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 that _she_ was, 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.