CONCLUSION.
They were all in evening costume—that sombre attire in which the modern gentleman may attend a funeral by day, and a ball by night, without change; and they all looked pale, harassed, and grave.
'Oh, Herr Graf von Frankenburg, if you have a human heart——' Charlie was beginning, anxious to propitiate the father of her he loved so dearly, when the Count, waving his hand, interrupted him, and said:
'Herr Lieutenant, I can well afford to forgive the past now, and your rash love for my daughter.'
'Herr Graf, I thank you—I thank you!' exclaimed Charlie, with warmth and gratitude; for he expected high words, anger, and fierce reproaches.
'Carl, my dear friend,' said Heinrich, taking his hand kindly in both of his, while his eyes filled with genuine emotion, 'you here!—you here after all!'
'You got my letter and gave it to her—to Ernestine?'
'To her—yes; but alas! Carl, it came too late.'
'Too late!—too late! How?'
'Do you not know? have you not heard? Poor Carl! poor Carl!' said Heinrich, in a voice full of sympathy.
'What do you mean?' asked Charlie, in great perplexity.
'He means, Mein Herr,' said the Count, in a broken voice, 'that our beloved Ernestine died at noon yesterday.'
Charlie passed a hand across his brow, and looked wildly in their faces, as if doubting their sanity or his own.
'Died!' he repeated mechanically.
'It is incomprehensible your being here,' said the Count, in a still more broken voice, and few could have seen that old man weeping unmoved, 'as her last words were, "Meet me at Burtscheid—at Burtscheid, dearest Carl."'
'And I have met her, seen her, spoken with her not two minutes since.'
'My poor friend,' said Heinrich, 'grief, or your wound, has turned your brain.'
'What madness is this?' asked Charlie, with a kind of bitter laugh in his voice, as he felt in no humour for jesting. 'Herr Graf, Herr Baron, Heinrich, my friend, Ernestine has been here with me, in this lonely church, for fully two hours!'
'And spoken with you?' said the Count, in an excited tone. 'Oh, if it should be that she still lives!'
'Lives!—great Heaven! Herr Graf—she was here with me, and I gave her a French cross with the bullet that wounded me.'
'He raves!' said the Baron Grunthal, with anger in his tone.
'She is there—in that room off the church.'
'In that room sure enough. It is the Dead Chamber,' said the Count, approaching the door.
'She fled there for concealment on hearing your approach.'
'Man,' said the old Count, pausing, 'are you not mad to tell me that she is there now, and yet was here but a minute ago?'
'As I have Heaven to answer to—she was!'
'Follow me, then.'
On entering the room, Charlie Pierrepont reeled, and would have fallen had not Heinrich supported him.
We scarcely know how to write of the episode that follows, and can but tell the tale as it was told by those who were cognisant of it.
In a purple velvet coffin, mounted with silver, and supported on trestles, the lid being open, lay Ernestine, dressed as we have described her—dead, stone-dead, cold and pale as marble, her lips a pale blue streak, her long eyelashes closed for ever.
Dead, beyond a doubt, was the girl he had clasped in his arms as a living being, but a few minutes before living and full of volition and life, love and energy; the lips he had kissed closed thus for ever; the hands he had caressed, snow-white now, disposed upon her bosom, the upper one holding the cross he had given her!
'Dead! What miracle of heaven; what magic of hell is here!' he exclaimed, as he staggered to the side of the coffin, pale as the girl who lay in it, the bead-like drops oozing from his temples as he grasped the locks above them. 'Speak! oh, speak, Heinrich!'
How terribly now came back to memory some of the strange things Ernestine had said to him, and more than all, those dying words of the French captain in the Chateau de Colombey, which sounded like something between a prophecy and a curse!
'Compose yourself, Carl,' said Heinrich, full of pity.
'My letter to her—written after she was dead,' said Charles, in a voice like a whisper—'she—she——'
'I placed it in her coffin ere she was brought here from the Schloss,' said Heinrich, who was now weeping freely; 'it is there now—and heavens, father! she has round her neck the cross of which Carl spoke.'
There are many things but imperfectly known in 'our philosophy,' and certainly this seemed one of them.
'She died talking of you—not raving—the poor angel,' said the old Count, as he bent fondly over the coffined girl, 'but smiling sweetly, and saying earnestly, again and, again, that she would meet you at Burtscheid.'
* * * * *
The gloomy half-lighted chamber in which this scene took place, and where the dead girl lay, looking so sweetly placid in her coffin, was one of those, where, in conformity with the police regulations of Germany in general, the bodies of persons deceased are placed within twelve hours after death—there to await interment.
In many places, more particularly at Frankfort, to guard against the chances of burial in cases of suspended animation, the fingers of the dead are placed in the loops of a bell-rope, attached to an alarm clock, which is fixed in the apartment of the attendant appointed to be on the watch.
The least pulsation in the body would give the alarm, when medical aid would instantly be called in.
Ernestine had a watcher in an adjoining room! but that worthy was found in the enjoyment of a profound slumber, and so had neither heard nor seen anything.
This strange story found its way into the Aix Gazette and the Extra Blatt.
Some averred that Charlie Pierrepont, on discovering her body in the chamber of Death, had gone mad and had imagined the whole interview in the church; others, that it was really a case of suspended animation, and that she had recovered for a time, and actually kept her tryst; but the former idea was the predominant one.
Certain it is that for many weeks after the event Charlie seemed to hover between life and death, sanity and insanity, at the Grand Monarque; and when he rejoined the Thuringianas before the walls of Paris, he had become so haggard, grey-haired, and old-looking, that his former comrades scarcely recognised him, so much had he undergone by a fever of the mind, rather than of the body.
When these dreadful events were soothed by time, though not forgotten at Frankenburg, and when the summer flowers were blooming over Charlie's grave—a grave which he found under the guns of Mont Valerien—the young Graf Heinrich was married to his cousin Herminia by the Herr Pastor Von Puffenvörtz, in the church of Burtscheid, when, as if no sorrow had preceded the ceremony, all indeed went merrily as a 'marriage bell.'
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD AND LONDON.