Part 53 (2/2)

Not long afterwards came the cracking thunderbolts flas.h.i.+ng and flaming as if they would flog the earth with a thousand fiery whips, while one perpendicular flash of lightning plumped right down into the middle of the town, shaking the earth with its cracking concussion, so that everyone believed the hour of judgment was at hand.

Nevertheless the storm had scattered the clouds, and by eventide the sky had cleared, and lo! before the eyes of the gaping mult.i.tude a gigantic comet stood in the firmament, all the more startling as n.o.body had been aware of its proximity because for three days the sky had been blotted out by clouds.

The nucleus of the comet stood just over the place where the sun had gone down, and the blood-red light of evening was not sufficient to dim the brightness of the lurid star; it appeared as if it had just slain the sun and was now bathing in its blood.

The comet was so long that it seemed to stretch across two-thirds of the firmament, and the end of it bulged out broadly like a Turkish scimitar.

”The sword of G.o.d!” whispered the people with instinctive fear.

For two weeks this phenomenon stood in the sky, rising late one day and early the next. Sometimes it appeared with the bright sun, and in the solar brightness it looked like a huge streak of blue enamel in the sky and spread around it a sort of febrile pallor as if the atmosphere itself were sick: on bright afternoons the sun could be regarded with the naked eye.

The people were in fear and terror at this extraordinary phenomenon, and when the blind ma.s.ses are in an unconscious panic then a storm is close at hand, then they are capable of anything to escape from their fear.

In those days the priests of every faith could give strange testimony of the general consternation which prevailed in Transylvania. The churches were kept open all day long, and the indefatigable curers of souls spoke words of consolation to the a.s.sembled hosts of the faithful. Magyari, the Prince's chaplain, preached four sermons every day in the cathedral, which was so crowded at such times that half the people could not get in at all but remained standing outside the doors.

One evening the church was so filled with faithful wors.h.i.+ppers that the very steps were covered with them, and all sorts of Klausenberg burgesses intermingled with travelling Szeklers in a group before the princ.i.p.al door, and after the hymn was finished they clapped to their clasped psalm-books and began to talk to each other while the sermon was going on inside.

”We live in evil times,” said an old master-tanner, shaking his big cap.

”We can say a word about that too,” interrupted a Szekler, who was up in town about a law-suit, and who seized the opportunity of saying what he knew because he had come from far.

”Then you also have seen the sword of G.o.d?” inquired a young man.

”Not only have we seen it, my little brother, but we have felt it also.

Not a single evening do we lay down to rest without reciting the prayers for the dead and dying, and scarce a night pa.s.ses but what we see the sky a fiery red colour, either on the right hand or to the left.”

”What would that be?”

”Some village or town burning to ashes. They say the whole kingdom is full of destroying angels; one never knows whose roof will be fired over his head next.”

”G.o.d and all good spirits guard us from it.”

”We hear all sorts of evil reports,” said a gingerbread baker.

”Yesterday I was talking to a Wallachian woman whose husband was faring on the Jaras-water on a raft taking cheese to Yorda. He was not a day's journey from his home when the Jaras turned, began to flow upwards, and took the Wallachian back to his house from which he had started.”

A listening clergyman here explained the matter by saying that the Aranyos, into which the Jaras flows, was greatly flooded just then, and it was its overflow which filled up the Jaras; in fact it was Divine Providence which brought the Wallachian back, for if he had been able to go on farther, the Tartars would certainly have fallen upon him and cut him to pieces.

”I have experienced everything in my time,” said the oldest of the burgesses, ”war, plague, flood and pestilence, but there's only one thing I am afraid of, and that is earthquake, for a man cannot even go to church to pray against that.”

At that moment the preacher in the church began to speak so loudly that those standing outside could hear his words, and, growing suddenly silent, they pressed nearer to the door of the church to hear what he was saying.

The right rev. Magyari was trouncing the gentlemen present unmercifully: ”G.o.d prepares to war against you, for ye also are preparing to war against Him. You have broken the peace ye swore to observe right and left, and ye shall have what you want, war without and war within, so that ye may be constrained to say: 'Enough, enough, O Lord!' and ye shall not see the end of what you have so foolishly begun.”

Magyari already knew that Teleki, at the Diet of Szamosujvar, had announced the impending war.

Just at this very time two men of the patrician order in sable kalpags were seen approaching, in whom the Klausenbergers at once recognised Michael Teleki and Ladislaus Vajda, and so far as they were able they made room for them to get into the church through the crowd; but the Szekler did not recognise either of them, and when Ladislaus Vajda very haughtily shoved him aside with his elbows, he turned upon him and said:

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