Three Weeks — Chapter XXXI

CHAPTER XXXI

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.

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