But the months went by without healing Paul's grief. Time only coated it
with a dull, callous crust. He had got into a hard way of taking everything
as it came. He did not fly from society, or ape the manners of the
misanthrope; he went to London, and stayed about and played the game. But
all with a stony, bald indifference which made people wonder.
No faintest inkling of his story had ever leaked out. And it seemed an
incomprehensible attitude towards life for a young and fortunate man.
Those who had looked for great things from his birthday speech shook their
heads sadly at the unfulfilment.
So time passed on, until one day at the beginning of February, nearly five
years after the light had gone out of his life, a circumstance happened
which proved a turning-point of great magnitude.
It was quite a small thing--just the brutalised hardness in a gipsy woman's
face!
The sun was setting that late afternoon when he strode home across the moor
with Pike, and they came upon some gipsy vans. Paul looked up--it was no
unaccustomed sight, only they happened to be in exactly the same spot where
the like had stood that morning long ago, when in his exuberant happiness
at the news of his little son's birth he had tossed the young woman the
sovereign.
The door of the last van was open, and there, sitting on the steps in an
attitude of dull sullen idleness, was the same swarthy lass, only now she
was altered sadly! No more the proud young mother met his view, but a hard,
gaunt, evil-looking woman.
She knew him instantly, and her black eyes fiercened; as he came up close
to her she said without any greeting:
"I lost him, your honour--him and my Bill in the same blasted year, and I
ain't never had no other."
Paul stopped and peered into her brown face in the fading light.
"So we have been both through hell since then, my poor girl?" he said.
The gipsy woman laughed with bitter harshness as she echoed back the one
word "Hell!"--and afterwards she added with a wail: "Yes, they're dead! and
there won't be never no meeting."
And Paul went on--but her face haunted him.
Was there the same hard change in himself, he wondered? Was he, too,
brutalised and branded with the five years of hell? Surely if so he had
gone on a lower road than his darling would have had him travel.
Then out of the mist of the dying day came the memory of her noble face as
it had been in that happy hour when they had floated out to the lagoon, and
she had told him--her eyes alight with the _feu sacré_--her wishes for his
future.
But what had he done to carry them out--those lofty wishes? Surely
nothing. For, obsessed with his own selfish anguish, he had lived on with
no single worthy aim, with no aim at all except to forget and deaden his
suffering.
Forget! Ah God! that could never be. For had she not said there was an
eternal marriage of their souls--in life or in death they could never be
parted?
And he had tried to break this sacred tender bond, when he should have
cherished every memory to comfort his deep pain with its sweetness. What
had he done? Let sorrow sink him to the level of the poor gipsy girl,
instead of trying to do some fine thing as a tribute to his lady's noble
teaching.
He strode on in the dusk towards his home, his thoughts lashing him with
shame and remorse.
And that night, when he and Pike were alone in his own panelled room, he
broke the seal of those beautiful letters which, with directions for them
to be buried with his body at his death, had lain in a packet hidden away
from sight all these years, freighted with agonised memory.
He read them over carefully, from the first brief note to the last long cry
of love which Dmitry had brought him to Paris. Then he lay back in his
chair, while his strong frame shook with sobs, and his eyes were blinded by
scorching, bitter tears.
But suddenly it seemed as if his lady's spirit stood beside him in the
firelight's flickering gleam, whispering words of hope, pleading to come
back from the cold grave to his heart, there to abide and comfort him.
He heard her golden voice once more, and it fell like soft, healing rain,
so that he stretched out his arms, and cried aloud:
"My darling, beloved one, forgive me for these five wasted
years--sweetheart, come back to me never to part again. Come back to my
heart, and dwell there, Angel Queen!"
* * * * *
Then, as the days went on, all the world altered for him. Instead of the
terrible bitterness against fate which had ruled his heart, a new
tenderness grew there. It seemed now as though he were never alone, but
lived in her ever-present memory. And with this golden change came thoughts
of his child--that little life neglected for so long. What had he done?
What cruel, terrible thing had he done in his selfish pain?
Each year Dmitry had sent him a letter of news, and each year that day had
held ghastly hours for him in the reopening of old anguish--the missive to
be read and quickly thrust out of sight, the thought of it to be strangled
and forgotten.
And now the little one would soon be five years old, and his father's
living eyes had never seen him! But this should no more be so, and he wrote
at once to Dmitry.
By return of post came the answer. The Excellency indeed would be
welcome. The Regent--the Grand Duke Peter--had bidden him say that if the
Excellency should be travelling for pleasure, as the nobility of his
country often did, he would gladly be received by the Regent, who was
himself a great _chasseur_ and _voyageur_. The Excellency would then see
the never-to-be-sufficiently-beloved baby King. Of this glorious child
he--Dmitry--found it difficult to write. It was as if the _Imperatorskoye_
breathed again in his spirit, while he was the portrait of his illustrious
father, proving how deeply and well the _Imperatorskoye_ must have loved
that father. If the Excellency could arrive in time for the Majesty's fifth
birthday, on the 19th of February, there was to be a special ceremony in
the great church which the Regent thought might be of interest to the
Excellency.
Paul wired back he would travel night and day to be in time, and he
instructed Dmitry to have the necessary arrangements made that he might go
straight to the church, in case unforeseen delay should not permit him to
arrive until that morning.
It was in a shaft of sunlight from the great altar window that Paul first
saw his son. The tiny upright figure in its blue velvet suit, heavily
trimmed with sable, standing there proudly. A fair, rosy-cheeked,
golden-haired English child--the living reality of that miniature painted
on ivory and framed in fine pearls, which made the holy of holies on Lady
Henrietta's writing-table.
And as he gazed at his little son, while the organ pealed out a Te Deum and
the sweet choir sang, a great rush of tenderness filled Paul's heart, and
melted forever the icebergs of grief and pain.
And as he knelt there, watching their child, it seemed as if his darling
stood beside him, telling him that he must look up and thank God, too--for
in her spirit's constant love, and this glory of their son, he would one
day find rest and consolation.
THE END.