'You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia,' said the men to him with envy. The child could not have expressed the vague mute wrath and shame that stirred together in him, but he turned from them without a word, and ran fleet as a roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He loved his great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost passion, though it was silent and almost unconscious of itself. She never checked him, beat him, or cursed him as the other women often did their children. She did her best by him, though they dwelt in a miserable little isba, that often in winter time was covered up with the snow like a bear's hole, and in summer, the fierce brief parching summer of north-east Russia, was as hot as a scorched eye under a sun-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to him. He was loved and he was free: childhood wants nothing more; Maritza was a Persian woman. Years and years before, when she had been in her youth, she had come from the Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are alike alive with the leaping naphtha of the Ghebir worship: she had been born within the iron gates of Derbent, of Persian parentage, and she had known war and capture and violence, and had had many troubles, many privations, many miseries before she had found herself stranded in her old age, with her grandchild, in this little desolate village on the sand-bank by the Volga.
She was very poor; she had an evil reputation: nothing evil was ever really traced to her, but she had Oriental faiths and traditions and worshipped fire, or so said her enemies the black clergy of the scattered villages and their ready believers. Never did Maritza light a lamp at nightfall, but her neighbours saw in the act a devil worship.
She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor; she was hated accordingly. When her granddaughter Sacha bore a child that was the offspring of Prince Paul Zabaroff, though she cursed him, the neighbours envied her and begrudged her such an honour.
Maritza had brought up the young Vassia with little tenderness, yet with a great yearning over the boy, with his pure Persian face and his beautiful fair body, like a pearl. The uttermost she wished for him was that he should grow up a raftsman or a fisherman on the Volga water; all that she dreaded was that the Kossacks would take him and put a lance in his hand and have him slain in war, as in the old stern days of her youth her lovers had been taken by the battle-god, that devoured them one by one, and her sons after them.
She never gave a thought to the boy's parentage as of possible use to him, but she always said to herself, 'If Paul Zabaroff ever come back, then shall he know his son,' and meanwhile the boy was happy, though he had not known the meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny Volga in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts go down it, and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which took the condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a gang of such captives would go by on foot and chained; miserable exceedingly, wounded, exhausted, doomed to twelve months' foot-sore travel ere they reached the endless darkness of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual frost. He watched them; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity nor pity as he lay on the tall rough grass, and they moved by him on the dusty, flint-strewn, ill-made road towards that chain of blue hills which marked their future home and their eternal grave. For sport the boy had the bear, the wolf, the blue fox, the wild hare, in the long wintertime; in the brief summer he helped chase the pelican and the swan along the sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves. He was keen of eye and swift of foot: the men of his native village were always willing to have his company, child though he was. He was fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder still of sport; once he risked his own life to save a stork and her nest on a burning roof. When asked why he did it, he who choked the cygnet and snared the cub, he could not say: he was ashamed of his own tenderness.
He wanted no other life than this rude freedom, but one day, a month or more after Paul Zabaroff had passed through the country, there came to the door of Maritza's hut a stranger, who displayed to her eyes, which could not read, a letter with the Prince's seal and signature. He said: 'I am sent to take away the boy who is called Vassia.'
The Persian woman bowed her head as before a headsman's glaive.
'It is the will of God,' she said.
But the time came when Vassia, grown to man's estate, thought that devils rather than gods had meddled with him then.
'Send him to a great school; send him out of Russia; spare no cost; make him a gentleman,' Paul Zabaroff had said to his agents when he had seen the son of Sacha, and he had been obeyed. The little fierce half-naked boy who in frost was wrapped in wolf-fur and looked like a little wild beast, had been taken from the free, headstrong, barbaric life of the Volga plains, where he was under no law and knew no rule, and passionately loved the river and the chase, and the great silent snow-wrapt world of his birth, and was sent to a famous and severe college near Paris, to the drill, and the class, and the uniform, and the classic learning, and the tape-bound, hard, artificial routine of mechanical education. The pride, of the Oriental and the subtlety of the Slav were all he brought with him as arms in the unequal combat with an unsympathetic crowd.