The words were simple, but the old soldier could not refrain from the tears that his own narrative had not yet forced from him. The child's comment unlocked his heart, and after a few moments' silence he said:
"My boy, you will try to live like him, and try to do your duty like him. You know you will soon have power in your hands: use it as he did. In a few years you will be your own master; even now you are master of this house and this estate. Never forget the responsibilities you will have. Always be kind to your servants, and just to your tenants, and charitable to the poor. Be loved as your father was, so that, when you die, you may be regretted as he is."
Egbert pressed his guardian's hand in silence, and presently knelt down by the coffin. There was a wreath of cypress on it, and he broke off a little twig and hid it in his bosom. His lips seemed to move—was he praying, or thinking half aloud? The old man's hand was on his shoulder, and he felt its pressure weighing him down. When he stood up again, he said nothing, only motioned his guardian to the door, and followed him. There were a few relations, mostly men, gathered before the fire in the drawing-room, and as the boy came in there was a general welcome of silent sympathy, and then a pause. Some few spoke in whispers, but the gloom was too deep to be broken. There seemed in the dead man's son more dignity and manliness than is usual, even under such circumstances, in one so young, and there was deference and surprise as well as pity in the looks that were bent on the boy of sixteen, to whom nearly all were strangers, and to whom his own home and his own household were themselves but new and strange associations.
As night came on, every one disappeared noiselessly from the room, Egbert himself having left it at an earlier hour. He had gone out into the summer moonlight to roam through the grounds he scarcely remembered, and to be alone with his own thoughts that would not let him sleep. The tall formal evergreens that skirted the broad terrace threw their shadows across the many flights of ornamental steps leading to the flower-garden; the scent of the heliotrope and mignonnette in the borders was wafted on the cool breeze that came from the sedge-encircled pond where the water-fowl played and hid in the rushes; the smooth-stemmed beeches stood like columns of silver in the moonlight, supporting their vaulted arches of interlacing leaves; the rooks cawed solemnly from their restless homes as the soft wind blew the branches backward and forward across the mossy mound; squirrels made cracking noises as they chattered in careless gaiety on the slender twigs of the spruce-fir; and hares and rabbits scudded away with terror-impelled swiftness as they heard human footfalls on the dewy grass.
The tall church-spire seemed to speak when the bell tolled out the hours through the night, and Egbert gazed longingly toward it, not as one who answers a well-known voice, but rather as one who strives painfully to guess the meaning of words he would gladly understand and yet cannot fathom.
"Oh!" he thought, "my father knows now all I wish to know; but he cannot come and tell me, and I shall have to live on, perhaps as long as he did, and never know what I seek, and never find the satisfaction and peace I look for. If I too could die, and know all at once!"
He thought, too, of the ceremony that would take place in that church to-morrow, and of the cold, damp vault his father's body would be laid in. And so great was the horror of this to his mind that the beauty of the night turned to hideousness for him, and its wooing sounds were changed into ghoul-like beckoning. Tears would not come to relieve his heart, and he felt as if an icy grasp were upon him, crushing out his young life, his father, he could only think of as he was, mute and helpless, not as he once had been, a true guide and monitor; his home, where was it? his duty, to what dreary fields of thankless labor might it not carry him? his friends, who were they? friends of yesterday? friends of the family, perhaps, but that was conventional friendship to him—or friends to him as the young landlord, but that was interested friendship!
And then came back a rush of Heidelberg memories, of the reckless young companions of his scarce-begun career, of the kind old professor, Herr Lebnach, and of his child-daughter Christina, of rambles among the chestnut woods, when the band had done playing in the castle gardens, and of two or three darker and more solemn rambles when he had gone to follow a dead comrade to his self-made grave.
The chill morning dew roused him at last, just when a faint-breaking light was to be seen over the fir-planted hill behind the house, and he went in and threw himself, all dressed, on his bed in the dim haunted-looking room he remembered as his nursery in days so long past that he could remember nothing else of them. The sun rose and gilded the many-hued flower-garden, and lighted red fires in the diamond-paned windows on the east side of the house, and sent long arrows of light into the tapestried and wainscoted chambers where the guests slept; it took the church-steeple by storm, and poured in floods of molten gold through the stained-glass windows of chancel and clerestory; it flashed through the dark beech grove, and blinded the uneasy rooks whom it roused to a new and jangling chorus; it threw rosy sparks across the pond, on the margin of which floated the water-lily and nestled the forget-me-not; and, lastly, it penetrated the sombre curtains of the darkened dining-room, and, braving death on his throne, threw a coronal of light on the very cypress wreath on the bier. And had it not a royal right, nay, a God-given mission, so to do? For the morning of the resurrection is ever near, and each morning's sun is its fit representative and the forerunner of its joy.
The same consoling ray that would not leave the dead alone in death's own shadow shone on the boy's fair curls as he bent, half in sorrow, half in slumber, over the hidden coffin. Soon, very soon, that coffin would not be there in the dear sunshine. It would be away in the darksome earth, in a lonely vault, with no one save the bats to make any moan over it, and, if ever the sun's darts made their way to it through low, grated air-holes or widening cracks in the stone, they would be pale and spectral themselves, like torches in a deadly atmosphere, like phantom lights over the quaking bog.