"Haven't I made it look beautiful!" he whispered; "and all in the few morning hours. They would both be delighted with it—he with the arms, and she with the sculptures. But they themselves are the most beautiful of all! I must now call the family, Reinhold, before we close the caskets; meanwhile, take your last look. You haven't had as much opportunity as the others."
Justus vanished through the door leading to the apartments. Reinhold ascended the steps and went between the caskets in which the two were sleeping their eternal sleep.
Yes, they were beautiful—more beautiful than they had been in life. Death appeared to have removed every trace of earth from them, so that noble Nature might reveal herself in all her splendor. How fair, how noble, the face of this girl, and how beautiful the face of the youth, as if their souls had been truly united in death, and each had fondly given to the other what was fairest in life! So, around their lips, once so proud, a sweet, blissful, meek smile rested, for, along with the restless shifting of the nervous eyes and the impatient trembling of the fine mouth, death had blotted out all that was incomplete, imperfect, from the young man's clear features, and had left nothing but the expression of heroic will with which he had gone to his death, and of which the broad red wound on his white brow was the awful seal.
There was a slight noise in the firs behind him; he turned and opened his arms to Else. She laid her head on his breast, weeping. "Only for a moment can I feel your dear heart beating, and know that you are still left me—you, my sweet solace, my unfailing treasure!"
She arose. "Farewell, farewell, for the last time, farewell, dear brother, farewell! Fair, proud sister, how I would have loved you!" She kissed the pale lips of the two corpses; Reinhold took her in his arms and led her from the platform, down to where he saw Justus and Mieting standing, hand in hand, at a respectful distance, among the shrubbery; while, following the General, Valerie and Sidonie, Uncle Ernst and Aunt Rikchen appeared upon the platform to take leave of the dead.
Solemn, yet nerve-racking moments, the details of which Reinhold's tearful eyes could not grasp nor retain! But to Justus' keen artist's eye, one touchingly beautiful picture followed another—but, none more touching or beautiful for him, who knew these persons and their relations so well, than the last—the General almost carrying the exhausted Valerie down the steps, her head shrouded in a heavy veil of lace—she had come down from her sick room only for this occasion; while Uncle Ernst's strong form, still standing there, bent over to kind little Aunt Rikchen, and, to quiet her, stroked with his strong hand her pale, troubled, tear-stained face.
"Do you know," whispered Mieting; "they now feel what we felt when we stood before the dead angel—that they must love each other, you know."
Half an hour later the funeral procession moved out of the castle gate, from one of whose turrets a large German flag, and from the other a black one, fluttered in the evening breeze; over the bridge of boats it passed, up the deep road, turning to the right along the gently sloping road to the cemetery which extended from the highest point to the chain of hills that formed the shore, a few hundred steps distant from the village—a long solemn procession!
The village children, strewing the way with evergreen, went on before the caskets—before the one decked with palms, where lay the maidenly form of the beautiful heroic girl, borne by strong pilots and fishermen who would not surrender the honor of carrying their Commander's kinswoman to her last resting place; before that of the man, decorated with emblems of war, for whom she had died, and whom a kindly fate had allowed to die as a brave man, worthy of the decorations which he had won in battle, and which the Sergeant-Major of the company bore on a silk cushion after him—worthy he, that the trim warriors who had seen him in the days of his glory should lift him now on their shoulders, so often touched by his friendly hand in the hot hour of battle, and by the flaming bivouac-fire on the wearisome march to the great rendezvous.
After the caskets, the two fathers; then Reinhold with Else, and Justus with Mieting—Sidonie and Aunt Rikchen remaining with Valerie; the President and Colonel von Bohl, Schönau and the brilliant company of the other officers, and neighboring noblemen with their ladies; von Strummin and his spouse, the Wartenbergs, the Griebens, the Boltenhagens, the Warnekows, and the rest, the descendants of the old hereditary families; the endless train of country folk and sea folk, with the heroic form of brave Pölitz, and the stout figure of the chief pilot, Bonsack, at their head.