“It is upon the unwilling of the world,” she continued, speaking slowly, yet with extraordinary distinctness, “that its greatest honors are often conferred. The name of my successor has been balloted for, secretly. It is you, Peter Ruff, who have been chosen.”
This time he was silent because he was literally bereft of words. This woman was dying and fancying strange things! He looked from one to the other of the stern, pale faces of those who were gathered around her bedside. Seven of them there were—the same seven. At that moment their eyes were all focused upon him. Peter Ruff shrank back.
“Madame,” he murmured, “this cannot be.”
Her lips twitched as though she would have smiled. “What we have decided,” she said, “we have decided. Nothing can alter that, not even the will of Mr. Peter Ruff.”
“I have been out of the world for four years,” Peter Ruff protested. “I have no longer ambitions, no longer any desire—”
“You lie!” the woman interrupted. “You lie or you do yourself an injustice. We gave you four years, and looking into your face, I think that it has been enough. I think that the weariness is there already. In any case, the charge which I lay upon you in these my last moments, is one which you can escape by death only.”
A low murmur of voices from those others repeated her words.
“By death only!”
Peter Ruff opened his lips, but closed them again without speech. A wave of emotion seemed passing through the room. Something strange was happening. It was Death itself, which had come among them.
A morning journalist wrote of the death of Madame eloquently, and with feeling. She had been a broad-minded aristocrat, a woman of brilliant intellect and great friendships, a woman of whose inner life during the last ten or fifteen years little was known, yet who, in happier times, might well have played a great part in the history of her country.