Tears gathered in his eyes, and fell slowly one by one. A sort of convulsion passed over his face. He gripped his throat with his hand, to stifle a sob that rose there.
The intense stillness of the chamber was not broken even by the buzzing of a gnat.
He sat quite motionless, and his thoughts went back to the summer day in the cornfields by the Volga; he saw the scene in all its little details: the impatient good-humour of the great lord, the awe of the listening peasants, the blowing wheat, the wooden cross, the stamping horses, the cringing servants; he heard the voice of his father saying, 'Will you be a jewel or a toad's eye?'
'Why could he not leave me there?' he thought; 'I should have known nothing; I should have been a hunter; I should have done no harm on the ice and the snow there, with old Maritza.'
He thought of his grandmother, of the little hut, of the nest of skins, of the young bears at play, of the glittering plains in winter, of the low red sun, of the black lonely woods, of the grey icy river, of the bright virgin snow—thought, with a great longing like that of thirst. Why had they not let him be? Why had they not left him ignorant and harmless in the clear, keen, solitary winter world?
Instead of that they had flung him into hell, and now left him in it, alone.
There was a far-off murmur on the sultry summer air, and a far-off gleam of metal beyond the leaves of the poplar trees; it was the murmur of the streets, and the glisten of the roofs of Paris.
About his neck there hung a little silver image of St. Paul. His mother had hung it there at birth, and Maritza had prayed him never to disturb it. Now he took it off, he spat on it, he trod on it, he threw it out to fall into the dust.
He did this insult to the sacred thing coldly, without passion. His tears were no more on his cheeks, nor the sobs in his throat.
He changed his clothes quickly, put together a few necessaries, leaving behind nearly all that he possessed, because he hated everything that the dead man's money had bought; and then, without noise and without haste, looking back once down the long empty chamber, he went through the house by back ways that he knew and had used in hours of forbidden liberty, and opening the gate of the courtyard, went out into the long dreary highway, white with dust, that stretched before him and led to Paris.