M. Van Amberg rose from his knees.
"Leave the room!" said he to his brother and daughters, "I would be alone with my wife."
Alone, beside the bed of his dead wife, Karl Van Amberg gazed upon the pale countenance, to which death had restored all the beauty of youth. A tear, left there by human suffering, a tear which none other was to follow, glittered upon the clay-cold cheek; one arm still hung out of bed, as when it held his hand; the head was in the position in which it had kissed his fingers. He gazed at her, and the icy envelope that bound his heart was at last broken. "Annunciata!" he exclaimed, "Annunciata!"
For fifteen years that name had not passed his lips. Throwing himself on his wife's corpse, he clasped her in his arms and kissed her forehead.
"Annunciata!" he cried, "can you not feel this kiss of peace and love! Annunciata, we have both suffered terribly! God did not grant us happiness. I loved you from the first day that I saw you, a joyous child in Spain, till this sad moment that I press you dead upon my heart. Oh Annunciata, how great have been our sufferings!"
Karl Van Amberg wept.
"Repose in peace, poor woman!" he murmured, "may you find in heaven the repose denied you upon earth!" And with trembling hand he closed Annunciata's eyes. Then he knelt down beside her.
"Almighty God!" he said, "I have been severe. Be thou merciful!"
When, at break of day, M. Van Amberg left the chamber of death, his face had resumed its habitual expression; his inflexible soul, for a moment bowed, had regained its usual level. To Annunciata had been given the last word of love, the last tear of that heart of adamant. To the eyes of all he reappeared as the stern master and father, the man on whose brow no sorrow left a trace. His daughters bowed themselves upon his passage, William spoke not to him, order and regularity returned to the house. Annunciata was buried without pomp or procession. She left, to revisit it no more, the melancholy abode where her suffering soul had worn out its mortal envelope; she ceased to live, as a sound ceases to be heard, as a cloud passes, as a flower fades; nothing stopped or altered because she went. If any mourned her, they mourned in silence; if they thought of her, they proclaimed not their thoughts; her name was no more heard; only the interior of the little red house was rather more silent, and M. Van Amberg's countenance appeared to all more rigid than before. During the day, Christine's profound grief obeyed the iron will that weighed on each member of the family. The poor child was silent, worked, sat at table, lived on as if her heart had not been crushed; but at night, when she was alone in the little room where her mother had so often wept with her, she gave free course to grief; she invoked her mother, spoke to her, extended her arms to her, and would fain have left the earth to be with her in heaven. "Take me to you, dear mother!" she would exclaim. "Deprived of you, apart from him, I cannot live! Since I saw you die, I no longer fear death."