There was a long silence. The aged priest and the little child were weeping bitterly, and the quiet tears of Clémence were falling. She was the first to speak. “And Elizabeth?” she asked softly.
“Elizabeth closed his eyes, knelt down beside him, and in a few words of prayer gave him up to God. Then she added to a letter she had already begun to the Empress Mother, ‘Our angel is gone from us into heaven. My only comfort is that I shall not long survive him. I hope soon to be reunited to him.’ And I think her hope will not be disappointed.”[87]
Another silence, then Ivan rose slowly, as if to leave the room. “Stay, dear Ivan,” Henri said. “I think it will comfort you to know with what a passion of grief he is lamented.”
“Scarcely,” Ivan answered in a trembling voice. “In this world love and understanding always come too late.”
“The long journey from Taganrog to St. Petersburg was made amidst the tears of a sorrowing people, who paid the precious dust every tribute of love and reverence their grateful hearts could devise,” said Henri. “The honours the living would never accept were heaped upon the dead. In many places the crowds drew the funeral carriage themselves, forgetting how he who lay there used to say he ‘could never endure to see men doing the work of beasts of burden.’ The faithful heart of Ilya was well-nigh broken, because, on account of his original rank, which was that of a mujik, he who had driven his lord for eight-and-twenty years would not be permitted to drive him now. Nothing could separate him from the hearse; by day he walked beside it, at night he slept beneath it, wrapped in furs. But when he came to the capital the Grand-Duke Nicholas allowed him once more to take the reins.
“In St. Petersburg, his own bright city of the Neva, the sorrow is profound and universal. There is scarcely a family, from the highest to the lowest, of which he has not been personally the benefactor. The first three days after the tidings came seemed like the three days’ darkness of Egypt. A deep, silent gloom brooded over all. To some true hearts that loved him the grief has proved too heavy to be borne. One such I know of—a merchant of retired habits, noted for his munificent charities. He heard the tidings when walking on the Neva Prospekt, reached his home with difficulty, uttered no words but these, ‘The Emperor is dead,’ and expired in the midst of his family.[88] Nor is it in St. Petersburg alone that he is missed and mourned. There is weeping in the vine-clad valleys of France as well as on the frozen plains of Russia.[89] Wherever his armies trod he has left behind him a track of blessing.
“Of funeral pomp and splendour, of the outward, visible signs of a great nation’s pride and sorrow, I have no heart to speak. The priceless jewels of the seven crowns of Russia which were laid upon his bier could be scarcely less to the senseless dust than they had been to the living man.”
“What need of them?” Pope Yefim said. “Now he wears the crown of glory that fadeth not away, he walks amidst the splendours of the New Jerusalem, with its streets of gold and gates of pearl, its walls of jasper and foundation-stones of living fire.”
“He sees the face of Christ,” Henri answered; “for it is written, ‘His servants shall serve him; they shall see his face, and his name shall be in their foreheads.’”