For a year's time he was insulted, tormented, ridiculed; in another twelve months he was let alone; in a third year he was admired and feared. All the while his heart was bursting within him with the agony of home-sickness and revolt; but he gave no sign of either. Only at nights, when the others of his chamber were all sleeping, he would slip out of bed and stare up at the stars, which did not look the same as he had known, and think of Maritza and of the bear-cubs, and of the Volga's waters bearing the wild white swans upon their breast; and then he would sob his very soul out in silence.
He had been entered upon the books of the college under the name of Vassia Kazán; Kazán having been the place at which he had been baptised, the golden-domed, many-towered, half Asiatic city which was seen afar off from the little square window in Maritza's hut. High influence and much gold had persuaded the principal of a great college—the Lycée Clovis, situated between Paris and Versailles—not to inquire too closely into the parentage of this beautiful little savage from the far north. Russia still remains dim, distant, and mysterious to the western mind; among his tutors and comrades it was taken for granted that he was some young barbarian noble, and the child's own lips were shut as close as if the ice of his own land had frozen them.
Eight years later, on another day when wheat was ripe and willows waved in summer sunshine, a youth lay asleep with his head on an open Lucretius in the deserted playground of a French college. The place of recreation was a dusty gravelled square; there were high stone walls all round it, and a few poplars stood in it white with dust. It was August, and all the other scholars were away; he alone had been forgotten; he was used to being forgotten. He was not dull or sorrowful, as other lads are when left in vacation time alone. He had many arts and pastimes, and he was a scholar by choice, if a capricious one, and he had a quick and facile tact which taught him how to have his own way always; and on many a summer night, when his teachers believed him safe sleeping, he was out of college, and away dancing and singing and laughing at students' halls, and in the haunts of artists, and at the little theatre beyond the barrier, and he had never been found out, and would have cared but little if he had been. And he slept now with his fair forehead leaning on Lucretius, and a drowsy, heavy heat around him, filled with the hum of flies and gnats. He did not dream of the heat and the insects; he did not even dream of the saucy beauty at the barrier ball the night before, who had kicked cherries out of his mouth with her blue-shod feet, and kissed him on his curls. He dreamt of a little, low, dark hut; of an old woman that knelt before a brazen image; of slumbering bear-cubs in a nest of hay; of a winter landscape, white and shining, that stretched away in an unbroken level of snow to the sea that half the year was ice. He dreamed of these, and, dreaming, sighed and woke. He thought he stood on the frozen sea, and the ice broke, and the waters swallowed him.
It was nothing; only the voice of his tutor calling him. He was summoned to the Principal of the Lycée: a rare honour. He rose, a slender, tall, beautiful youth, in the dark close-fitting costume of the institute. He shook the dust off his uniform and his curls, shut his book, and went within the large white prison-like building which had been his home since he had left the lowly isba among the sandhills and the blowing corn by Volga.
The Principal was sitting in one of his private chambers, a grim, dark, book-lined chamber; he held an open letter in his hand, which he had read and re-read. He was a clever man, and unscrupulous and purchasable; but he was not without feeling, and he was disquieted, for he had a painful office to fulfil.
When the youth obeyed his summons he looked up and shaded his eyes with his hand. He hesitated, looking curiously at the young man's attitude, which had an easy grace in it, and some hauteur visible under a semblance of respect.
The Principal took up the open letter: 'I regret, I grieve, to tell you,' he said slowly, 'your patron and friend, the Prince Zabaroff, has died suddenly!'
The face of Vassia Kazán grew very pale, but very cold. He said nothing.
'He died quite suddenly,' continued the director of the college; 'a blood-vessel broke in the brain, after great fatigue in hunting; he was upon one of his estates in White Russia.'
The son of Paul Zabaroff was still silent. His master wished that he would show some emotion.