For a full
minute he stood speechless, feeling as though his emotion must find
some physical expression, lest it should kill him there and then.
He heard a footstep, and then the door opened and closed softly.
Looking round, he saw that he was alone; Frau von Sigmundskron had
understood from what she could see of his attitude that the letter had
brought him news even worse than that of his father's death, and she
had felt that to stay any longer would have been to intrude upon a
sorrow in which she could have no share. Seeing that she was gone, Rex
abandoned all restraint over himself, and submitted for a time to the
overwhelming influences that surrounded him on all sides. His face
became livid as he threw himself upon the couch, and his fingers were
twisted unnaturally, as though their nerves were irritated by a strong
electric current. Lying on his back, he rolled his head from side to
side, like a man tortured on the rack, while his reddening eyes kept
their sight fixed upon a blank point of the ceiling. The pain in his
temples was as that of a red-hot screw boring its way through his
brain, and while his white teeth ground audibly upon each other his
quick-coming breath blew a scarcely perceptible foam from his strained
and parted lips.
Father, mother, honour, were gone at one blow. Not the mother he had
learned to dream of as a boy, when some faint memory of her fair face
was still with him; not the tender and gentle mother who, if she had
lived, would have been dearest on earth to him, and whose untimely
death had lent her something heavenly and brightly mysterious; not the
mother of whom his father had often told him, who from her place of
peace looked down, perhaps, and smiled when he did well, or was pained
when he did wrong; not the mother who, in his sleep, seemed to walk
beside him when he was a child, robed in white, holding him by the hand
and pointing heavenwards, like the picture of the Guardian Angel so
common in his native country; not that mother who was to him the
embodiment of all that was pure and lovely, and saintly and kind; not
that sweet mother who for nearly forty years had held her secret place
in the strange labyrinths of the lonely student's heart, to whose
angelic figure he had often turned for consolation when weary with the
aimlessness of deep study that led to nothing, or when satiated with
all the useless, pleasureless pleasure which money could give and which
there was no one to forbid.
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