The woman trembled from head to foot, but the dying man folded his hands calmly and murmured in broken accents: "The hour is nearly gone. The doctor was right: I no longer feel any pain; everything grows dark around me, only my son's pictures are still visible. Who is that coming toward me out of the darkness? Halt! Advance no farther; I have yet more that I must say."
But the grim spectre's approach was not to be stayed; it laid its invisible hand over the dying patient's face, and the powerful man with the heart of stone succumbed to a force mightier than himself. He voluntarily closed his eyes and pressed his lips together, not calling upon any one to help him die, as do ordinary weak mortals; but proudly and unshrinkingly, as becomes a nobleman, he surrendered his great, indomitable soul to the master jailer, Death.
When the baroness saw that her husband was dead, she fell upon her knees by the table and, folding her hands upon the written page before her, stammered forth: "Hear me, Lord God, and be merciful to his forsaken soul, as I now vow to be merciful and to execute the very opposite of all the wicked commands he has with his last breath enjoined upon me. This is my fixed resolve, O God, and I pray Thee in Thine infinite power to help me."
A cry, unearthly and terrible, rang out on the sepulchral stillness of the room. The startled woman threw a look of horror at the dead form stretched out upon the bed. And see! his closed lips had parted, his eyes had opened, and his right hand, which had been folded in his left upon his breast, was raised toward his head.
Perhaps the departing soul had been overtaken in its flight by the kneeling woman's vow, and had turned back to reënter its mortal tenement and protest with that one fearful cry against the violation of its commands.
CHAPTER II.
THE PRAYER AT THE GRAVE.
The baron's funeral took place a week later. The funeral sermon was very long, and the baroness wept through it all with a grief as unaffected as that of any peasant widow in the land.
"The poor lady is having a good cry once for all," remarked one of the distinguished attendants at the funeral to his neighbour. "They say she was not allowed to shed a tear during her husband's lifetime."
"The baron was indeed a stern man," answered the other, "and would not suffer his wife to give way to grief or pain, however severe."