could not but breed certain doubts, but it did not lessen his hearty admiration of his friend's purity of nature, nor his longing to help him. He did what he could to ease the heavy burden of his dealings with the mandatar, coming forward as a mediator СКАЧАТЬ