She could realize it all the more in the shuttered mansion, which seemed to lie as a waste round that one locked door of the widow’s boudoir. In the dining-hall, surrounded by candles, stood the coffin, awaiting the heir. All the house and the village and their surroundings seemed full of a subdued eagerness to bury the past and welcome the present. The library table was covered with carefully addressed letters and cards.
Gerard was absent. Only the Freule van Borck came forward, with hushed step, to greet them in the gray loneliness of the flowerless hall.
“My dears,” she said, sententiously, “you might have spared yourselves the shame of running away.”
CHAPTER XXII
GERARD’S SHARE
So the old Baron slept in the church-yard under the shadow of the “Devil’s Doll,” which he himself had erected on the grave of his children. Opposite, outside the chancel-wall, shone dully the great slab which marked the entrance to the family vault, heavy with the single name “De Horst.” The word suggested a “dépendance” of the Manor-house; hither came for more permanent residence the successive sojourners at the larger hostel. It was the widow who, waking from her lethargy, had demanded separate sepulture for her dear, dead lord, to Otto’s tacitly disapprobatory regret.
She had summoned her elder son into the dusk of her silenced chamber, and speaking softly from amid the solemn blankness of her loss, “I want your father to lie in the sunshine,” she said, “and I wish them to make the—the—in such a manner that every possible sunbeam shall fall straight across it.”
Then, before Otto’s unspoken demur: “He always had a horror of the vault; he never would enter it once during his whole lifetime. And, Otto, all his life long he detested cold. In the end it has killed him.” She began to cry. Her children had found her greatly changed, quite broken down and feeble.