fortunately very mild and perfectly still; there was not a breath of
wind. The inhabitants of the village had been asleep a long time; now
and then there was the noise of the barking of a dog tied to the
door-sill of some cabin, the hoarse song of the cocks who kept watch
over the village, and in the distance the cry of the night birds,--owls
and screech-owls,--as they answered each other like vigilant guards on
sentry duty. The old man and the child passed through the village in
silence; they reached the crossroads, crossed themselves before the
great crucifix set up on the spot, and took by chance the road which
crossed a vast region of marshes and bare brush-wood, beyond which one
entered the wood leading to Lithuania. Prudence obliged them to avoid
open roads; nevertheless, it was important to go in some certain
direction. Iermola, who formerly had been an excellent hunter, easily
succeeded in finding his way in the midst of a forest, guiding himself
now by the light of the sky and now by the mosses on the trees. In the
daytime he knew that he could easily succeed in not getting lost; but
he scarcely thought it possible during the night, and not on the beaten
road,--to keep the same direction. He therefore turned into a narrow
pathway leading to a pitch-kiln situated about a mile off, in a
clearing called Smolna, and resolved to follow it until daylight, when
he would leave it and turn to the north through the coppices and bogs.
The two walked on in silence, each praying in a low voice. Radionek
seemed born again. He held his head up joyfully; he supported Iermola;
and when they reached the protecting forest which surrounded them with
its undergrowth and concealed them with its shadows, they both began to
breathe more freely.
"Oh, good father," said the young refugee, "two, three, five days more
perhaps, of patience, fatigue, and effort, and we shall come to some
place in the open fields where we can settle down and be quiet. No one
will know us; no one will hunt for us. We shall have enough bread; I
saw that you put it in your sack. We shall not be obliged to go into
the villages; there is water in the woods, and we shall not die of
thirst even if we have to suck the leaves on the trees. During the day
we will rest, we will sleep on the thick brakes; and we will walk all
night and early in the morning."
The old man sighed as he listened to him, for he knew very well that
all this was neither so simple nor so easy; he did not wish to frighten
the child, but he said to himself that the strength of both of them
would doubtless give out, and that in the woods they were exposed to
face a thousand dangers, and meet with a thousand obstacles. Some one
passing, meeting the two fugitives, might arrest them and turn them
over to justice. Thoughts like this, and others still more sad, crushed
the old man's spirit; but he forced himself to smile and say nothing,
and listened to the joyous babble and tender outpourings of the child,
who had been so long deprived of such enjoyment that now he could not
be satisfied, and his old father had not the strength to undeceive him
or tell him to be silent.
The fear of being surprised had doubtless quickened their pace, for
long before daylight they reached the clearing of Smolna, where the
path stopped. From there no beaten road could be seen through the
undergrowth, which was literally ploughed down in every direction by
the wheels of the wagons of the peasants who came there for wood and
resin torches.
Day had scarcely dawned; the road became more and more rugged and
difficult. The old man determined to make a halt, knowing very well
that no one would come to look for them in that place. They lighted a
fire with boughs and some coal picked up near the kiln; and Radionek,
full of joy, stretched himself at the old man's feet.
"No, no," said he, "they will not look for me; they are not even sorry
I am gone. Do you suppose I am at all necessary to them? They never
have understood me; and I never have been able to comprehend them. My
mother has Wladzio; my father has Wladzio. They will be happier without
me in the house."
Here, however, he could not help sighing.
"However, some day," he continued, "after a while,--after a long
while,--I shall go to see my mother again. But now I should suffer too
much, living with them; I do not like to think of it even. I should
surely die of grief. There I was shut up all alone; no one ever talked
to me as you used to talk to me, father. They were always telling me,
whatever I did, that I had the manners of a peasant; that peasants did
so and so. Yes, it is true, I am a peasant; they,--they are masters and
lords. My little brother Wladzio is the only one I regret; he already
began to know me, and smiled so sweetly on me as he would hold out his
arms for me."
"My dear child," said Iermola, "do not talk in that way. Perhaps at
this moment they are weeping over there and cursing me. You break my
heart; you make me remember that I have betrayed them."
"Ah, well! let us talk about our happy life in Popielnia, father. Do
you remember the time when we used to make our porringers, our little
dishes, and when we went with Chwedko to the fair, and how astonished
and pleased you were when we succeeded with our first glazed pitchers?"
"Ah, those days will never come again," sighed the old man.
"Why should they never return? I have forgotten nothing,--nothing at
all. It was useless for them to forbid me over there; I used, in
secret, to make little pots and porringers of the clay Iwaneck would
bring me, and I know still how to glaze dishes and other things. We
will build a kiln; you will see how we will work."
Talking thus, they both fell asleep; and when the song of the oriole
which was warbling above their heads aroused them from their slumber,
it was broad day, but under the trees hung a thick, damp fog.
The old man rose quickly; the child followed him; and they began to
travel northward, guiding themselves by the thick mosses which grew on
the trunks of the trees.
Although our great forests have been in some places greatly diminished,
frequently cleared, and often half cut down and partly destroyed, the
heart of them still recalls the majesty of the early ages of the world;
here the coppices are so thick and the brakes so impenetrable that one
finds the greatest difficulty in going through them.
Here the wild beast has his lair, where he hears no murmur but that of
the giant trees which shelter him at their feet. The great waving
branches, broken down by the winds, are thrown up in heaps and rot in
great mounds, overgrown with mosses and pale grasses; the wild hop-vine
crowns them, and running plants cover them with their interlacing
tendrils.
Here and there, under a thick bed of dry, half-rotten leaves, flows a
black-looking brook, bearing with it dead grasses and the remains of
other plants.
Sometimes it spreads itself and forms a large pond of stagnant water
and moving mud, in the midst of which grow water-lilies and rushes;
farther on, it again contracts and runs in a narrow, miry bed,
interrupted by unevenness of the land, hummocks of turf, and trunks of
trees.
These gloomy coppices are succeeded by rude clearings and fields of
small extent. Here, the opening seems wider and less savage; there
young shrubs grow thickly; farther on, marshes and thickets appear; and
at last you see the open fields.
The gloomiest places in these wild forests are those where fire has
devastated them, leaving deep traces of its ravages. Great trunks still
stand, dry and blackened; the branches of the pine-trees put out sad,
yellow-looking leaves; scanty, miserable grass begins to cover the
ground.
Sometimes the flight of a bird breaks this awful silence; a squirrel
leaps and makes the boughs of an oak-tree bend; a hungry raven goes by
cawing; a black swan darts into the thickest part of the forest, or a
startled deer bounds over the tall grasses. Then the woods fall again
into their majestic, eternal sleep.
The deeper you penetrate, the fewer traces you find of man's passage.
At first there is a road, then a path, and farther on broken bushes,
trodden grass, a tree cut down, trails of yellow chips in places where
beams have been hewn, a hut where hunters have been on the watch, the
cabin of a sentinel, the trench of a charcoal-burner, the ashes of a
shepherd's fire; then one sees only the traces of animals, then no
traces of anything, for the wild animal leaves few traces behind him
when he has passed by.
On the second day of their journey, when they began to go deeper into
the heart of the forest, which stretched toward the north like a great
green sea, they only at rare intervals came upon any indications of the
passage of man. The silence was universal and profound; and it was rare
that the noise of the woodman's axe, resounding in the distance,
obliged them to withdraw rapidly from the direction whence the sound
came.
The old man, guiding himself by inspecting the mosses and the part of
the sky whence the light came, continued to go northward. They neither
saw nor encountered any one; and toward evening they stopped on a
little rising ground, shadowed by such thickly growing pine-trees and
hazel-nut bushes that they could allow themselves boldly to light a
fire without fear of being betrayed by the smoke or by the crackling of
the flames.
Iermola then declared that they were too far from Malyczki for any one
to discover any trace of them. Their feet, in fact, had left no
impression upon the slippery, moss-covered ground under the sombre dome
of the pines; chance alone could put the pursuers on their track.
The two travellers were extremely tired; so after having eaten a bit of
dry bread and drank out of the hollow of their hands some water from
the brook in the forest, they stretched themselves on the ground near
their fire, which sent up a clear red flame. Iermola roasted a few
potatoes which he had brought with him; and this was their evening
meal.
Radionek appeared happy all the time, but now he scarcely talked at
all. His breath seemed to fail him sometimes; for having been a long
time accustomed to an indoor life, he could with difficulty endure such
a rapid march.
A wandering blackbird, roused by the crackling of the flames, wished
them good-evening; a light breeze, passing over the summits of the
pines, awoke vague murmurs in the depths of the forest. Then all was
hushed; and a solemn silence began to reign again over the immense and
gloomy forest.
The third day they came to woods less thick, where the trees grew
smaller; low, tangled brush-wood took the place of the old trees of
pine and oak; the earth was damper, softer, and more thickly covered
with verdure.
They comprehended that they were coming to the low and often inundated
regions; they would have to go along the edge of some vast marshes, for
here and there they perceived at a distance large tracts covered with
mud, interspersed with salt-water ponds.
It became impossible to follow the direction they had at first chosen;
but as they had still some bread, and as their strength seemed not yet
in danger of giving out, Iermola determined to turn a little to the
left so as to avoid encountering the marshes. Radionek, quite restored,
proposed to seek a frequented road, follow it, stop in the nearest
village, and afterward go on fearlessly into the interior of the
country; but Iermola did not yet dare thus to tempt fortune. Choosing,
therefore, the more elevated land, across the clearings of brakes and
brush-wood, they walked on in the solitude three more days, when at the
end of the last day the old man, as they stopped for rest, remarked
such a change in the child's face that he was seriously alarmed, and
resolved to run the risk and look for the public road himself.
In fact, poor Radionek could hardly walk any longer; his courage alone
kept him on his feet and supplied his strength. Unaccustomed to fatigue
and labour, exposed thus to constant exertion just after a long
illness, he was every moment in danger of fainting away and never
rising again.
He was pale and oppressed, and complained of a great heaviness in his
head. Soon he fell into a deep, heavy sleep, from which Iermola could
scarcely rouse him.
It was then necessary to seek for help, to find men, a shelter, a
village; and in the mean time, as our travellers had just come across a
wood-cutter's hut on the road, Iermola pretended to be weary, and
proposed to stop, although the day was not nearly ended.
The portion of the forest where they then were was much less wild than
that which they had crossed some days before, when they plunged through
the brakes.
Here and there was an old forgotten beam, bits of wood chips, a trunk
recently deprived of its branches, attesting that some villages must be
quite near; the air, moreover, impregnated with the odour of smoke and
fragrance of the fields, gave evidence of the existence of some
inhabited place in the vicinity.
These various indications contributed to restore the old man somewhat;
but on the other hand, seeing the child so sadly weakened, he did not
know what to do, how to be able to go, or where to look for help for
Radionek.
Their terrible and threatening position rose before him in all its
horrors. Nevertheless the poor old man, recommending himself to the
all-powerful mercy of God, employed his remaining strength in preparing
a bed of leaves in one corner of the hut, and determined to go in
search of a village as soon as poor Radionek should go to sleep. The
fainting child, having taken a few swallows of water, had scarcely
stretched himself on his bed before he was sleeping like a rock.
The old man's limbs also trembled under him, and his head swam; he was
greatly in need of rest and sleep, but he could not think of either one
or the other. Leaning on his stick, he plunged into the forest in
search of the village, which from all indications could not be far
away.
Sure enough, in the distance, behind a long stretch of bushes and
brush-wood he soon perceived quite a large village, whose blackened
houses were ranged in a half-circle along the edge of the lake. It was
surrounded by gardens full of large pear-trees; wells with sweeps and
with cranks could be seen in the distance; two old _cerkiews_ with
cupolas rose at the two extremities, but there was no _dwor_ to be
seen; in the centre, however, on a little hill surrounded by the rains
of ramparts and old fallen walls, there was a small plank house, which
could not be the residence of the lord, but must be that of the
steward.
The old man, after making these observations, concluded that the
village he saw before him was not one of the little towns of Wolhynian
Polesia.
The country around him, though somewhat resembling his native land, was
more marshy, flatter, and more dreary-looking. He was convinced, upon
examining the different style of the dwellings, the sandy hills, the
clear water of the lake, and the larch-trees growing near the Russian
church, that according to appearances he must be in a corner of
Dobrynian Russia, or else in the vicinity of Pinsk.
But the village was too far off for him to go there for assistance, to
leave the child all alone in that hut just at nightfall. Accordingly
the old man after a moment retraced his steps; he sat down on the sill
of the door, leaned against the doorway, and fell into an anxious and
disturbed sleep, with his eyes always fixed on Radionek, whose face in
the half-light was pale and motionless as that of a marble statue. For
some moments he listened to his breathing; he watched his sleep. Then
again, broken down by fatigue, he returned and sat down; and in this
position, thoroughly overcome by sleep and weariness, he at last
unwillingly closed his tired eyes.
Near them a bright fire, built of branches and dry leaves, burned and
sparkled until daylight; and in the morning, the old man, feeling a
little more quiet, slept two or three hours much more peaceably.
When he woke, he saw with astonishment the great bright, glad sun
shining above his head, the sweet morning light smiling at him through
the trees, and a woman, still young and beautiful, though very pale,
regarding him in silence mingled with surprise, doubt, and sorrow.
This new-comer, who had very black eyes and hair, was tall and slender;
she was dressed in a gown of coloured calico and wore on her head a
handkerchief arranged after the fashion of the women belonging to the
lesser nobility. She held in her hand a closed knife, a basket in which
to put mushrooms, and some provisions wrapped in a white linen bag.
Iermola, when he saw her, was as much surprised as she was; he opened
his mouth, was about to exclaim, to pronounce a name, then stopped,
hesitated in doubt, and looked again.
But the stranger, starting back a few steps, cried at the same time,--
"Are you old Iermola?"
"Is it you, Horpyna? Is it you, my dear lady?" answered the old man,
correcting himself quickly.
"What are you doing here?"
The unhappy creature, full of trouble, was silent, not knowing what to
reply.
"You are here alone?"
"No, madame, with Radionek."
"You have run away from Popielnia? Tell me, then, what has happened to
you?"
Iermola had no need of dissimulation in the presence of one whom he
knew so well, and whom he esteemed so highly; he therefore in a few
words told her his whole story.
She listened attentively, grieved, and somewhat indignant, but above
all filled with astonishment, and in the bottom of her heart a little
displeased at the coming of this old friend who could reveal to every
one her real origin (for since she had lived in that country, she had
pretended to belong to the lesser nobility). But she did not wish to
refuse the unfortunate man either her assistance or her advice, for she
had been very fond of the child, and besides, she was really
sympathetic and charitable.
"It is useless to think of mushrooms to-day," said she, shutting up her
knife; "come to the village. My husband is the steward there; there is
a vacant cabin,--one formerly occupied by the blacksmith. We will put
you in it for the present."
At this Iermola threw himself at her feet and embraced them, then went
to rouse the child.
But all night Radionek had been in a burning fever; he had talked in
his sleep of things the old man could not understand. He seemed
disturbed and in pain; and when it was necessary to waken him, it was
impossible to do so. He sat up on his bed, trembled, looked round
bewildered, did not recognize Iermola, and fell back upon his bed,
complaining first of being very cold and then of a burning heat. It was
impossible to be mistaken any longer; the child was in the early stage
of some terrible illness. Iermola, exhausted and in despair, wrung his
hands and sobbed aloud.
"He is cold and tired; he must have drunk some bad water when he was in
a perspiration," cried Horpyna. "Do not be so anxious; that is not so
bad, only the poor child may be sick for a few days."
"But how can I carry him to the village? Perhaps it would be better to
let him be quiet here."
"Certainly, do not rouse him; the fever will soon pass off," said the
steward's wife. "I will go back home and send you something to eat, for
hunger alone is enough to cause illness. Light a fire in the fireplace;
stop up the cracks in the door as well as you can; cover the child up
well, and do not move from here. I will send you some herb tea."
Iermola took off all of his own clothes except his shirt, to cover his
child, then sat down weeping beside his bed. Horpyna hastened to
return, for she loved Radionek, whom she had cared for when he was a
baby; and she felt a sincere pity for him.
After a few hours, the messenger whom she sent from her house arrived,
bringing some fresh bread, some water, some herbs good in sickness, and
some brandy for Iermola; a boy also accompanied him, who was to remain
at the hut to assist the old man.
But it was still impossible to rouse Radionek sufficiently to make him
take the refreshing tea which Horpyna had prepared.
His face burned like fire; his eyes, half open, shone with a strange
light. The fever and delirium were evidently increasing.
In the silent forest, under the sombre branches of the old pine-trees,
was about to be enacted the last scene of this drama of love,--this
rustic drama, which would perhaps be improbable, if it were not
strictly true in every detail, true in its sad simplicity.
The day after the one on which he had gone to sleep in the forester's
hut, Radionek opened his eyes for a moment, recognized and smiled upon
the old man, who rejoiced and began to hope; but this smile was like
the last flicker of a dying lamp.
The child began to amuse himself, to talk in a low voice, telling of
all he meant to do when he should get rested and well again; he
proposed to go to work immediately, spoke in turn of Popielnia, Huluk,
the widow, the happy days of the past, Malyczki, and the sorrowful days
of trial. He tried especially to reassure and cheer the old man, who
wept bitterly; but while he was speaking, he grew weaker and fell again
into a doze, then a violent fever came on, during which he threw
himself about, cried, trembled, as though he thought himself pursued by
some invisible enemy, and so he died in the arms of Iermola, upon whose
breast he sought shelter, and who held him tightly in his embrace.
The old man strained to his bosom a long while the beautiful, pure
young form, now still and cold, which he could not make up his mind to
surrender to the grave; he did not utter a word, but the big tears fell
from her eyes,--silent, bitter tears. At last his breast heaved, and a
great sorrowful cry escaped him.
"My child! my child!" Then he buried his hands in his gray hair, and
fled like a madman into the depths of the forest.
In the cemetery of Horodyszcz may still be seen the tomb of Radionek,
whose history the people relate, embellishing it with a thousand
wonderful, almost superhuman circumstances. Not even a poor cross of
black wood marks this neglected tomb; but the white and pink thorn
gives it the fragrance of its flowers and the velvety verdure of its
leaves.
At the door of a neighbouring church there has stood for a long time a
little old man, bent, decrepit, called by the people of the vicinity
old Father Skin-and-Bones, because it seems that his skin, yellow,
wrinkled, and sadly withered, alone holds his bones together.
On Sundays the villagers gather round him to laugh at and tease him;
for who would not laugh to see him constantly hugging in his arms an
old doll, wrapped in rags like a baby swaddled in its long clothes? He
rocks it on his heart, and sings it to sleep, now and then kissing it,
talking to it in a low voice, and often weeping over it. He thinks he
is still caring for, rocking and petting his darling child, the poor
old beggar, skin and bones, Iermola, the poor old father.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: The name given to the dwellings of the nobility.]
[Footnote 2: A disease of the hair peculiar to Poland.]
[Footnote 3: A sort of boat or raft.]
[Footnote 4: Presents usually made by a young peasant of these
countries to a young girl whom he asks in marriage.]
[Footnote 5: Popular proverb, signifying that nothing is impossible.]
[Footnote 6: A sort of cake thrown into warm water and then baked in
the oven.]
[Footnote 7: God has pity on the orphan.]
THE END.