Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/448

438 few words of prayer gave him up to God. Then she added to a letter she had already begun to the Empress Mother, 'Our angel is gone from us into heaven. My only comfort is that I shall not long survive him. I hope soon to be reunited to him.' And I think her hope will not be disappointed."

Another silence, then Ivan rose slowly, as if to leave the room. "Stay, dear Ivan," Henri said. "I think it will comfort you to know with what a passion of grief he is lamented."

"Scarcely," Ivan answered in a trembling voice. "In this world love and understanding always come too late."

"The long journey from Taganrog to St. Petersburg was made amidst the tears of a sorrowing people, who paid the precious dust every tribute of love and reverence their grateful hearts could devise," said Henri. "The honours the living would never accept were heaped upon the dead. In many places the crowds drew the funeral carriage themselves, forgetting how he who lay there used to say he 'could never endure to see men doing the work of beasts of burden.' The faithful heart of Ilya was well-nigh broken, because, on account of his original rank, which was that of a mujik, he who had driven his lord for eight-and-twenty years would not be permitted to drive him now. Nothing could separate him from the hearse; by day he walked beside it, at night he slept beneath it, wrapped in furs. But when he came to the capital the Grand-Duke Nicholas allowed him once more to take the reins.

"In St. Petersburg, his own bright city of the Neva, the sorrow is profound and universal. There is scarcely a family, from the highest to the lowest, of which he has not been personally the benefactor. The first three days after the tidings came seemed like the three days' darkness of Egypt. A deep, silent gloom brooded over all. To some true hearts that loved him the grief has proved too heavy to be borne. One such I