LITTLE Roskĕ lay in her last sleep, pale and beautiful, robed in white and crowned with flowers. Amongst those who brought sweet roses to the faded Rosebud was a gracious lady, not beautiful, but with a noble, thoughtful face, full of cense and kindliness. Charlotte de Bourbon, Princess of Orange, took Marie Pernet’s hand in hers, and told her how she felt it might have been their own little Louise Julienne, so sorry the Prince was for their sorrow, and so earnestly did they both pray God to comfort them. Then Marie took courage, forgot she was speaking to a great lady, and told her with what a wonderful love Roskĕ had loved the Prince, how eager she had been to see him, how passionately she had longed for a word, a look, a touch from him. The first relieving burst of tears came to her as she tried to add, ‘And he took her in his arms. And she never knew it.’
‘I saw all,’ the Princess answered, not without tears of sympathy. ‘It was in throwing the flowers down to us that she fell. I have kept those flowers. I will keep them always.’
Many such kind words were spoken, and by many voices. They soothed the sorrow of Marie; but to Adrian they were only like the sound on a coral reef of breakers ‘that never touch the shore.’ There was round him a great solitude, which seemed all the greater when people came and went, sat down by him and talked to him.
The ladies who had been on the balcony came, with explanations and excuses. ‘No one had thought of danger. No one had been looking. It happened in such a moment.’ Adrian heard and kept silence, but none the less, perhaps all the more, he hated them in his heart. Maldeer came with offers of help with his patients, kindly intended, and to him Adrian managed to say, ‘You closed her eyes; I thank you.’
All the pastors came, endeavoring to bring him in one form or other ‘the consolations of religion’ — very real consolations, as many thousands have proved; but where is the use of bread to a man who cannot eat? Duifhuis came among the rest, said scarcely anything, but pressed his hand and burst into tears, for which Adrian envied him in a dull, perplexed kind of way.
The whole town was moved to sympathy; and there was a universal desire to show it by such honors as the living have it in their power to give to the dead. Thus it was that little Roskĕ was decreed a public funeral. She was borne to her rest on a bier covered with flowers, surrounded by white robed children singing hymns, and followed by a great concourse of people. Pastor Duifhuis preached a sermon on the test, ‘Jesus called unto Him a little child.’ Marie thought it very consoling; Adrian, a fine piece of eloquence, as well meant and as useless as the flowers everyone was bringing in such lavish profusion. He would hate the sight and scent of flowers for evermore!
When the arrangements for the funeral were being made, Dirk pleaded his right to be one of the bearers. But the City Fathers, in their desire to do all possible honor to the decreed that these should be of noble birth, so his prayer was refused. He would not speak of it to Adrian, though he knew, very certainly, what his wishes would have been. What did it matter? What did anything matter now?
Marie had thought it right to give him back his chain, which to a youth in his position represented a little fortune. He took it in silence; but when, alone and with noiseless footsteps, he stole into the chamber of death to take his last farewell, he kissed the lips he could have never dared to kiss again in life, and placed the chain in the half-shut hand, hiding it with flowers. What he meant he could not have told anyone—he had no words in which to say it. Three hundred years later, a great poet said for him just the words he wanted—
‘There, that is our secret; go to sleep
You will wake, and remember, and understand.’
His little lady was gone from him. But she lived still—lived with God, lived, and would live forever, in his heart also. And if, in his day and generation, he might by God’s grace do any worthy deeds for Him and for his country, they would be Juffrouw Roskĕ’s work too, and he would tell her so when they met again.
Kaatje and Neeltje made sore lamentation; they agreed in pitying the Juffrouw much, and the doctor more. But Käatje thought the death of his wife, of whom Juffrouw Marie had told them, must have been even a worse sorrow to him than this, while the sententious Neeltje thought otherwise. ‘A man’s strength stands out against the first blow,’ she said, ‘‘tis the second lays him on the ground. He who has a child has something to live for; when that’s gone ‘tis a case “Lose heart, lose all.” Master’s eggs were all in one basket; and take my word for it, he will never lift up his head again. That child was the apple of his eye.’
‘I am sure,’ said Käatje, ‘he has had enough to comfort him—if he could be comforted. He knows she is now a little angel in heaven—the darling! And the flowers, and the singing, and the kindness of everybody, from the Prince—God forgive him all his sins, for he has a kind heart, at any rate! —down to the very beggars in the street. And the beautiful sermon that pastor of yours preached about her! —You have done your best to make the poor church look like a kitchen, I am sure I pity it!—Still, I have more than half a mind to go and hear that man again next Sunday.’
So Death and Sorrow—those stern and silent, yet not untender ministers of God—began already to do their work; the fruits of kindness, deep hidden in our common nature, sprang forth everywhere at their touch. Ranks, creeds, classes, were drawn together by that touch, which effaced differences, and brought out essential likenesses in strong relief. Even to those to whom it meant anguish beyond words, there came, after the anguish—with it in a measure—the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Marie drew nearer to God than she had ever done before. Dirk Willemszoon sprang, as it seemed ab one bound, into the full stature of a noble and heroic manhood.
But Adrian? For him there was no balm in Gilead, nor any physician there. He was desolate—and desolation means isolation. The world was full of people they crowded round him, they spoke vain words to him, they tried to comfort him. But Roskĕ was not among them—that was all he knew, or cared. He might search the world through and through, and never find Roskĕ—never any more. When he looked up at night to the star-bespangled sky, all he thought was this: ‘Until the heavens be no more they shall not awake, neither be raised out of their sleep.’ Not till all those worlds had passed away—not forever and ever—should he hear again the voice, see again the face that was the light of life to him.
‘Until the heavens be no more,’ the words echoed and reechoed through his weary brain like the burden of a song of despair. But by-and-by other words from the same old Book came to him instead, ‘The child is not, and I—whither shall I go?’