Warm was the welcome and great were the rejoicings that greeted his appearance. The poor people had been sorely terrified by the mysterious absence of their nursling, and they had sought him far and near, through the birch-wood and the corn-fields, and even for some distance in the waste. They were preparing to renew the search that day with anxious and foreboding hearts.
Almost all Nicolofsky crowded to the starost’s cottage to congratulate Ivan and to hear his wonderful story. Certainly, he had attained his object, if that object was to make himself the hero of the village, and totally and for ever to eclipse the exploits of Michael Ivanovitch!
But Ivan was no more the thoughtless little lad who set out two days ago in search of adventures. His young heart had awakened from the sleep of childhood; new feelings, vague and dimly comprehended, were beginning to stir it. As he trod his homeward way, full of all the wonders he had witnessed, a voice seemed to murmur within him, “And I, too, am a boyar.” What did it mean to be a boyar? He had no words in which to express his thought; but the dawning light of a grand truth, faint and far off, shone upon him from the face of the first boyar he had ever seen, as it bent anxiously and tenderly over the mujik’s senseless form—that to be greater than all the rest meant to do good to all the rest.
He told his adventures modestly and truthfully. What he had done with his silver rouble he told no one, but he showed the gold piece that had been given him with proud pleasure, and asked the starost to make a hole in it, as he wished to keep it always, and to wear it on the ribbon round his neck with the little iron cross put there at his baptism.
He told what the priest had said to him, adding, however, “But of course he was mocking me; no one could believe such a foolish story as that.”
Every one present agreed with him, except Pope Nikita, who pondered awhile, and then said thoughtfully, “Who knows? it may have been. After all, One greater than the Czar put his hands upon the poor sick folk and healed them.”[8]
CHAPTER IV.
IVAN’S HORIZON WIDENS.
“Behind the orphan, God himself bears a purse.”—Russian Proverb.