the ducal burial vault, through the
cobwebbed windows of which, from the garden where he played as a child,
the young Duke had often peered at the faded glories of the immense
coroneted coffins, the oldest shedding their velvet tatters around
them. Surrounded by the whole official world of Rosenmold, arrayed for
the occasion in almost [139] forgotten dresses of ceremony as if for a
masquerade, the new coffin glided from the fragrant chapel where the
Requiem was sung, down the broad staircase lined with peach-colour and
yellow marble, into the shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as a
strolling musician, had followed it across the square through a
drenching rain, on which circumstance he overheard the old people
congratulate the "blessed" dead within, had listened to a dirge of his
own composing brought out on the great organ with much bravura by his
friend, the new court organist, who was in the secret, and that night
turned the key of the garden entrance to the vault, and peeped in upon
the sleepy, painted, and bewigged young pages whose duty it would be
for a certain number of days to come to watch beside their late
master's couch.

And a certain number of weeks afterwards it was known that "the mad
Duke" had reappeared, to the dismay of court marshals. Things might
have gone hard with the youth had the strange news, at first as
fantastic rumour, then as matter of solemn enquiry, lastly as
ascertained fact, pleasing or otherwise, been less welcome than it was
to the grandfather, too old, indeed, to sorrow deeply, but grown so
decrepit as to propose that ministers should possess themselves of the
person of the young Duke, proclaim him of age and regent. From those
dim travels, presenting themselves to the old man, who had never been
[140] fifty miles away from home, as almost lunar in their audacity, he
would come back--come back "in time," he murmured faintly, eager to
feel that youthful, animating life on the stir about him once more.

Carl himself, now the thing was over, greatly relishing its satiric
elements, must be forgiven the trick of the burial and his still
greater enormity in coming to life again. And then, duke or no duke,
it was understood that he willed that things should in no case be
precisely as they had been. He would never again be quite so near
people's lives as in the past--a fitful, intermittent visitor--almost
as if he had been properly dead; the empty coffin remaining as a kind
of sy