"My poor, poor boy," she said, "you are broken-hearted already, and yet you don't know nearly all."
"What more is there?" he asked, shaken with emotion.
"The letter says," she continued, "that all the others got their presents from parents and friends in time for the distribution. Only his table was empty. And he couldn't believe it--couldn't believe that his mother had forgotten him. And when the rest were playing round the Christmas-tree, he slipped out unseen, without hat or overcoat. He must go to the post-office, he said, to inquire whether mamma had sent nothing. Not the soldiers and the cannons, and the pocket inkstand, and all the things that he had wanted so badly, and which mamma had promised him? But he couldn't find the post-office, and ran on and on over the open fields in a snowstorm, without cap and overcoat, and because he could not believe that his mother had forsaken him (for your sake, Leo), he died--died."
She pressed her forehead against the bowed head of the kneeling man, sobbing bitterly, and clung to his shoulders. And so they cried together and would not be comforted. When at last they lifted their heads they looked into each other's eyes, astonished and questioning. Was he this man? Was she this woman? It seemed as if their common sorrow had made them new creatures, and linked them as one for all time in guilt and the wretched consequence of their sin. She smiled at him inconsolably, but at the same time she was almost happy.
"Lizzie, we are lost," he murmured.
"Yes, we are lost," she said, still smiling, and then he left her.
XXXIV
On the first Sunday of the New Year, Ulrich alighted at the station at Münsterberg, after seeing the grave close over his step-son. He had decided, after long consideration, to have the boy buried in the place where he died, and if his wife felt herself equal to the strain, to have the body removed later to be interred in the family vault of the Rhadens at Fichtkampen.
Felicitas had not spared him any of the details of her despair, illness, and attempted suicide, and had painted all in the darkest colours. She had too much to conceal to be able to express her grief simply and sincerely. The task lay before her of excusing herself, as far as was possible, of any blame in her child's death, and of presenting the whole unhappy affair to Ulrich and the world and to herself, tricked out in the guise of romance.
Above all, it had never occurred to her to spare her husband. The letters she had written him from her bed with a feverish hand were full of endless laments that they had ever sent the boy so far away to school, which strengthened the pangs of remorse that already tortured his sensitive soul.