“Very well. Please be in the hall when I come down; I may want to give you some orders.”
The old servant bowed and Bertram hastened with hushed steps to ascend the stairs. At the first platform he paused. What is there in a house of death, of sudden death especially, that draws a veil of spectral unreality over each familiar object! Behind that door now inexorably closed before him, lay without doubt the shrouded form of her who but a few short hours before, had dazzled the eyes of men and made envious the hearts of women with her imposing beauty! No such quiet then reigned over the spot filled by her presence. As the vision of a dream returns, he saw her again in all her splendor. Never a brow in all the great hall shone more brightly beneath its sparkling diamonds; never a lip in the whole vast throng curled with more self-complacent pride, or melted into a more alluring smile, than that of her who now lay here, a marble image beneath the eye of day. It was as if a flowery field had split beneath the dancing foot of some laughing siren. One moment your gaze is upon the swaying voluptuous form, the half-shut beguiling eye, the white out-reaching arms upon whose satin surface a thousand loves seem perching; the next you stare horror-stricken upon the closing jaws of an awful pit, with the flash of something bright in your eyes, and the sense of a hideous noiseless rush in which earth and heaven appear to join, sink and be swallowed! Bertram felt his heart grow sick. Moving on, he passed the bronze image of Luxury lying half asleep on its bed of crumpled roses. Hideous mockery! What has luxury to do with death? She who was luxury itself has vanished from these halls. Shall the mute bronze go on smiling over its wine cup while she who was its prototype is carried by without a smile on the lips once so vermeil with pride and tropical languors!
Arrived at the top of the house, Bertram knocked at the door with the strange lock, and uttering his own name, asked if there was anything he could do here or elsewhere to show his sympathy and desire to be of use in this great and sudden bereavement. There was no immediate reply and he began to fear he would be obliged to retire without seeing his uncle, when the door was slowly opened and Mr. Sylvester came out. Instantly Bertram understood the anxiety of the servant. Not only did Mr. Sylvester’s countenance exhibit the usual traces of grief and horror incident to a sudden and awful calamity, but there were visible upon it the tokens of another and still more unfathomable emotion, a wild and paralyzed look that altered the very contour of his features, and made his face almost like that of a stranger.
“Uncle, what is it?” sprang involuntarily to his lips. But Mr. Sylvester betraying by a sudden backward movement an instinctive desire to escape scrutiny, he bethought himself, and with hasty utterance offered some words of consolation that sounded strangely hollow and superficial in that dim and silent corridor. “Is there nothing I can do for you?” he finally asked.
“Everything is being done,” exclaimed his uncle in a strained and altered voice; “Robert is here.” And a silence fell over the hall, that Bertram dared not break.
“I have help for everything but—” He did not say what, it seemed as if something rose up in his throat that choked him.
“Bertram,” said he at last in a more natural tone, “come with me.”
He led him into an adjoining room and shut the door. It was a room from which the sunshine had not been excluded and it seemed as if they could both breathe more easily.
“Sit down,” said his uncle, pointing to a chair. The young man did so, but Mr. Sylvester remained standing. Then without preamble, “Have you seen her?”
There was no grief in the question, only a quiet respect. Death clothes the most volatile with a garment of awe. Bertram slowly shook his head. “No,” said he, “I came at once up stairs.”