“If your heart were bad and false, you might well be afraid. Come here to me.”
Sasha obeyed. The old man opened the boy’s coarse shirt and laid his hand upon his heart; then he made him do the same to himself, so that the heart of each beat directly against the hand of the other.
“Now, boy,” he then said, “I am going to trust you, and if you say a word you do not mean, or think otherwise than you speak, I shall feel it in the motion of your heart. Do you know the difference between a serf and a free man? Would you rather live like your father, without anything he can call his own, or like the Baron, with houses and forests that nobody could take away from you—unless it might be the Emperor?”
Sasha’s heart gave a great thump, before he opened his mouth. The old man smiled, and he said to himself: “I was right.” Then he continued: “I should be a free man now, if our colonel had lived. Your father had not wit and courage enough to try, but you can do it, Sasha, if you think of nothing else and work for nothing else. I will help you all I can; but you must begin at once. Will you?”
“Yes! yes!” cried Sasha, eagerly.
“Promise me that you will say nothing to any living soul; that you will obey me and remember all I say to you while I live, and be none the less faithful to the purpose when I am dead!”
Sasha promised everything, at once. After a moment’s silence, Gregor took his hand from the boy’s breast, and said: “Yes, you truly mean it. The old people used to say that if anybody broke a promise made before this stone, the black heathen god would have power over him.”
“Perhaps the bear was the black god,” Sasha suggested.
“Perhaps he was. Look him in the face, as you did yesterday, remember your promise, and he can’t harm you.”
As they walked slowly back through the forest, Gregor began to talk, and the boy kept close beside him, listening eagerly to every word.