Part 25 (2/2)
The two walked on in silence, each praying in a low voice. Radionek seemed born again. He held his head up joyfully; he supported Iermola; and when they reached the protecting forest which surrounded them with its undergrowth and concealed them with its shadows, they both began to breathe more freely.
”Oh, good father,” said the young refugee, ”two, three, five days more perhaps, of patience, fatigue, and effort, and we shall come to some place in the open fields where we can settle down and be quiet. No one will know us; no one will hunt for us. We shall have enough bread; I saw that you put it in your sack. We shall not be obliged to go into the villages; there is water in the woods, and we shall not die of thirst even if we have to suck the leaves on the trees. During the day we will rest, we will sleep on the thick brakes; and we will walk all night and early in the morning.”
The old man sighed as he listened to him, for he knew very well that all this was neither so simple nor so easy; he did not wish to frighten the child, but he said to himself that the strength of both of them would doubtless give out, and that in the woods they were exposed to face a thousand dangers, and meet with a thousand obstacles. Some one pa.s.sing, meeting the two fugitives, might arrest them and turn them over to justice. Thoughts like this, and others still more sad, crushed the old man's spirit; but he forced himself to smile and say nothing, and listened to the joyous babble and tender outpourings of the child, who had been so long deprived of such enjoyment that now he could not be satisfied, and his old father had not the strength to undeceive him or tell him to be silent.
The fear of being surprised had doubtless quickened their pace, for long before daylight they reached the clearing of Smolna, where the path stopped. From there no beaten road could be seen through the undergrowth, which was literally ploughed down in every direction by the wheels of the wagons of the peasants who came there for wood and resin torches.
Day had scarcely dawned; the road became more and more rugged and difficult. The old man determined to make a halt, knowing very well that no one would come to look for them in that place. They lighted a fire with boughs and some coal picked up near the kiln; and Radionek, full of joy, stretched himself at the old man's feet.
”No, no,” said he, ”they will not look for me; they are not even sorry I am gone. Do you suppose I am at all necessary to them? They never have understood me; and I never have been able to comprehend them. My mother has Wladzio; my father has Wladzio. They will be happier without me in the house.”
Here, however, he could not help sighing.
”However, some day,” he continued, ”after a while,--after a long while,--I shall go to see my mother again. But now I should suffer too much, living with them; I do not like to think of it even. I should surely die of grief. There I was shut up all alone; no one ever talked to me as you used to talk to me, father. They were always telling me, whatever I did, that I had the manners of a peasant; that peasants did so and so. Yes, it is true, I am a peasant; they,--they are masters and lords. My little brother Wladzio is the only one I regret; he already began to know me, and smiled so sweetly on me as he would hold out his arms for me.”
”My dear child,” said Iermola, ”do not talk in that way. Perhaps at this moment they are weeping over there and cursing me. You break my heart; you make me remember that I have betrayed them.”
”Ah, well! let us talk about our happy life in Popielnia, father. Do you remember the time when we used to make our porringers, our little dishes, and when we went with Chwedko to the fair, and how astonished and pleased you were when we succeeded with our first glazed pitchers?”
”Ah, those days will never come again,” sighed the old man.
”Why should they never return? I have forgotten nothing,--nothing at all. It was useless for them to forbid me over there; I used, in secret, to make little pots and porringers of the clay Iwaneck would bring me, and I know still how to glaze dishes and other things. We will build a kiln; you will see how we will work.”
Talking thus, they both fell asleep; and when the song of the oriole which was warbling above their heads aroused them from their slumber, it was broad day, but under the trees hung a thick, damp fog.
The old man rose quickly; the child followed him; and they began to travel northward, guiding themselves by the thick mosses which grew on the trunks of the trees.
Although our great forests have been in some places greatly diminished, frequently cleared, and often half cut down and partly destroyed, the heart of them still recalls the majesty of the early ages of the world; here the coppices are so thick and the brakes so impenetrable that one finds the greatest difficulty in going through them.
Here the wild beast has his lair, where he hears no murmur but that of the giant trees which shelter him at their feet. The great waving branches, broken down by the winds, are thrown up in heaps and rot in great mounds, overgrown with mosses and pale gra.s.ses; the wild hop-vine crowns them, and running plants cover them with their interlacing tendrils.
Here and there, under a thick bed of dry, half-rotten leaves, flows a black-looking brook, bearing with it dead gra.s.ses and the remains of other plants.
Sometimes it spreads itself and forms a large pond of stagnant water and moving mud, in the midst of which grow water-lilies and rushes; farther on, it again contracts and runs in a narrow, miry bed, interrupted by unevenness of the land, hummocks of turf, and trunks of trees.
These gloomy coppices are succeeded by rude clearings and fields of small extent. Here, the opening seems wider and less savage; there young shrubs grow thickly; farther on, marshes and thickets appear; and at last you see the open fields.
The gloomiest places in these wild forests are those where fire has devastated them, leaving deep traces of its ravages. Great trunks still stand, dry and blackened; the branches of the pine-trees put out sad, yellow-looking leaves; scanty, miserable gra.s.s begins to cover the ground.
Sometimes the flight of a bird breaks this awful silence; a squirrel leaps and makes the boughs of an oak-tree bend; a hungry raven goes by cawing; a black swan darts into the thickest part of the forest, or a startled deer bounds over the tall gra.s.ses. Then the woods fall again into their majestic, eternal sleep.
The deeper you penetrate, the fewer traces you find of man's pa.s.sage.
At first there is a road, then a path, and farther on broken bushes, trodden gra.s.s, a tree cut down, trails of yellow chips in places where beams have been hewn, a hut where hunters have been on the watch, the cabin of a sentinel, the trench of a charcoal-burner, the ashes of a shepherd's fire; then one sees only the traces of animals, then no traces of anything, for the wild animal leaves few traces behind him when he has pa.s.sed by.
On the second day of their journey, when they began to go deeper into the heart of the forest, which stretched toward the north like a great green sea, they only at rare intervals came upon any indications of the pa.s.sage of man. The silence was universal and profound; and it was rare that the noise of the woodman's axe, resounding in the distance, obliged them to withdraw rapidly from the direction whence the sound came.
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