“Come, Peter Alexievitch,” he said softly, “come out and look at the sea.”
He had never known when a glimpse even of the ocean had failed to soothe the Czar.
Peter did not reply, and Mentchikoff deftly drew off the dressing-gown and put on an old green coat of European cut that hung over a chair; the Czar silently permitted the change.
The Prince fetched a bowl of water and helped him bathe his face, a comb and smoothed out the tangled hair, performing these menial tasks with an unconscious joy in the doing of them and a tender love for the person whom he served that was touching to behold in one so stern featured and haughty as Danilovitch Mentchikoff.
Peter did not speak; he seemed in an apathy that chilled his faculties like the languor of a mortal illness; he suffered his friend to lead him from the house and showed neither dissent or assent.
It was now fading to the cool of the evening; the sky was translucent and almost colorless against the motionless forms of the trees that had not yet lost the freshness of early summer; the lake was placid beneath the borders of bright grasses and trails of wild flowers that flung themselves in lightly woven wreaths over the tiny wavelets that spent themselves against the banks.
In the distance a nightingale made the silence of the wood tremble with the intermittent rehearsal of his sharp, sweet song.
The two fine figures, the servant so splendid, the master so humble in attire, the King leaning on his minister with a sad and fatigued air, passed the little clearing round the house and through the first trees of the wood until they came to a spot where, through a break in the forest, was a view of low swamps and the distant sea which had the pale splendor of a tourmaline in the light of the sunset.
Peter sighed, with a long shiver of relief; his very muscles seemed to relax; his was the panting satisfaction of one who is fevered, and, after much delay in heat and pain, finds a cup of cool fragrant water at his lips.
The air was of a keen freshness and ocean salt; it seemed to be wafted, pure and strong, from the distant shores of some dreamland beyond the verge of the pale confining sea; the perfect silence seemed charged with a sense of vitality, of the joy of life, of nature; the song of the hidden bird, that now and then sharply broke the stillness, was like a chant of calm triumph in the eternal majesty of nature’s solitudes and untouched places; there was now no melancholy in this loneliness; a tender magic filled the marvelous hour of the twilight and something more than mortal was abroad in the gathering dusk.