CVI
She died in August, and the letter would never come now....
September paved the chestnut-woods with golden leaves, the ripened blackberries vanished before the onslaughts of children and the attack of birds. The snow-peaks turned into pyramids of ice, blizzards swept screaming down the gorges, there were frost-frogs in the valleys and icicles upon the edges of the rocks over which the waterfalls hung in blocks of frozen foam. The Promenade of Zeiden grew empty—people had migrated to Davos or Grindelwald. The familiar figure of the old white-haired man in the Bath-chair had not been seen for many a day.For he lay in his large bedroom at the Home, dying at ninety-three years of age, of a complaint the existence of which is, by the physicians, denied....
He was tended with the kindest care. Nor, when the land and submarine telegraphs tapped out the news East, West, North, and South, and the Wireless sent it to the ears of the helmeted operators in the Marconi Installation Room on the upper decks of the great passenger steamers, hurrying with their human cargo to distant countries, did expressions of sympathy fail.
People were very sorry. Extremely sorry. Though hardly anybody had ever in their lives before heard the name of the dying man. Of the Society of the Crimson Cross, they knew quite certainly. An excellent institution. Had done heaps of good. But they had rather imagined it to have been founded by the Prince Consort in 1859, if they were English; and if they happened to be Germans, they boldly said that the-never-to-be-sufficiently-esteemed and-now-with-his-mourned-ancestors-and-beloved-wife-reposing Imperial Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, had laid the egg of the idea that another less eminent had hatched.... Italians draped with fine art their own innate convictions that Garibaldi or the Pope was responsible. French people shrugged, superior, for even an Austro-Helvetian, born and bred in Paris, becomes by the most subtle of transitions, a Frenchman of France.
Several Crowned Heads and Scientific Associations cabled sympathetic messages, the Council of the Society of the Crimson Cross pressed for the latest bulletin, the State Council of Widinitz despatched a delegate; the Mayor of Zeiden, with two of his town councillors, made a visit of ceremony to the dying man’s bedside.... Two Little Sisters of the Poor were with him—mild-eyed religious who had taken it in turns for years with others of their Community, to visit him daily. Lights were burning between vases of flowers before a Crucifix set upon a little white-draped table. They were ending the recitation of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary as the officials were ushered in.
The man they sought lay, snow-white and barely conscious, a fitful breathing stirring the white hairs of his upper lip. A bleak pinched look was on the brave old face, the great black eyes were closed and sunken. Butsometimes their lids would flutter and lift, and they would wander until they fell upon an object that might have been a woman’s bust upon a pedestal draped in a heavy veil of crape that hid its lineaments. And then—the look in them was not good to see.
“M. Dunoisse is barely conscious,” said the elder of the two Sisters. “The doctors hold that the end is close at hand. That he is quite prepared is happily certain,—Monsieur has ever been a devout Catholic. His confessor is to bring him the Viaticum at noon.” The pale face of the speaker flushed as a carriage was heard to stop before the hall-entrance. “It is here!” she said, and hurried to the double doors and flung them wide apart.