There lay the reed sceptre broken on the floor.
The countess shuddered at the sight. A strange melancholy stole over her, and tears filled her eyes.
"My sceptre of reeds--broken--in the dust!" said Freyer, his voice tremulous with an emotion which forced an answering echo in Madeleine von Wildenau's soul. He raised the fragments, gazing at them long and mournfully. "Aye, the sad symbol speaks the truth--my strength is broken, my sovereignty vanished."
A terrible dread overpowered the countess and she fondly clasped the man she loved, as a princess might press to her heart her dethroned husband, grieving amid the ruins of his power. "You will still remain king in my heart!" she said, consolingly, amid her tears.
"You must now be everything to me, my loved one. In you is my Heaven, my justification in the presence of God. Hold me closely, firmly, for you must lift me in your arms out of this constant torture by the redeeming power of love." He rested his head wearily on hers, and she gladly supported the precious burden. She felt at that moment that she had the power to lift him from Hades, that the love in her heart was strong enough to win Heaven for him and herself.
"Womanly nature is drawing us together!" She clung to him, so absorbed in blissful melancholy that his soul thrilled with an emotion never experienced before. Their lips now met in a kiss as pure as if all earthly things were at an end and their rising souls were greeting each other in a loftier sphere.
"That was an angel's kiss!" said Freyer with a sigh, while the air around the stake seemed to quiver with the rustling of angels' wings, the chains which bound him to it for the scourging to clank as though some invisible hand had flung one end around the feet of the fugitives, to bind them forever to the place of the cross.
"Come, I have one more thing to do." He took the lamp from the table and went into the dressing-room.
There hung the raiment in which a God revealed Himself to mortal eyes--the ample garments stirred mysteriously in the draught from the open door. A glimmering white figure seemed to be soaring upward in one corner--it was the Resurrection robe. Inflated by the wind, it floated with a ghost-like movement, while the man divested of his divinity stood with clasped hands and drooping head--to say farewell.
When a mortal strips off his earthly husk he knows that he will exchange it for a brighter one! Here a mortal was stripping off his robe of light and returning to the oppressive form of human imperfection. This, too, was a death agony.