CHAPTER LXXII.
Old Matsko had divined the truth clearly, but only half of it. In fact one part of Zbyshko's life had ended completely. Whatever the young knight thought of Danusia, he grieved for her, but he said to himself that she must be happier in the court of heaven than she had been at the court of Prince Yanush. He had grown inured to the idea that she was no longer in the world; he had become familiar with it, and considered that the position could not be changed in any way. When in Cracow he had admired immensely the figures of sacred virgins outlined on glass and framed in lead on church windows. These figures were colored and gleaming in the sunlight, and now he imagined Danusia as being just like them. He saw her transparent, heavenly, turned toward him in profile, with palms placed together, and eyes uplifted, or he saw her playing on a lute among a host of celestial musicians, who in heaven play to the Holy Mother and the Divine Infant. There was nothing earthly in her now; to his mind she had become a spirit so pure and disembodied that when at times he remembered how Danusia had served the princess at the hunting-lodge, how she had laughed and conversed, how she had sat down at the table with others, he was filled as it were with wonder that such things could be. During his expedition with Vitold, when questions of warfare and battles had swallowed his attention, he ceased to yearn for his celestial one as a man yearns for a woman, and thought of her only as a devotee thinks of his patron saint. In this way his love, by losing gradually earthly elements, changed more and more into what was only a remembrance, sweet and pure as the sky itself, and became simply religious reverence.
Had he been a man of frail body and deeper thought he would have become a monk, and in the calm life of a cloister would have preserved that heavenly reminiscence as something sacred till the moment in which his soul could fly from the shackles of its body into endless space, just as a bird rushes forth from its cage. But the third decade of his years had begun not long before; he was able to squeeze with his fist the sap out of green chips and could so press
