The tuberculosis which had ailed Evelina Korzeniowska for years advanced unimpeded in these conditions. The days that remained to her were numbered. When the Czarist authorities granted her a compassionate stay of sentence in order that she might spend a longer spell on her brother's estate in the Ukraine, to recover her health, it was no more than an additional torment; for after the period of reprieve expired she had to return into exile with Konrad, despite all her petitions and applications and despite the fact that she was now more dead than alive. On the day of her departure, Evelina Korzeniowska stood on the steps of the manor house at Nowofastów surrounded by her relations, the servants, and friends from the neighbouring domains. Everyone there assembled, apart from the children and those in livery, is attired in black cloth or black silk. Not a single word is spoken. grandmother stoically stares out past the sad scene into the deserted countryside. On the sweeping sandy drive that curves around the circular yew hedge a bizarre, elongated carriage is waiting. The shafts protrude much too far forward, and the coachman's box seems a long way from the rear of the strange conveyance, which is overloaded with trunks and chests of every description. The carriage is slung low between the wheels as if between two worlds drifting ever further apart. The carriage door is open, and inside, on the cracked leather seat, young Konrad has been settled for some time, watching from the dark the scene he will later describe. Poor Mama, inconsolable, looks around her for the last time, then descends the steps on the arm of Uncle Tadeusz. Those who remain behind retain their composure. Even Konrad's favourite cousin, who is wearing a short skirt of a tartan pattern and resembles a princess amidst the black-clad gathering, just puts her fingertips to her lips to indicate her horror at the departure of the two banished exiles. And ungainly Mlle Durand from Switzerland, the governess who has devoted herself to Konrad's education all summer with the utmost energy and who would otherwise avail herself of any opportunity to burst into tears, valiantly appeals to her charge as she waves a farewell handkerchief: N'oublie pas ton français, mon chéri! Uncle Tadeusz closes the carriage door and takes a step back. The coach lurches forward. The friends and relatives vanish from Konrad's view through the small window, and when he looks out at the other side he sees, in the distance, halfway down to the great gates, the district police commandant's light, open trap, harnessed to three horses in Russian fashion, drawn up on one side and the commandant himself sitting in it, the vizor of his flat cap with its red band pulled down over his eyes.
In early April 1865, eighteen months after the departure from nowofastów, Evelina Korzeniowska died in exile aged thirty-two of the shadows that her tuberculosis had spread through her body, and of the home-sickness that was corroding her soul. Apollo's will to live was also almost extinguished. He was quite unable now to devote himself to his troubled son's education, and hardly ever pursued his own work at all. The most he could do was to alter the odd line or two in his translation of Victor Hugo's Les travailleurs de la mer. That prodigiously boring book seemed to him to mirror his own life. C'est un livre sur des destinées dépaysées, he once said to Konrad, sur des individus expulsés et perdus, sur les éliminés du sort, un livre sur ceux qui song seuls et évités. In 1867, a few days before Christmas, Apollo Korzeniowski was released from his Russian exile. The authorities had decided that he no longer constituted a threat, and gave him a passport valid for one journey to Madeira, for purposes of convalescence. But neither Apollo's financial position nor his frail state of health allowed him to travel. After a short stay in Lemberg, which he found too Austrian for his liking, he rented a few rooms in Poselska Street in Cracow. There he spent most of the time in his armchair, grieving for his lost wife, for the wasted years, and for his poor and lonely boy, who had just written a patriotic play entitled The Eyes of Johan Sobieski. Apollo had burnt all of his own manuscripts in the fireplace. At times, when he did so, a weightless flake of soot ash like a scrap of black silk would drift through the room, borne up on the air, before sinking to the floor somewhere or dissolving into the dark. For Apollo, as for Evelina, the end came in the spring, as it was beginning to thaw, but it was not granted to him to depart this life on the anniversary of her death. He lay in his bed till well into May, becoming steadily weaker and thinner. During those weeks when his father was dying, Konrad would sit at a little table lit by a green lamp in a windowless cabinet to do his homework in the late afternoon after school. The ink stains in his exercise book and on his hands came from the fear in his heart. Whenever the door of the next room opened he could hear his father's shallow breathing. Two nuns with snow-white wimples were tending the patient. Without a sound they glided hither and thither, performing their duties and occasionally casting a concerned glance at the child who would soon be orphaned, bent over his writing, adding up numbers or reading, hour after hour, voluminous Polish and French adventure stories, novels and travel books.
The funeral of the patriot Apollo Korzeniowski was a great demonstration, conducted in silence. Along the streets, which were closed to traffic, bare-headed workmen, schoolchildren, university students and citizens, who had doffed their top hats, stood in solemn emotion, and at every open upper-storey window there were clusters of people dressed in black. The cortège, led by eleven-year old Konrad as chief mourner, moved out of the narrow side street, through the centre of the town, past the Church of Mary the Virgin with its two unequal towers, towards Florian's Gate. It was a fine afternoon. The blue sky compassed the rooftops and on high the clouds scudded before the wind like a squadron of sailboats. During the funeral, as the priest in his heavy silver-embroidered vestments was intoning the ritual words for the dead man in the pit, Konrad perhaps raised his eyes and beheld the clouds drifting by, seeing them as he had never done before, and perhaps it was then that the thought occurred to him of becoming a sea captain, an altogether unheard-of notion for the son of a Polish gentleman. Three years later he expressed this wish to his guardian for the first time, and nothing on earth could put it out of his mind thereafter, not even when Uncle Tadeusz sent him to Switzerland for a summer holiday of several weeks with his private tutor, Pulman. The tutor was under instructions to remind his charge at every opportunity of the many careers that were open to him beside seafaring, but no matter what he said (at the Rhine falls near Schaffhausen, in Hospenthal, viewing the St Gotthard tunnel under construction, or up on the Furka Pass), Konrad stuck tenaciously to his resolve. Scarcely a year later, on the 14th of October 1874, when he was not yet seventeen, he took leave of his grandmother Teofila Bobrowska and his good Uncle Tadeusz, as they stood on the platform at Cracow outside the train window. The ticket to Marseilles in his pocket had cost one hundred and thirty-seven guilders and seventy-five groschen. He took with him no more than would fit into his small case, and it would be almost sixteen years before he returned to visit his native country again.