e Heiligenberg suddenly from one of the villages
of the plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to come out of
the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his way homeward
sadly, an hour later, he enters by chance the open door of a village
church, half buried in the tangle of its churchyard. The rude coffin is
lying there of a labourer who had but a hovel to live in. The enemy
dogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to be flying, not from
death simply, but from assassination.

And as these thoughts sent him back in the rebounding power of youth,
with renewed appetite, to life and sense, so, grown at last familiar,
they gave additional purpose to his fantastic experiment. Had it not
been said by a wise man that after all the offence of death was in its
trappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing, while,
presumably, a large reversionary interest in life was still his. He
would purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy "trappings," and
listen while he was spoken of as dead. The mere preparations gave
pleasant proof of the devotion to him of a certain number, who entered
without question into his plans. It is not difficult to mislead the
world concerning what happens to those who live at the artificial
distance from it of a court, with its high wall of etiquette. However
the matter was managed, no one doubted, when, with a blazon of
ceremonious words, the court news went forth that, after a brief
illness, according to the way of his race, the hereditary Grand-duke
was deceased. In momentary regret, bethinking them of the lad's taste
for splendour, those to whom the arrangement of such matters belonged
(the grandfather now sinking deeper into bare quiescence) backed by the
popular wish, determined to give him a funeral with even more than
grand-ducal measure of lugubrious magnificence. The place of his repose
was marked out for him as officiously as if it had been the
delimitation of a kingdom, in 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 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 line