“About your father!” Adrian repeated in great astonishment. “You amaze me! You and I have lived together for six years, and never have I heard you so much as name him.”
“No; never to any one around me—scarcely even to dear old Petrovitch. Yet to my sovereign, in one hour, the whole secret of my life flashed out, I know not how. I told all;—how ever since I heard the story of my birth in early boyhood, I dreamed of that exiled father, dwelling forlorn and solitary in the frozen desert of Siberia; how I longed to seek him out and comfort him, and even dared to cherish the hope that one day I might win his pardon and restore him to his home. But, even as I spoke thus, a sudden overwhelming sense of the presence in which I stood swept over me. I was confounded, struck dumb, paralyzed with the sense of my own boldness. At last I stammered, by way of excuse, ‘I implore of your Majesty to pardon me; you can understand how the sad fate of a father must shadow the life of a son!’”
Adrian uttered a groan of dismay. “Most luckless of men!” he cried. “Never in all your days did you make a blunder until that moment. My friend Ivan, it is clear you are no courtier; you may as well give up the game at once and come back to the camp with me.”
“Why so?” asked Ivan, terribly disconcerted. “What have I said amiss? I don’t understand—”
“You don’t understand! Have you forgotten the fate of the Czar Paul, and the unfortunate circumstances under which his majesty began his reign?”
“Utterly!” cried the horror-stricken Ivan, growing red and pale by turns. “Oh, what have I done?—I never dreamed of any sorrow save my own.” But after a long pause he resumed, with a look of returning composure: “I think he did not misunderstand me. It is true I saw a look of pain pass across his face, and I wondered at it for a moment. But his manner to me grew even gentler than before. He asked me what my father’s supposed crime had been, and I told him frankly. Then he said, ‘He shall be sought out and restored to you, if he be not already beyond our reach;’ and he added, ‘Beyond the reach of God he cannot be. Is it not so?’ I thought he waited for an answer, and I said, ‘Yes, sire.’ That was nearly the end. He told me I should receive a communication to-morrow through the Governor of St. Petersburg, General Soltikoff. Then I kissed his hand; and the gentleman-in-waiting, who accompanied me to the gate of the palace, asked for my address. Now, Adrian, you know as much as I can tell you. But,” he added to himself, “not all; the look, the tone, the manner, these are mine, mine only. These it is that give me the precious sense that I myself—Ivan Ivanovitch Pojarsky—am recognized, thought of, cared for.”
CHAPTER XIX.
THE CHEVALIER GUARD.
“I sang the joyful pæan clear,
And, sitting, burnished without fear
The brand, the buckler, and the spear—