In bad company

XIII

The boy's face, as he listened, was sad and thoughtful. When the song dwelt on the hillside, and the reaping of the grain, he felt himself at the top of a high rock he knew, overhanging the river. Yes, that was the place. He knew it by the splashing of the river down below, where the waves struck, barely audibly, against the stones. And he knew about the reaping, too. He could hear the sound of the sickles, and the rustle of the cut ears as they fell.
But when the song turned to what was happening down below, the blind child's imagination carried him down at once from the heights to the valley.
The sound of the sickles faded away; but the boy knew that the reapers were still there, up on the hillside. They were still there, but he could not hear them because they were up there so high, high as the pines whose rustling he could hear down at the foot of his rock. And here below, down at the riverside, came the quick, even beat of horses' hoofs. Many, many horses, their hoofbeats merging into dull thunder down here in the darkness. That was the Cossacks riding by.
The Cossacks—yes, he knew about them, too. "Old Cossack"—that was what everyone called old Fedko, when he turned up, from time to time, at the manor. Many a time, Fedko had held the blind boy on his knee and passed a trembling hand over his hair. And when the boy put up his own hand to feel Fedko's face, as he did with everyone, his sensitive fingers found deep furrows, and a long, drooping moustache, and sunken cheeks, wet with the involuntary tears of deep old age. That was the sort of Cossacks that he now imagined, down at the foot of the hill, as he listened to the song. Riding their horses—bent and old and long-moustached, like Fedko. Noiseless, shapeless shadows, advancing through the darkness, weeping as Fedko always wept—weeping, perhaps, because of this moaning song that hung over hillside and valley: Iochim's mournful song of the "careless Cossack lad" who left his young wife for war's adversities, for a pipe smoked on the march.
It needed only a glance to convince Maxim that, blind though the child might be, his sensitive nature fully responded to the poetry of the song.