"Forwards!" spluttered old Hackelberg, "avenge my poor child. Mow them down!"
Outside, in the market-place, the whole population of the village was assembled. Even babies in swaddling-clothes had been snatched out of their cradles, and their squalling mingled with the babel of many tongues. The moon came out from behind some clouds, and shed a pale twilight on the scene. The church tower rose dark and forbidding against the sky, and the parsonage, too, remained silent and dark. The old veteran had kept his word. He heard and saw nothing of what was passing. A dark-red fiery glow appeared behind the cottages that lined the road to the river. Above the low roofs rose columns of thick black smoke. Like the reflection from a conflagration the purple vapour encroached on the pale dusk of the summer night.
With one accord the rabble took the path to the churchyard, which, a few yards from the last straggling houses, lay close to the street. There by the gate they would best be able to bar the way to the invaders. Those who had been in the war fell into rank and stood ready for action. As far as they were concerned, it would be a case of soldiers pitted against soldiers.
"Where is Merckel?" one of them exclaimed in astonishment, expecting to hear the lieutenant's word of command. "Where is Merckel?" was echoed in consternation from all sides.
But the feeling that he must be coming, and had only gone to arm himself, allayed any momentary suspicion of his having shirked the business at the last. The lurid glow drew nearer and nearer. Soon the eye could distinguish something black and square, framed as it were in flames.
"The coffin--the coffin!" the crowd exclaimed, and involuntarily shuddered. Then, suddenly--who began it no one knew--it was as if it had flashed across every brain at the same instant, in a booming chorus the mob set up the weird chorale--
"_Our noble Baron and Lord Of Schrandener's souls abhorred; For the shame he has brought on our head, O God, let the plague strike him dead_."
And the coffin advanced. Already the light from the torches shone on the faces of the singing mob, and women and children retreated screaming.
The crowd opened wide enough for the procession to pass on, and closed again behind it. Six men carried the coffin on their shoulders and swung flaming pine-branches in their disengaged hands, which scared the throng and made it draw to one side. Six others followed with loaded muskets. At their head Boleslav, with his pistols cocked in his hand, his military cap on the back of his head, piercing his antagonists with his burning gaze, cleared a road for his father's corpse. Deeper became the rent in the human vortex, thinner the space that divided the procession from the armed Schrandeners, who looked uneasily from side to side, conscious that they were leaderless.