“But Prince Roman was silent.  The military judges looked at him hopefully.  In silence he reached for a pen and wrote on a sheet of paper he found under his hand:  ‘I joined the national rising from conviction.’

“He pushed the paper across the table.  The president took it up, showed it in turn to his two colleagues sitting to the right and left, then looking fixedly at Prince Roman let it fall from his hand.  And the silence remained unbroken till he spoke to the gendarmes ordering them to remove the prisoner.

“Such was the written testimony of Prince Roman in the supreme moment of
his life.  I have heard that the Princes of the S--------- family, in
all its branches, adopted the last two words:  ‘From conviction’ for the
device under the armorial bearings of their house.  I don’t know whether
the report is true.  My uncle could not tell me.  He remarked only, that
naturally, it was not to be seen on Prince Roman’s own seal.

“He was condemned for life to Siberian mines.  Emperor Nicholas, who always took personal cognizance of all sentences on Polish nobility, wrote with his own hand in the margin:  ’The authorities are severely warned to take care that this convict walks in chains like any other criminal every step of the way.’

“It was a sentence of deferred death.  Very few survived entombment in these mines for more than three years.  Yet as he was reported as still alive at the end of that time he was allowed, on a petition of his parents and by way of exceptional grace, to serve as common soldier in the Caucasus.  All communication with him was forbidden.  He had no civil rights.  For all practical purposes except that of suffering he was a dead man.  The little child he had been so careful not to wake up when he kissed her in her cot, inherited all the fortune after Prince John’s death.  Her existence saved those immense estates from confiscation.

“It was twenty-five years before Prince Roman, stone deaf, his health broken, was permitted to return to Poland.  His daughter married splendidly to a Polish Austrian grand seigneur and, moving in the cosmopolitan sphere of the highest European aristocracy, lived mostly abroad in Nice and Vienna.  He, settling down on one of her estates, not the one with the palatial residence but another where there was a modest little house, saw very little of her.

“But Prince Roman did not shut himself up as if his work were done.  There was hardly anything done in the private and public life of the neighbourhood, in which Prince Roman’s advice and assistance were not called upon, and never in vain.  It was well said that his days did not belong to himself but to his fellow citizens.  And especially he was the particular friend of all returned exiles, helping them with purse and advice, arranging their affairs and finding them means of livelihood.

“I heard from my uncle many tales of his devoted activity, in which he was always guided by a simple wisdom, a high sense of honour, and the most scrupulous conception of private and public probity.  He remains a living figure for me because of that meeting in a billiard room, when, in my anxiety to hear about a particularly wolfish wolf, I came in momentary contact with a man who was preeminently a man amongst all men capable of feeling deeply, of believing steadily, of loving ardently.