"That will amount to nothing, my son.Go and sin no more."Upon which the serf raised himself and left the room, smiling throughout.Ivan's smile is an exotic plant which I am not acquainted with, and which only grows in Slavonic soil, a strange smile,--real prodigy of baseness or heroism.Which is it? I am sure I cannot tell.
In spite of my trouble, I had been able to observe Stephane at the beginning of the punishment.At the first blow, a flash of triumphant joy passed over his face; but when the blood started he became horribly pale, and pressed one of his hands to his throat as if to arrest a cry of horror, and with the other he covered his eyes to shut out the sight; then not being able to contain himself, he hurried away.God be praised! compassion had triumphed in his heart over the joy of seeing his jailer chastised.There is in this young soul, embittered as it is by long sufferings, a fund of generosity and goodness; but will it not in time lose the last vestiges of its native qualities? Three years hence will Stephane cover his eyes to avoid the sight of an enemy's punishment? Within three years will not the habit of suffering have stifled pity in his breast? To-morrow, to-morrow perhaps, will not his heart have uttered its last cry!
Since you have no tender words for him, Count Kostia, would that Icould close his ears to the desolating lessons that you give him!
Do you not see that the life he leads is enough to teach him to hate men and life, without the necessity of your interference? He knows nothing of humanity, but what he sees through the bars of his prison; and imagines that there is nothing in the world but capricious tyrants and trembling, degraded slaves.Why thus kill in his heart every germ of enthusiasm, of hope, of manly and generous faith?
But may not Stephane be a vicious child, whose perverse instincts a justly provoked father seeks to curb by a pitiless discipline? No, a thousand times no! It is false, it is impossible; it is only necessary to look at him to be satisfied of this.His face is often hard, cold, scornful; but it never expresses a low thought, a pollution of soul, or a precocious corruption of mind.In his quiet moods there is upon his brow a stamp of infantile purity.Iwas wrong in supposing that his soul had lost its youth.
Alas! with what cruel harshness they dispute the little pleasures which remain to him.In spite of his jests over the periwinkles, he has a taste for flowers, and had obtained from the gardener the concession of a little plot of ground to cultivate according to his fancy.The Count, it appears, had ratified this favor; but this unheard-of condescension proved to be but a refinement of cruelty.
For some time, every evening after dinner, Stephane passed an hour in his little parterre; he plucked out the weeds, planted, watered, and watched with a paternal eye the growth of his favorites.
Yesterday, an hour after the sanguinary castigation, while his father was dressing Ivan's wounds, he had gone out on tiptoe.Some minutes after, as I was walking upon the terrace, I saw him occupied.with absorbing gravity, in this great work of watering.
I was but a few paces from him, when the gardener approached, pickax in hand, and, without a word, struck it violently into the middle of a tuft of verbenas which grew at one end of the plot of ground.Stephane raised himself briskly, and, believing him stupid, threw himself upon him, crying out:
