Then he made a movement of his right hand as though he wrote his signature to some deed.
'The house—the house—tell them the house will not——' he muttered thickly, then a spasm choked his voice, the agony began; in less than an hour he was dead.
'God save me from such a death as this!' thought Othmar as the full day broke. 'Rather let me die a beggar in the high road, but with some love about me, some hope within my heart!'
And the mouth of the dead man seemed to smile, as though the dead brain knew his thoughts, as though the dead lips said to him:
'Oh, dreamer!—Oh, fool!'
CHAPTER XXII.
The death of Friedrich Othmar brought increased occupation and cares upon him, and the first few days after the obsequies were too full for him to give more than a passing thought once or twice in twenty-four hours to the sick girl lying under his roof. He asked each day after her health, and they each day answered him that the progress made in it was now all that could be wished; youth and strength had reasserted their rights. He was importuned by a thousand claimants on his uncle's properties, fatigued by a thousand attempts at imposition and extortion; all the wearisome details which harass the living and add a millionfold to the horrors of every death, encompassed him all day long.
All that the old man had possessed he had bequeathed unconditionally to his nephew, and there were many companions of his late pleasures who clamoured incessantly to his heir for recognition of their unlawful demands. All these matters detained him in Paris until midsummer had waned, and a weary sense of irreparable loss and of harassed irritation was with him, through all these long summer days, which found him for the first time in his life in the stone walls of a city when fruits were ripe and roses were blooming in shady, fragrant, country places.
The whole temperament of Othmar was one to which business was antagonistic and oppressive in the greatest degree; nature had made him a student and a dreamer, and all the dull, fretting cares which accompany the administration of all great fortunes and houses of finance were to him the most irksome and distasteful of all bondage. But they were fastened in their golden fetters on his life as the burden of the ivory and silver howdah lies heavy as lead upon the back of an elephant in a state procession. And now there was no longer beside him the astute wisdom, the ready invention, the untiring capacity of Friedrich Othmar, to take off his shoulders this mass of affairs, of projects, of public demands, of state necessities supplied or denied, of all the throngs of supplicants, of sycophants, of enemies or of allies, who day after day besieged the Maison d'Othmar.