He looked in at several huts in this way, and with the same result. As a last resource, and to leave no drop of pain and humiliation untasted, he went to see Matthew. But the man was not in; and his mother at once, and from the very threshold, stormed at him and drove him out like a dog. He answered not a word, nor did he indeed feel any resentment now; for the time, all bitterness had left him. He plodded on slowly through the darkness, stopping at times to look around him on the village, bright with many a lighted window, at which, and at the lowly huts that rose on every side, he gazed in bewilderment, as though he had never seen them before. In those hedgerows, those orchards, those lights, resided a strange spell, which somehow chained him to the spot. It was incomprehensible, but he experienced a resistless power that had seized hold of him and bound him to the land—which made him bow his neck to the yoke, and filled him with an inexplicable dread. He eyed those lamplit windows, and terror possessed his soul. They were all watching him, he thought; they were peering at him, following him, to fetter and enslave him with adamantine chains. He was no longer able to flee, nor to move, nor to cry out. He leaned back against a tree; and there, crushed with anguish, he listened ... and heard—from all the homesteads, the shadows around them, the fields, nay, even the heavens themselves—those same words of pitiless condemnation, now ratified by the whole population of Lipka! “It is just! it is just!” he said, huskily, humbled to the dust, and from the inmost depths of his miserable heart, struck with mortal fear of that almighty Power—the Voice of the Many. By degrees all the lights went out, and the village fell asleep. It drizzled still, and drops pattered from the drooping trees. Occasionally a dog would utter a short bark, in the midst of the stillness that reigned everywhere. Then Antek, returning to complete consciousness, suddenly started to his feet. “Yes, he spoke justly; he said the truth as it was in him. But I will not let the other go scot-free—not I! Blood of a dog! whatever happens, he shall pay!” His words were a frenzied shriek, and he shook his fist at Lipka and at the whole world. Settling his cap on his head, he made again for the tavern. CHAPTER XIII Spring was drawing nigh. March had come, with its own most foul weather—quagmiry, chilly, foggy; with its daily falls of sleet, its daily thick, shaggy, dingy mists, creeping along over the fields, and quenching all light so thoroughly that the whole day, from grey dawn to dusky twilight, was equally dark. Or, if at rare intervals the sun peered, half drowned, out of those sombre abysses, it was but for the space of one Ave Maria; and ere one’s soul could rejoice in the splendour, one’s body in the warmth of it, down came the dusk once more upon the world, down swept the winds afresh, and the “fog and filthy air” resumed their reign.