VI.
One warm autumn night both families were sitting on the terrace in front of the house, admiring the starry sky, with its blue distances and glimmering lights. The blind boy with his friend sat as usual by his mother’s side. All was still around the mansion, and for the moment they sat silent; only the leaves stirred from time to time, like startled things, with unintelligible murmurings, and then lapsed into silence.
Suddenly a meteor, leaping forth from the darkness, flashed across the sky in one brilliant streak; and as it gradually disappeared, it left behind a trail of phosphorescent light. Petrùsya seated beside his mother had linked his arm in hers, and she became suddenly conscious that he started and began to tremble.
“What—was that?” he asked, with a look of trouble on his face.
“It was a falling star, my child.”
“Ah yes, a star,” he said thoughtfully. “I felt sure that it was a star.”
“How could you know, my boy?” inquired the mother, with a pitiful accent of doubt in her voice.
“He is telling the truth,” exclaimed Evelyn; “he knows many things like that.”
This increasing sensitiveness indicated that the boy was evidently drawing near the critical period that lay between childhood and youth. Meanwhile his development pursued its quiet course. He seemed to have grown accustomed to his lot, and the exceptional and uniform character of his sadness,—a sadness cheered as it were by no single ray of light, but at the same time free from all eager cravings, and grown to be the habitual background of his life,—was in some measure mitigated.
But this proved to have been simply a period of temporary repose. Nature has appointed these resting-places that the young organism may gain strength to meet other attacks. During these calms, new questions imperceptibly rise to the surface and mature; and it needs but a touch to disturb this outward peace, and stir the soul to its very depths, even as the sea is lashed by a sudden squall.
V. LOVE.
V.
Love.
And thus a few more years went by. There were no changes in the peaceful mansion. The beech-trees in the garden rustled as of old, only their foliage seemed to have grown darker and thicker; the white walls, although they had warped and settled more or less, shone precisely as they used; the thatched roofs frowned the same as ever; and even the well-known sound of Joachim’s pipe might be heard at the usual hour from the direction of the stable. But Joachim himself, still a bachelor, and grown gray in the service as groom, chose rather to listen to the Panitch when he played either the piano or the pipe, it mattered not which. Maxim too, had grown still more gray. The Popèlski had no other children, and therefore their first-born, the blind boy, remained as ever the central object of interest, around which clustered the life of the whole mansion. It was for his sake that the family had thus isolated itself within its own narrow circle, contented with its tranquil existence, whose current had now united with the equally placid life of the Possessor’s “cabin.”
Thus Peter, who had now become a youth, had grown up like a hot-house plant, guarded from the rude winds of the outer world. He was still as of old in the centre of a vast, dark world. Darkness enveloped him in every direction,—above, around, on all sides; illimitable, eternal. His delicate and sensitive organism vibrated in response to every impression, like a finely strung instrument. This sensitive expectancy was perceptible in the blind youth’s disposition; he seemed to feel that the darkness was about to stretch forth its invisible arms and arouse by its touch that which now lay dormant in his breast, waiting only for the summons. But the dreary darkness around him, familiar from his childhood, replied only by the caressing murmur that rose from the old garden, inspiring him with vague, tranquillizing, and dreamy thoughts. The turbulent current of the far-off world, known to the blind boy only through the medium of song and story, had no entrance here. Amid the dreary whispers of the garden and the peaceful every-day life of the country house, he heard of the tumults and tribulations of the world from the lips of others; and his imagination pictured it all veiled in clouds of mystery,—like a song, an heroic poem, or a fairy tale.
Everything seemed favorable. The mother felt that the soul of her son, protected as by a wall was living in an enchanted dream, which was tranquil even if it were unreal. Evelyn, who had imperceptibly grown to womanhood, watched this enchanted tranquillity with her calm gaze, sometimes showing a slight surprise, or an expression of wonder as to future events, but never a shadow of impatience. Popèlski the father had brought his estate into a prosperous condition, but the good man troubled himself very little about his son’s future life. A man of Maxim’s temperament could only be ill at ease in this quiet life; he simply endured it, looking upon it as a temporary arrangement, which had interwoven itself into his plans in spite of himself. He deemed it necessary for the youth’s interior nature to gain strength and maturity, that he might be better able to cope with the rude assaults of life.
Meanwhile, outside the limit of this enchanted circle, life went on, seething, bubbling, and raging; and at last the time came when the old veteran decided to break into this circle,—to open the door of the hot-house, and admit a current of outside air.