by Ouida
‘All hail to my lord, and heaven be with him! The poor Maritza comes to give him back what he left.’
Prince Zabaroff smiled in a kindly manner, being a man often careless, but not cruel.
‘Nay, good mother, keep it, whatever it be: you have earned the right. Is it a jewel, you say?’
‘It is a jewel.’
‘Then keep it. I had forgotten even that I was ever here.’
‘Ay! the great lord had forgot.’
She rose up with the dust on her white hair, and thrust forward a young boy, and put her hands on the boy’s shoulders and made him kneel.
‘There is the jewel, Paul Ivanovitch. It is time the Gospodar kept it now.’
Paul Zabaroff did not understand. He looked down at the little serf kneeling in the dust.
‘A handsome child. May the land have many such to serve the Tsar. Is he your grandson, good mother?’
The boy was beautiful, with long curling fair hair and a rosy mouth, and eyes like the blue heavens in a night of frost. His limbs were naked, and his chest. He had a shirt of sheepskin.
Old Maritza kept her hands on the shoulders of the kneeling child.
‘He is thy son, O lord!’
‘My son!’
‘Ay. The lord has forgotten. The lord tarried but one night, but he bade my Sacha serve drink to him in his chamber, and on the morrow, when he left, Sacha wept. The lord has forgotten!’
Paul Zabaroff stood silent, slowly remembering. In the boy’s face looking up at him, half-sullenly, half-timidly, he saw the features of his own race mingled with something much more beautiful, oriental, and superb.
Yes: he had forgotten; quite forgotten; but he remembered now.
The people stood around, remembering better than he, but thinking it no wrong in him to have forgotten, because he was their ruler and lord, and did that which seemed right to him; and when he had gone away, in Sacha’s bosom there had been a thick roll of gold.
‘Where is — the mother?’ he said at length.
Old Maritza made answer:
‘My Sacha died four summers ago. Always Sacha hoped that the lord might some day return.’
Prince Zabaroff’s cheek reddened a little with pain.
‘Fool! why did you not marry her?’ he said with impatience. ‘There were plenty of men. I would have given more dowry.’
‘Sacha would not wed. What the lord had honoured she thought holy.’
‘Poor soul!’ muttered Paul Zabaroff; and he looked again at the boy, who bore his own face, and was as like him as an eaglet to an eagle.
‘Do you understand what we say?’
The boy answered sullenly, ‘I understand.’ ‘What is your name?’
‘I am Vassia.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘I do nothing.’
‘Are you happy?’
‘What is that? I do not know.’
Prince Zabaroff was silent.
‘Rise up, since you are my son,’ he said at length.
The boy rose.
He was sullen, shy, tameless, timid, like a young animal from the pine woods. The old woman took her hands off his shoulders.
‘I have delivered the jewel to the lord that owns it. I have done Sacha’s will.’
Then she turned herself round and covered her face, and went towards her home.
The child stood, half-fierce, half-fearful, like a dog which an old master drives away, and which fears the new one.
‘These jewels are as many as the sands of the sea, and as worthless,’ said Paul Zabaroff with a slight smile.
Nevertheless, he resolved, since Maritza spoke truth, that the boy should be cared for and well taught, and have all that gold could get for him, and be sent away out from Russia; for in Russia he was a serf.
The boy’s hair hung over his eyes, which were hungrily watching the dark lean figure of the woman as it went away through the tall corn to the white wood hut that stood alone in the fields. He dimly understood that his life was being changed for him, but how he knew not. He wanted to go home with Maritza to his nest of moss, where his bear-cubs slept with him by night and played with him at dawn.
‘Farewell,’ said Paul Zabaroff, and he touched his son’s cheek with his hand.
‘You are magnificently handsome, my poor child; indeed, who knows what you will be? — a jewel or only a toad’s eye?’ he said dreamily; then he sprang up behind his horses, and was borne away through the fast-falling shades of the evening, leaving behind him the boy Vassia and a little rough mound of nameless grass, which he had never seen, and which was Sacha’s grave.
The four fiery horses that bore the telegue dashed away with it in the sunlight, scattering the sand in yellow clouds, and the village on the Volga plains beheld its lord never more in life. The boy stood still, and looked after it with a sombre anger on his beautiful fair Circassian face.
‘You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia,’ said the men to him with envy. The child could not have expressed the vague mute wrath and shame that stirred together in him, but he turned from them without a word, and ran fleet as a roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He loved his great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost passion, though it was silent and almost unconscious of itself. She never checked him, beat him, or cursed him as the other women often did their children. She did her best by him, though they dwelt in a miserable little isba, that often in winter time was covered up with the snow like a bear’s hole, and in summer, the fierce brief parching summer of north-east Russia, was as hot as a scorched eye under a sun-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to him. He was loved and he was free: childhood wants nothing more; Maritza was a Persian woman. Years and years before, when she had been in her youth, she had come from the Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are alike alive with the leaping naphtha of the Ghebir worship: she had been born within the iron gates of Derbent, of Persian parentage, and she had known war and capture and violence, and had had many troubles, many privations, many miseries before she had found herself stranded in her old age, with her grandchild, in this little desolate village on the sand-bank by the Volga.
She was very poor; she had an evil reputation: nothing evil was ever really traced to her, but she had Oriental faiths and traditions and worshipped fire, or so said her enemies the black clergy of the scattered villages and their ready believers. Never did Maritza light a lamp at nightfall, but her neighbours saw in the act a devil worship.
She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor; she was hated accordingly. When her granddaughter Sacha bore a child that was the offspring of Prince Paul Zabaroff, though she cursed him, the neighbours envied her and begrudged her such an honour.
Maritza had brought up the young Vassia with little tenderness, yet with a great yearning over the boy, with his pure Persian face and his beautiful fair body, like a pearl. The uttermost she wished for him was that he should grow up a raftsman or a fisherman on the Volga water; all that she dreaded was that the Kossacks would take him and put a lance in his hand and have him slain in war, as in the old stern days of her youth her lovers had been taken by the battle-god, that devoured them one by one, and her sons after them.
She never gave a thought to the boy’s parentage as of possible use to him, but she always said to herself, ‘If Paul Zabaroff ever come back, then shall he know his son,’ and meanwhile the boy was happy, though he had not known the meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny Volga in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts go down it, and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which took the condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a gang of such captives would go by on foot and chained; miserable exceedingly, wounded, exhausted, doomed to twelve months’ foot-sore travel ere they reached the endless darkness of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual frost. He watched them; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity nor pity as he lay on the tall rough grass, and they moved by him on the dusty, flint-strewn,
ill-made road towards that chain of blue hills which marked their future home and their eternal grave. For sport the boy had the bear, the wolf, the blue fox, the wild hare, in the long wintertime; in the brief summer he helped chase the pelican and the swan along the sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves. He was keen of eye and swift of foot: the men of his native village were always willing to have his company, child though he was. He was fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder still of sport; once he risked his own life to save a stork and her nest on a burning roof. When asked why he did it, he who choked the cygnet and snared the cub, he could not say: he was ashamed of his own tenderness.
He wanted no other life than this rude freedom, but one day, a month or more after Paul Zabaroff had passed through the country, there came to the door of Maritza’s hut a stranger, who displayed to her eyes, which could not read, a letter with the Prince’s seal and signature. He said: ‘I am sent to take away the boy who is called Vassia.’
The Persian woman bowed her head as before a headsman’s glaive.
‘It is the will of God,’ she said.
But the time came when Vassia, grown to man’s estate, thought that devils rather than gods had meddled with him then.
‘Send him to a great school; send him out of Russia; spare no cost; make him a gentleman,’ Paul Zabaroff had said to his agents when he had seen the son of Sacha, and he had been obeyed. The little fierce half-naked boy who in frost was wrapped in wolf-fur and looked like a little wild beast, had been taken from the free, headstrong, barbaric life of the Volga plains, where he was under no law and knew no rule, and passionately loved the river and the chase, and the great silent snow-wrapt world of his birth, and was sent to a famous and severe college near Paris, to the drill, and the class, and the uniform, and the classic learning, and the tape-bound, hard, artificial routine of mechanical education. The pride, of the Oriental and the subtlety of the Slav were all he brought with him as arms in the unequal combat with an unsympathetic crowd.
For a year’s time he was insulted, tormented, ridiculed; in another twelve months he was let alone; in a third year he was admired and feared. All the while his heart was bursting within him with the agony of home-sickness and revolt; but he gave no sign of either. Only at nights, when the others of his chamber were all sleeping, he would slip out of bed and stare up at the stars, which did not look the same as he had known, and think of Maritza and of the bear-cubs, and of the Volga’s waters bearing the wild white swans upon their breast; and then he would sob his very soul out in silence.
He had been entered upon the books of the college under the name of Vassia Kazán; Kazán having been the place at which he had been baptised, the golden-domed, many-towered, half Asiatic city which was seen afar off from the little square window in Maritza’s hut. High influence and much gold had persuaded the principal of a great college — the Lycée Clovis, situated between Paris and Versailles — not to inquire too closely into the parentage of this beautiful little savage from the far north. Russia still remains dim, distant, and mysterious to the western mind; among his tutors and comrades it was taken for granted that he was some young barbarian noble, and the child’s own lips were shut as close as if the ice of his own land had frozen them.
Eight years later, on another day when wheat was ripe and willows waved in summer sunshine, a youth lay asleep with his head on an open Lucretius in the deserted playground of a French college. The place of recreation was a dusty gravelled square; there were high stone walls all round it, and a few poplars stood in it white with dust. It was August, and all the other scholars were away; he alone had been forgotten; he was used to being forgotten. He was not dull or sorrowful, as other lads are when left in vacation time alone. He had many arts and pastimes, and he was a scholar by choice, if a capricious one, and he had a quick and facile tact which taught him how to have his own way always; and on many a summer night, when his teachers believed him safe sleeping, he was out of college, and away dancing and singing and laughing at students’ halls, and in the haunts of artists, and at the little theatre beyond the barrier, and he had never been found out, and would have cared but little if he had been. And he slept now with his fair forehead leaning on Lucretius, and a drowsy, heavy heat around him, filled with the hum of flies and gnats. He did not dream of the heat and the insects; he did not even dream of the saucy beauty at the barrier ball the night before, who had kicked cherries out of his mouth with her blue-shod feet, and kissed him on his curls. He dreamt of a little, low, dark hut; of an old woman that knelt before a brazen image; of slumbering bear-cubs in a nest of hay; of a winter landscape, white and shining, that stretched away in an unbroken level of snow to the sea that half the year was ice. He dreamed of these, and, dreaming, sighed and woke. He thought he stood on the frozen sea, and the ice broke, and the waters swallowed him.
It was nothing; only the voice of his tutor calling him. He was summoned to the Principal of the Lycée: a rare honour. He rose, a slender, tall, beautiful youth, in the dark close-fitting costume of the institute. He shook the dust off his uniform and his curls, shut his book, and went within the large white prison-like building which had been his home since he had left the lowly isba among the sandhills and the blowing corn by Volga.
The Principal was sitting in one of his private chambers, a grim, dark, book-lined chamber; he held an open letter in his hand, which he had read and re-read. He was a clever man, and unscrupulous and purchasable; but he was not without feeling, and he was disquieted, for he had a painful office to fulfil.
When the youth obeyed his summons he looked up and shaded his eyes with his hand. He hesitated, looking curiously at the young man’s attitude, which had an easy grace in it, and some hauteur visible under a semblance of respect.
The Principal took up the open letter: ‘I regret, I grieve, to tell you,’ he said slowly, ‘your patron and friend, the Prince Zabaroff, has died suddenly!’
The face of Vassia Kazán grew very pale, but very cold. He said nothing.
‘He died quite suddenly,’ continued the director of the college; ‘a blood-vessel broke in the brain, after great fatigue in hunting; he was upon one of his estates in White Russia.’
The son of Paul Zabaroff was still silent. His master wished that he would show some emotion.
‘It was he who placed you here — was at all costs for your education. I suppose you are aware of that?’ he continued, with some embarrassment.
Vassia Kazán bowed and still said nothing. He might have been made of ice or of marble for any sign that he gave. He might only have heard that an unknown man had died in the street.
‘You were placed here by him — at least, by his agents; you were the son of a dead friend, they said. I did not inquire closer — payments were always made in advance.’
He passed his hand a little confusedly over his eyes, for he felt a little shame; his college was of high repute, and the agents of Prince Zabaroff had placed sums in his hands, to induce him to deviate from his rules, larger than he would have cared to confess.
The boy was silent.
‘If he would only speak!’ thought his master. ‘He must know — he must know.’
But the son of the dead Zabaroff did not speak.
‘I am sorry to say,’ resumed his master, still with hesitation, ‘I am very sorry to say that the death of the Prince being thus sudden and thus unforeseen, his agents write me that there are no instructions, no arrangement, no testament, in short — you will understand what I mean; you will understand that, in point of fact, there is nothing for you, there is no one to pay anything any longer.’
He paused abruptly; the fair face of the boy grew a shade paler, that was all. He bore the shock without giving any sign.
‘Is he made of ice and steel?’ thought the old man, who had been proud of him as his most brilliant pupil.
‘It pains me to give you such terrible intelligence,’ he muttered; ‘but it is my duty not to conceal it an hour. You are quit
e — penniless. It is very sad.’
The boy smiled slightly; it was not a smile for so young a face.
‘He has given me learning; he need not have done that,’ he said carelessly. The words sounded grateful, but it was not gratitude that glanced from his eyes.
‘I believe I am a serf in Russia?’ he added, after a short silence.
‘I do not know at all,’ muttered the Principal, who felt ill at ease and ashamed of himself for having taken for eight years the gold of Prince Paul.
‘I cannot tell — lawyers would tell you — I am not sure at all; indeed, I know nothing of your history; but you are young and friendless. You are a brilliant scholar, but you are not fit for work. What will you do, my poor lad?’
The boy did not respond to the kindness that was in the tone, and he resented the pity there was in it.
‘That will be my affair alone,’ he said, still carelessly and very haughtily.
‘All is paid up to the New Year,’ said his master, feeling restless and dissatisfied. ‘There is no haste — I would not turn you from my roof. You are a brilliant classic — you might be a teacher here, perhaps?’
The youth smiled; then he said coldly:
‘You are very good. I had better go away at once. I should wish to be away before the others return.’
‘But where will you go?’ said the old man, staring at him with a dull and troubled surprise.
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
‘The world is large — at least it looks so when one has not been over it. Can you tell me who inherits from Prince Paul Zabaroff?’
‘His eldest son by his marriage with a Princess Kourouassine. If he had only left some will, some sort of command or direction — perhaps if I wrote to the Princess, and told her the facts, she—’
‘Pray do not do that,’ said the boy coldly. ‘I thank you for all I have learned here, and I will leave your house to-night. Farewell to you, sir.’
The boy’s eyes were dry and calm; the old man’s were wet and dim. He rose hurriedly, and laid aside his stern habit of authority for a moment, as he put his hand on the lad’s shoulder.