Slowly the Cossack pulled round, as the doctor thought he would, and
ere long he was sent home to recuperate. The smiling Dvina spread out
before him in the early dawn, with the blue, cloudless sky above and
the golden sun shining on its shimmering water. On the banks green
trees waved in the breeze, and away in the distance the blurred outline
of a town was visible in the purple morning haze. As he came nearer
to the city, however, and the buildings took distinctive objects of
Dvinsk, some of the familiar houses and churches and towers that he
knew so well. It was a city shorn of its beauty, a ghost of what it
had once been. He thought that his recent illness must have impaired
his eyesight, but when he neared the town and beheld great heaps of
stones, roofless houses, and walls crumbled to dust a great panic
seized his heart. Where was the mother whom he had left there in the
house they called their own? Was it, too, a mass of dust and stones?
With trembling knees he turned to find the well-known street. A few
stray dogs, thin and hungry, wandered about among the rubbish in search
of food. A strange silence seemed everywhere.
At last he reached his mother's house. Yes, the roof was still intact;
a little broken glass lay about, and there were marks of shrapnel on
the wall, but the house stood firm and unharmed. This would be about
the hour, he remembered, that his mother would be rising to prepare
the morning meal. He put his hand on the latch of the door, and his
heart was thumping with emotion. Slowly he pushed it open and entered
the little kitchen. Everything was spotlessly clean and neat, and
everything stood just where he had seen it last. The kettle was hissing
with a welcome sound, and the old black cat was asleep on the hearth,
but the bench beside it was empty. He looked round, and the morning
sun shone on the polished brasses and lit them up like burnished gold.
The pendulum of the big clock was swaying monotonously as of old, and
pointing to the hour when the household used to assemble round the
oaken table for their morning meal. As the last stroke of the hour
ceased to vibrate, a bent figure kneeling in front of the _ikon_ raised
her trembling hands to it, clasped in an agony of prayer. "Send him
home to me, good Lord, that I may see his face once more," she cried.
Mooska Zarden stooped and lifted the prostrate form and folded his
mother closely to his heart. Then he told her the strange story of his
miraculous escape, and showed her the well-worn leather belt, with
the marks of the teeth of the faithful horse that had saved his life,
and recounted to her again and again the tale of the brave animal's
pluck and endurance during that long night and those dreadful days of
suffering.
"It was the will of God, my son," she said, earnestly. "What is to be,
now and for evermore."