The afternoon was growing to a close; without, there were the sounds of traffic and of pleasure; through the closed venetian blinds the air came into the room, which was hot, dark, filled with the soporific odours of stimulants and medicines. Great physicians waited by the death-bed, though they could do nothing to avert the sure coming of death. Othmar sat there and watched with them. Now and then someone spoke in a whisper, that was all. The end was near at hand. The sun sank and the evening came. There was always the same slow, stertorous breathing so painful on the ear of the listener, so expressive of effort and of suffering still existent in that inert unconscious mass which lay motionless upon the bed.
As the hours passed on, Othmar went downstairs and broke a little bread, took a little wine, then returned to the chamber of death and waited there. They told him that as the night wore away the last struggle must come. Death loves the hour before dawn.
Many thoughts came to the watcher as he sat there; they were melancholy and tired thoughts. Life seemed to him, as to Heine, like a child lost in the dark. What was the use of all the energy and effort, all the desire and regret, all the grief and hope, all the knowledge and ambition? The issue of them all at their best was a few years of success and of renown, then a brain which refused to do its work any more, a body which was but as the carcass of a slaughtered beast.
The hours stole on, the strokes of the clocks echoed through the silent house, the wheels of the passing carriages made low and muffled sounds upon the tan laid down on the street beneath in needless precaution for ears deaf for ever, for a brain for ever numb and senseless. The evening became night and night brightened towards morning; a little bird sang at the closed shutter. Othmar rose and opened one of the windows and looked out; it was daybreak. There was a soft mist over the masses of verdure of the Bois, and in the sky a pale, dim light.
'Shall I die like this?' he thought; 'and will my son sorrow no more for me than I sorrow now?—who can tell?'
He stood gazing out at the shadowy houses and the dim outlines of the avenues. When he turned back from the window he saw that the hand of the dying man feebly beckoned him. In the supreme moment of severance from earth, the stunned mind recovered one momentary gleam of consciousness, the mute lips one momentary spasm of thickened, struggling speech; once more and once more only the tongue obeyed the order of its master—the brain.
Friedrich Othmar looked at him with eyes that for an instant saw.
'Do not make that loan—do not make that loan,' he said with his paralysed lips. 'Wait—wait; there will be war.'
His master passion ruled him in his death.