King Stakh's Wild Hunt

But she suddenly buried her face in her hands and began to sob. Upon my word of honour, my heart bled. I couldn't help it. I have an inexcusable and deep compassion for people.

I don't remember the words I found to comfort her. I must say, dear reader, that up to this point in my story, I have been a severe realist. You must know that I do not very much like novels in the spirit of Madam Radcliffe, and would be the first to disbelieve, were anybody to tell me the things that took place later on. And therefore the tone of my story is going to change sharply.

Believe me, were this a product of my imagination, I'd have invented something entirely different. My taste is good, I hope, but not a single novelist who has self-respect would dare to offer serious people anything like it.

But I am relating the simple truth, I mustn't lie. It touches me personally, is too important for me. Therefore I shall tell everything just as it happened.

We were sitting silent for some time; the fire was dying out and darkness had settled in the corners of the enormous room when I looked at her and was frightened: so wide were her eyes, so strangely bent her head. And her lips so pale, they were invisible.

“Don't you hear anything?”

I listened. My hearing is very good, but only after a minute did I hear what she heard.

Somewhere in the corridor, to our left, the parquet was creaking under someone's footsteps.

Someone was walking through the long, endless passages, and the steps now quieted down, now were heard again, — tap, tap, lap… went those stamping feet.

“Miss Nadzieja, what on earth's the matter with you? What's happened?”

“Let me be!.. It's that Little Man! He's here again!.. He is after my soul!”

From all this I understood only that somebody was amusing himself with stupid jokes, that somebody was frightening a woman. I paid no attention when she seized me by the sleeve in an attempt to hold me back. I grabbed the poker from the fireplace and rushed off down the steps into the corridor. This took only a moment and I opened the door with my foot.

The tremendous corridor was half in darkness, but I could very well see that no one was there. Nobody was there! Only the footsteps were there, they sounded as previously, somewhat uncertain, but quite loud. They were near me, but little by little they moved farther on to the other end of the corridor.

What could I do? Fight an invisible person? I knew that would come to naught, but I thrust the poker straight into the space where I heard the steps. The poker cut the emptiness and with a ring fell to the floor.

Funny? At that moment, as you may guess, I was far from laughing. In answer to my vainglorious knightly thrust something groaned, then two, three steps — and silence reigned.

Only now did I remember that my hostess was alone in that tremendous, poorly-lit room and hastened back to her.

I had expected to find her unconscious, gone mad with fright, to have died, anything except what I did see. Janoŭskaja was standing at the fireplace, her face severe, gloomy, almost calm, with that same incomprehensible expression in her eyes.

“In vain you rushed off there,” she said. “Of course, you saw nothing. I know, because only I see him and sometimes the housekeeper does, too. And Bierman has seen him.”

“Who is ‘he’?”

“The Little Man of Marsh Firs.”

“But what is he, what does he want?”

“I don't know. But he appears when somebody in Marsh Firs must die a sudden death. He may walk a whole year, but in the end he'll get what he's after.”

“It's possible,” I joked unsuccessfully, “he'll walk another 70 years yet before your greatgrandchildren bury you.”

She threw back her head.

“I hate those who get married. And don't dare to jest on this subject. Eight of my ancestors perished in this way, — they are only those about whom we possess notes, and the Little Man is always mentioned there.”

“Miss Janoŭskaja, don't worry, but our ancestors believed, by the way, in witches, too. And there have always been people ready to swear they had seen them.”

“And my father? My father? This was not notes, this I heard, this I saw myself. My father was an atheist, but he believed in the Little Man, even he believed until the very day when the Wild Hunt put an end to him. I hear him, you understand? Here you cannot convince me. These steps were heard in our castle almost every day before my father's death.”