Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/450

 CHAPTER XLIV.

"CHRISTOHS VOSKRESS."

VAN "entered into his closet, and shut his door;" not to hold communion with his Father in heaven, but to wrestle in solitude and silence with the anguish of his soul. Never before had a sorrow touched the roots of his nature, the very ground and core of his being. He was stricken to the heart, but he was not stunned by the blow. He had been able to hear and to comprehend every detail; and now—far from telling himself, as men often do in the first strangeness of a sudden grief, that this thing was not, could not be, true—he felt as if he had known it for years, as if it had already become part of his life. "The Czar Alexander Paulovitch is dead," said Ivan—"dead in the very prime of his days, in the very zenith of his power and glory."

From the first hour he knew him, the soul of Ivan clave to that of his Czar. His love for him was a passion of loyalty and hero-worship, blended with deepest personal affection and gratitude. And now it seemed to him that the world, from which that grand presence had departed, was henceforward a dull, cold, sunless world; where, indeed, there might be much