At the head of the procession rode one to whom they looked up with awe and affection, and whose brief and not unfriendly words of command they obeyed with almost childlike zeal. It was Boleslav, who came with this little army to reconquer his own territory.
He had recruited it far away in the Lithuanian East, on the remotest border of the province, whither neither good nor evil reports of the name of Schranden had ever penetrated. During his five years' previous intercourse with this people, he had become intimately acquainted with their habits and customs, and took care to choose his pioneers from those who had been in the war, and become accustomed to the rigours of a soldier's life, but who were still unfamiliar enough with the German tongue to have their minds poisoned by the Schrandeners' gossip.
Now he had every hope that the fate of his father, who had failed to find either serf or labourer to bind himself to work for him, would not be his. And should the Schrandeners offer fight to these workpeople, as they had done to the Polish serfs whom his father had been obliged to call to his assistance, so much the worse for the Schrandeners; they would only be sent home with bleeding noses.
In proud self-reliance he looked coming events in the face. He would willingly have returned home earlier, only, to prosecute his enterprise on the scale it demanded, he was forced to wait till the time in which he could claim his aunt's legacy, and so have the necessary means at his disposal.
He had lived through hard times since that January night, when, to flee the coercion of his hot young blood, he had dashed out into the snow-clad, moon-illumined landscape, followed by the cries of the unhappy woman who could not understand what ailed him.
It was long before the furnace within him abated, and her beseeching, frightened eyes became dimmer in his memory. In Königsberg, where he had gone direct from home, he had meditated obtaining, through boldly seeking a trial, that justice long denied to his house. But though the cross on his breast compelled the doors that had been shut on his father to open to him, the polite shrug of the shoulders with which the judges promised to see what could be done, and then coolly referred him to one Court of Appeal after another, taught him that the passionate self-surrender he had dreamed of would be here ill-timed and out of place.