'To my son and successor a word of warning and counsel.'
So ran the opening words of the sealed-up paper; and those were about all Tom was able to read that night. After the many fatigues and excitements of the day his brain was too heavy to be taxed any further. When Hoosanee, who had been waiting patiently in the inner room until the hum of conversation should cease, receiving no summons from his master, ventured to open the door between the rooms, he found him seated before the table, his arms folded over the open paper, and his head resting on his arms, fast asleep.
He awoke him, protested with him for his love of study, and persuaded him to undress and lie down. So in dreamless sleep the night passed peacefully away. Of his coming to himself the next morning I have often heard the rajah speak. He was perfectly refreshed and strengthened; but for a few moments he could not stir. As he lay, the blue of the June sky, flecked with soft shreds of snow-white vapour, peeped in through the open window. A tuneful chorus of English song-birds, linnets and larks and thrushes, filled the air with throbbing gladness; the familiar sound of the gardener's scythe, sweeping through swathes of wet grass, fell dimly upon his ear; and sweet scents of eglantine and roses and newly-mown hay saluted his nostrils. Ah! how delicious they all were—dream-like sensations that seemed to be coming to him out of the tranquil past, and making the fever of these last two years unsubstantial as a vision!
So, for a few minutes, he mused. Then Hoosanee looked in, and seeing him awake brought in tea and his bath, and, in a very short time he had cast his languor aside, and was giving himself to his papers.
Those in Persian and Hindi he laid aside for the present. They were closely written, and, with all the instruction he had given himself and the facility he had been able to acquire, they would, he knew, take him some time to decipher. The English paper he read at once. Its full text I am not at liberty to give. I know, however, that it did not contain the story, which Tom's mother had given to him, touching his birth. From first to last, there was nothing to make him believe that the tie, which, as the writer asserted, did actually bind him to the East, was anything but spiritual.
It was written for use in the event, which, as we know, came about, of the then rajah not being able personally to make the acquaintance of his son by adoption. For purposes of his own it appeared, and in order that his son's education and training should be entirely English, he had bound himself not to interfere with him in any way until he should have reached years of discretion. Then, if his life was spared, he would pay a visit to England, and instruct his adopted son with his own lips regarding the career that lay before him. For the rest, it contained instructions concerning Tom's conduct on his arrival in India, and upon taking up the government of Gumilcund, which, as the young rajah recognised with a thrill of pleasure, agreed in almost every particular with the course he had instinctively adopted. There were, besides, dim and uncertain foreshadowings of spiritual visitations, and dark forebodings of a time of trial and great terror for the country the writer loved; the country that, he hoped and believed, would be loved by his successor; with admonitions to him to be courageous, bracing his nerves to receive whatever might come to him in a manner becoming to a man into whose hands a sacred trust has been given.
An entreaty that he would be patient, and not allow himself to fall away into despair if the good to which they looked as the fruit of their labours did not come in his time; a recommendation to train up those who would come after him to regard themselves as the repositories of the great trust, any one of whom might be the Revealer predestined to give to the New World and the Old the light of the new revelation; a hope that he would gain sufficient knowledge of the Eastern languages to read the enclosed manuscripts, which contained the gist of their philosophy and the definition of their hope; with a pathetic farewell, couched in language which made Tom believe that Byrajee Pirtha Raj was a Christian at heart—brought the paper to a conclusion.
And here, on the threshold of his new life, I find, to my deep regret, that I must leave him. The life becomes too complicated; the interests too numerous; the hopes too lofty and large, to find room in what will generally be considered as a work of fiction. Besides, I am not allowed. All I may venture to say is that he is working still. A Maharajah in India—he was given this title after the mutiny—and in England a private gentleman of fortune and distinction, he passes his life between the two worlds of East and West, trying to induce that sympathy, that mutual comprehension, upon which so many of his hopes for the future depend.
Married now, and with children of his own, he does not forget his lost love; and indeed, in the face of his gentle wife, there is an expression that recalls Grace vividly. It is quite natural, Aglaia says with a smile, for Grace is often with her.