V.
Consequently, however much Maxim might try to exclude all outward impressions from his nephew, he had no control over the urgent cravings that came from within. With all his precautions he could but avert a premature awakening of these unsatisfied yearnings, and thereby diminish the boy’s chances of suffering. In every other respect the child’s unhappy fate, with all its cruel consequences, must take its course.
And like a dark shadow this fate advanced to meet him. From year to year the boy’s natural vivacity subsided, like a receding wave, while the melancholy that was echoing within his soul grew persistently, and left its impress on his temperament. His laughter, which in childhood resounded at every new and especially vivid impression, was now rarely heard. He was naturally less accessible to all that was bright and cheerful, and more or less humorous, than to that vague obscurity and gloom peculiar to the Southern nature, which finds reflection in the folk-songs. These made a deep impression on the boy’s imagination. The tears stood in his eyes whenever he heard how “the grave whispers to the wind in the field,” and he loved to wander through the fields himself, listening to this murmur. He longed more and more for solitude; and when in his hours of recreation he started off on his lonely walk, the family would avoid that direction, lest they might disturb his solitude.
Seated upon some mound out on the steppe, or on the hillock above the river, or on the familiar cliff, Petrùsya would listen to the rustling leaves, the whispering grass, the vague soughing of the wind across the steppe. All this harmonized perfectly with the deep seriousness of his mood. There, so far as in him lay, he was in absolute sympathy with Nature; he understood her; she disturbed him by no perplexing and unanswerable questions. There the wind fanned his very soul, and the grass seemed to whisper soft words of pity; and as the spirit of the youth in harmony with the gentle influences that surrounded him melted at the tender caress of Nature, he felt his bosom swell with an emotion that communicated itself to his whole being. In moments like these he would throw himself on the cool, moist grass and weep; but in these tears there was no bitterness. Again, he would seize his pipe, and enraptured by his own emotions would improvise pensive melodies suited to his mood and to the peaceful harmony of the steppe. One could easily understand that any human sound coming unexpectedly to interrupt this mood would affect him like a distressing discord. At such times the only fellowship possible to him was with a soul akin to his own; and in the fair-haired girl from the estate of the Possessor the boy enjoyed just such a companion.
This friendship was the more firmly knitted by mutual sympathy. If Evelyn contributed to their partnership her calmness, her gentle animation, or imparted to the blind boy some new detail of the surrounding life, he in turn gave her his sorrow. The little woman’s knowledge of him seemed to have dealt a serious blow to her tender heart: pluck a dagger from a wound, and the bleeding will increase. On the day when she first learned to know the blind boy on the hillock in the steppe, her sympathy for his affliction had really caused her acute pain, and his presence had grown by degrees quite indispensable to her. Separation seemed to renew and increase the poignant pain of her wound, and she longed to be with her little friend that she might appease her own suffering by ministering constantly to his comfort.