“Is it you, son? is it you?”
And he relapsed into lethargy.
Spring
I
Spring had come.
Like a toiler who, having slept the sleep of exhaustion, is forced to rise ere dawn after a too short rest, and go out and plough without delay, the April morning was rising lazily.
It was grey dawn.
Silence reigned everywhere, save for the copious dews that dropped and dripped from the trees, wrapped in dense mists and slumbering.
Over the black earth, plunged in stillness and deep darkness, the sky was beginning to glimmer palely, and look like a sheet of wringing wet bluish canvas.
All the low-lying meadows were whitish with mantling haze, which resembled the frothy head of milk in a pail.
Cocks presently vied with one another, crowing in the yet invisible hamlets.
The last stars went out, closing their tired and sleepy eyes.
And now a glow was kindled in the East, as when they blow on embers half quenched in the ashes.
The floating mists rolled heavily hither and thither, surged about the dusky fields as floods in the spring thaw, or went up the sky in thin blue spirals, like incense smoke.
The day was at odds with the paling night, which crouched and clung close to the earth, covering it with its thick wet cloak.
The light was slowly spreading all over the sky, and coming down nearer and nearer to the ground, and struggling with the entangling fog. In places, along the uplands, there were seen drab dew-soaked expanses, peering out of the night, and plashes of water that shimmered with lacklustre surfaces, and brooks that poured their streaming contents along, between the dissolving mists and the brightening dawn.
And as it grew lighter, the flush in the East changed from livid violet to the bloodred tints of a huge conflagration. Things grew visible: the black circle of forest at the skyline, the long row of poplars on the ascending road, drooping forward, as though tired by the weary climb, sprang into sight; and the hamlets sprinkled over the countryside, and hitherto buried in shadows, now peeped forth here and there in the morning light, like dark rocks in a swirl of foaming water, and some of the nearer trees were silvered all over with morning dews.
The sun had not risen yet, but it was clearly on the point of bursting out of the crimson glory round it, upon the world now just opening its bleared eyes, and stirring a little, but still resting and drowsily enjoying its rest. Now the stillness seemed to ring yet more loudly in the ears, for the earth was, as it were, holding its breath: only a feeble breeze, faint as the breathing of an infant, blew from the woods and shook the dewdrops from the trees.
Out of the greyness of the early morn, above those fields still deep in slumber and in shadow, like a church filled with silent worshippers, suddenly rose the ditty of a lark.
Up from the ground it soared, and, rising, flapped its wings, twittering with silvery sounds—the tinkling of a Mass-bell, as it were—or like a fragrant column of springtide perfumes, rising, rising upward; and from the hallowed heights and silences of the eastern sky it called aloud to all the countryside.
And in a little others joined its song, soaring to heaven, and, as they beat their wings, proclaimed the approach of day to every creature!
The sun was coming, it was close at hand.
At last it peered above the far-off forest, as if it rose from an abyss; as if divine invisible hands were holding up its huge and glittering paten over the drowsy lands, and blessing with the blessing of its light all things that in them were—living or dead, coming to life or dying out of it—beginning thus the holy offering of the day, while all things fell and worshipped in the dust, mutely closing their unworthy eyes before its sacred majesty.
Now day had dawned.
Like odoriferous smoke, the haze was wafted upwards from the meadows to the gold-splashed sky; and birds and living things of every kind burst out into a chant … a cry, a thankful prayer, a prayer rising from the heart!
Then did the sun appear above the dark woods and countless villages, high, mighty, shedding warmth below—the eye of God’s own mercy—and commence its reign, its peaceful gentle mastery over all the land.
It was just then that Agata, the Klembas’ aged kinswoman, made her appearance upon a sandhill near the forest, where several stacks belonging to the Manor stood by a roadway full of deep ruts.
In early autumn she had started on her pilgrimage of beggary, and eaten “bread of our Lord’s giving” ever since.
And now she had come back, just like those homing birds that always find their nests again in spring.
Old, feeble, very short of breath, and something like a roadside willow, rooted in the sand, decrepit, phosphorescent, tottering to its fall—she walked all in rags, staff in hand, wallet on back, and a rosary dangling at her side.
The sun was rising when she passed the Manor stacks with quick short steps, raising her weatherbeaten shrivelled face to the sun, while her grey eyes, though bloodshot, sparkled bright with joy.
Ah! Back again in her native village, after the long hard winter!—The thought gave wings to her feet; her wallet jogged upon her shoulders, and her beads tinkled at her side: but soon her breath grew short, her labouring lungs failed her, and she had perforce to stop and then go on more slowly and painfully. But her hungry eyes scoured the country round; she smiled on those grey fields, now greenish with a haze of growing corn; on the villages, coming little by little out of the enveloping fog; on those trees, as yet bare of foliage, that stood as guardians of the road, and on those others, scattered solitary
