A German Pompadour Part 41

She turned away. After all, the man had spoken truly in his sculptured allegory: Time, and Change, and Death are more mighty than Love, than Joy, than Power. She mused on, and unconsciously her wanderings, led by old custom's memory, brought her to the vaulted arcade beside the door of the east pavilion where she had dwelt. Here, too, her own face met her in the bas-reliefs. Graceful designs of musical instruments, emblems of her taste, and everywhere laughing Cupids held wreathed flowers, viole d'amore, harps and lutes around the mistress-musician's voluptuous face.

The carven stone held for ever the memory of Eberhard Ludwig's homage in the beauteous picturing of Love, Laughter, Music--all that she had wielded with such potency to charm; and she knew that the sneering artist-architect had hidden everywhere the figure of Time the Avenger; sometimes she had called him the Consoler, but she knew him better now as the Eternally Pitiless, waiting to reap his harvest--the flowers reaped with the wheat.

Suddenly the full message came to her: 'All things wither, but the remembrance of the sinful light of love is bitter pain, whereas the memory of the pure woman is sweet with children's tears.' She had read the words in some book, they smote her now. In an agony of weeping she leaned her head against the stone picture of Music, Love, and Laughter, and her own young face. 'O G.o.d! O G.o.d! have I not atoned by pain?' she moaned.

A soft evening breeze came stealing round her. Nature could give no answer to her fearful questioning, but the gentle Spring wind kissed her on lips and brow. She rose and took her way to the terrace. Here, too, was ruinous neglect--gra.s.s-grown paths, moss-covered sculptures, untended plants. She looked up at the windows of the rooms which had been Eberhard Ludwig's; they were closed and shuttered.--Dead, everything was dead!

She hurried on towards La Favorite, her Chateau Joyeux. Here again was ruin, and here also her own face met her sculptured everywhere--smiling, young, and indifferent to the ruin. The flowering parterre was untended, but the lilacs and the redthorn-trees made the garden fair. The long Spring twilight faded, night drew near--and the Gravenitz turned away.

'Farewell,' she said aloud, 'the night comes! Farewell, Spring!'

That night Maria could not induce her beloved mistress to taste food. 'I am so weary, Maria, let me rest. I think G.o.d will give me sleep,' she said, and the faithful peasant woman left her.

In the morning Maria found her resting still. G.o.d had given her the Great Sleep.