The old man looked up with such love to Alexis as though he would sacrifice his soul for him; he cried and whispered to him as in adoration:—
“Lord Tsarevitch, our light and sunshine, poor orphan, no father nor mother! May the Heavenly Father and the pure Virgin protect and keep thee!”
Alexis had often been beaten, with or without ceremony, with fist or cane. In everything else the Tsar followed the new ideas. Only his son he beat according to the old tradition, following the advice of Father Sylvester, author of the Domostroi, councillor to the Tsar Ivan the Terrible, (who killed his son, you remember).
“Do not let your son gain mastery in his youth, but beat him as he grows. Strike him with a stick, it won’t kill, but make a man of him!”
Alexis shrank in bodily fear from the blows, “He will kill, maim me”; but the moral suffering and shame he had grown used to. At times a hard joy kindled within him, “Well! what of it! Strike me, it is you who are shamed, not I,” he seemed to say to his father, fixing on him a look at once infinitely submissive and infinitely insolent.
His father probably divined this, for he ceased beating him and devised another punishment. He broke off all intercourse with him. When Alexis addressed him, he remained silent, pretended not to hear, looked past him, as into space. The silence would last weeks, months, years. Alexis was conscious of it at all times and wherever he went. It grew more intolerable, more insulting than scolding, more terrible than blows. He felt it to be slow murder, a cruelty which neither man nor God could wipe out.
This sheer silence was the end of everything. Beyond, there was nothing but darkness, and through the darkness he saw the immovable face of his father, motionless as a stone mask, as it had appeared at their last interview. And the terrible words coming from lips that were dead to him: “I’ll cut you off like a gangrenous limb!”
The thread of reminiscence snapped; he opened his eyes The night was as quiet as ever; the white church towers were still wrapped in a bluish haze. The golden domes shone silvery in heaven’s dark blue vault, studded with stars; the Milky Way glimmered but faintly; and the fresh breezes of heaven, even as the breathing of a slumberer, seemed to bring with them from the heavens a foreboding of eternal rest, infinite quietude.
Alexis seemed to experience in this moment the weariness of his whole life. His back, hands, legs, his whole body was an ache, his bones were full of pain.