O terrible tragi-comedy of life, O strange, tangled world, in which poor, petty man must walk, tripped by endless coils--religion, race, sex, custom, wealth, poverty! World that from boyhood he had seemed to see stretching so clearly before him, to be mapped out with lucid logic, to be bestridden with triumphant foot by men become as gods, knowing good and evil. Only one thing was left--to die unbroken. He had his lawyer brought to his bedside, went through his last testament again, left money for the Union, recommended it to the workers as their one sure path of salvation. Moses had only been permitted to gaze upon the Promised Land, but the Chosen People--the Germans--should yet luxuriate in its milk and honey. A month after his meeting with Helene on the Righi--a month after his glad shout, "By all the gods of Greece, 'tis she!"--he was a corpse, the magic voice silent for ever; while the woman he had sought was to give herself to his slayer, and the movement he had all but abandoned for her was to become a great power in the State, under the ever-growing glamour of his memory. The Countess bent over the body. A strange, grim joy mingled with her rage and despair. None of all these women had the right to share in her grief. He belonged to her--to her and the People. Yes, she would bear the body of her _cher enfant_ through the provinces of the Rhine--he had been murdered by a cunning political plot, the People who loved him should rise and avenge their martyred Messiah. And suddenly she remembered with a fresh pang the one woman who had a right to share her grief, nay, to call him--in no figurative sense--"_enfant_"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting strength, of his superb fore-visionings. THE PRIMROSE SPHINX I In the choir of the old-fashioned church of Hughenden, that broods amid the beautiful peace of English meadows, there stands, on the left hand of the aisle, a black high-backed stall of polished oak, overhung by the picturesque insignia of the Order of the Garter. In the pavement behind it gleams a square slab, dedicated by "his grateful sovereign and friend" to her great Prime Minister, and heaped in the spring with primroses. And on this white memorial is sculptured in bas-relief the profile of the head of a Semitic Sphinx, round whose mute lips flickers in a faint sardonic smile the wisdom of the ages. II I see him, methinks, in life, Premier of England, Lord Privy Seal, Earl Beaconsfield of Beaconsfield, Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden, sitting in his knightly stall, listening impassibly to the country parson's sermon. His head droops on his breast, but his coal-black inscrutable eyes are open. It is the hour of his star.