"Do you think she's going to die?" cried Fanny suddenly in panic. "We'd better get a priest anyway, only the poor heathen die without one!"
Fanny had always been interested in foreign missions and was in the habit of giving propitiatory sums to the church when she got panicky, for the purpose of conversions....
A ring at the door, a firm, long ring caused Maria to jump up.
It was Hermann, Hermann of the old days, despite his right arm hanging straight, Hermann completely professional, quiet, strong, but loving too.
He gave one look at his Tante Ilde.
"Pneumonia," he said, "she's been ill for a couple of days," and he started to do the little there was to be done.
"But she never said anything except that she had a bit of a cold, the angel, and going to the cemetery too!" answered Fanny aghast.
"To the cemetery in such a state!" he echoed in astonishment, "why she won't get through the night. Fanny—I'm glad she's here."
As the brother and sister looked at each other their eyes filled with tears. The way life was....
"I'm afraid she's already begun her agony," he whispered a few minutes later, "dear, good, sweet Tante Ilde."
But he wrote a prescription for Maria to take out.
"It may last longer than we think. It's sometimes so hard for them to go, even when they've nothing to stay for, but we can try to make it easy for her."
Fanny ran out of the room after Maria.
"Go to the Kapuziners and bring some one back and quick," she whispered imperatively.
Then she returned to the bedside. Hermann was bending over his aunt, raising her up and Fanny ran again and got some of the softest cushions from the blue divan, to put high, high under her head.
Suddenly Tante Ilde opened her eyes.
"Manny, dear, good Manny!" she cried, quite loud, then, "Fanny, darling, you won't forget little Ferry?"
And then she called for Corinne, and called again and again. She loved them all equally, but the flavor of Corinne's being was the flavor of her own, Ildefonse Stacher's being, and that made a strange, an essential difference at the end....
But at that very minute Corinne was sitting in a little restaurant with Pauli, close together on a narrow, leather bench in a corner, and Pauli's dark, small hand lay closely, hotly over hers. After they had eaten he was going to take her to Kaethe's,—not to Fanny's where a more merciful Fate would have lead them. And that is why stupidly, horribly, Corinne was always to think, she wasn't at home when Maria came to get her....
As Tante Ilde lay calling for Corinne, with her blue eyes widely open, neither Fanny nor Hermann could know that flashingly, she was seeing, as the day before, Pauli's dark, turquoise-ringed hand clasped tightly over the slim whiteness of Corinne's, and that she was very frightened for Corinne. She closed her eyes flutteringly several times, but still she saw their hands. Then suddenly the cavities under her brow grew very deep and she gave a long, whistling gasp.
"Not yet," whispered Hermann, seizing Fanny's hand, for at the sight she had burst into wild weeping, "but soon,—dear, dear Auntie," and from his voice there was momentarily released all the pent-up tenderness of his great heart. It flooded the room. It surged warmly about his sister, about his dying aunt....
Then Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, began to pluck at the sheet and talk in snatches of Baden and of Heinie, her brother, their father. Once she smiled, but they didn't know that it was because the bed was so soft and she was so comfortable, quite knowing that she would never have to move again.... And certainly if this was dying it wasn't at all what people thought.
Maria's key was in the door ... Maria's voice was respectfully ushering someone into that silk-hung chamber,—a dark-bearded, deep-eyed Capuchin monk. He threw back widely his brown-hooded cloak, and as he did so glanced enfoldingly at the dying woman without a single other look about the room. His work lay there....
Frau Stacher had fallen into a last unconsciousness, but her breathing was still terribly loud, like wind through a vacant room. Fanny on her knees by the bed, was weeping and praying and kissing her aunt's thin hand rather extravagantly, after her way.
The monk's eyes, accustomed to the sight of death, knew without a word from Hermann that the end was very near. On the little, white, lace-covered table by the bed, on which Maria had placed a lighted candle, a basin of water and a towel, he laid the Blessed Oils, those final oils with which he was to anoint Frau Stacher's noisy tenement, commending it to mercy....
Her broad-lidded blue eyes, that through tears would look no more on misery, no more on starving children, no, never anymore....
Her ears, that would hear no further cries of woe, nor any unprofitable discourse....
Her nostrils, that would no more weakly dilate at smell of needed food....
Her tongue, that would frame no more its words of gentle, helpless pity....
Her hands, that had once given so freely, would be held out no more to receive. Never again would she have to suffer humble uncertainty for the gifts of food and raiment. The body, no longer needing food, was itself become as raiment, cast off....
Her feet, that had forever fallen away from the ranks of those who in aged misery still flitted through the wintry streets of Vienna seeking their midday meal of charity ... the Mariahilferstrasse, endless, the Alserstrasse separated from the Hoher Markt by so many wide, open places, the narrow, crowded Kaerntnerstrasse and all those other streets that had sounded a last time to her diminished step....
Irma would never again give her the thin part of the soup, and never again would she watch to see that her sister-in-law drew back the curtains of the alcove. Alcove! Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, in the name of Principalities and Powers, in the name of the Cherubim and Seraphim, was about to take possession of her whole heavenly mansion, her very own from all time unto all time, and big and beautiful.
Fanny not only buried her aunt decently, but splendidly as such things in such times were rated. A Requiem Mass was sung at the Capuchin Church. Expensive wreaths were ordered in the name of each niece for which Fanny herself paid; (except for Mizzi's, Mizzi got the bill, unjustly, she considered, and she ran into the office and said some horrible things to Hermann when it came)....
They were but more tokens of Fanny, those many flowers, Fanny inescapably, confusingly beneficent to the end. Wet with the dew of the Church's blessing, they almost concealed Tante Ilde's coffin, as to the sound of those sable horses over the cobbly streets she was carried to her grave ... at last to be alone behind the heaviest door known to mortals....
As they drove back, each was saying in one or another tone, "what a pity," that Tante Ilde couldn't have been there to enjoy it in her fine, gentle way, and that if they had known she was going to die so soon they would have arranged differently. They had spoken of Baden, too, and of childhood things. They had mourned, yes, but their mourning, as would have been any cheer, was after their several and varying natures.
Anna had not gone to Fanny's to see her aunt laid out. No, indeed! She and Hermine went only to the church and cemetery, as likewise did four of Kaethe's children and Irma and her boys. Hermine had been all eyes for her veiled, but still discernibly lovely aunt, whose crisp, deep black stood out cypress-like against the greyer, cheaper hues of the other mourning figures, and she had been pleasantly conscious of a sort of pricking interest in some one in her very own family who, by all accounts, would go straight to Hell when she died.
Ferry had wept over-much for his strength and years, but Resl in her high, true voice had sung "In Paradise, In Paradise" about the house for days.
Liesel, after a long discussion with Otto, who was born knowing what happened to husbands who didn't look after their wives, had gone, safely and properly accompanied by him, to take a last look at her aunt as she lay in Fanny's darkened salon, candles at her head and feet, and all those flowers,—in January. So great was the majesty clothing the features of "poor, old Tante Ilde," that fear suddenly entered into Liesel's rippling, shallow soul, and she got confused, and afterwards, to her annoyance, she could only remember vaguely that everything was blue and that over the divan was a silken cover picked out in what seemed to be silver rose-buds. Donkey thatshewas, she hadn't noticed the jeweled elephants either, nor the rabbits of which she had heard so much. Otto couldn't help her out in the slightest,—no more than a blind man. No, Liesel decidedly hadn't had her pleasant wits about her that day and she keenly regretted not having taken better advantage of her one opportunity.
Fanny had not shown herself. Maria robed fittingly in deepest black, the expression on her face almost as sombre as her garb, saw through, competently and proudly, the visits of the sorrowing nieces.
Mizzi had been all honey, though she thought Fanny was decidedly over-doing things, and had given Maria a present of money, which Maria considered long due and took with small thanks. She couldn't abide Mizzi anyway.
Leo and Kaethe slipped in grievingly to continue their weeping by that second bier; Kaethe was greatly comforted by thinking that Carli and Tante Ilde were, even then, together.
Hermann came no more. Beloved dead,—he couldn't bear it—the cold body—and all he knew about it. No, no.
Corinne whose sorrow was as deep as her being, spent two nights watching by her Dresden china aunt, now done in palest ivory. She felt as if she herself had destroyed her. When you had a fragile treasure like that and threw it literally into the streets....
But Fanny mingled her bright tears so healingly with her sister's that the last night, as they sat near their Tante Ilde, they found themselves talking softly, smilingly even, of familiar little things that once had made her smile. The flickering light of the candles at her head and feet met the silver crucifix on her breast, shimmered on the silver hair flat above the still, pale forehead.... The same light caught with a greedy, leaping flame the young, living gold of the two bowed heads....
But after a while except for the memory of the splendid funeral Fanny gave her, getting dimmer even that, in the hearts of those she had truly loved, it would soon be to everyone except Tante Ilde herself, busied timelessly in one of many mansions, as if she had never been.