Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/148

 A short time after the body of the unfortunate lord was brought back in the arms of his weeping servants. They clothed him in his richest vestments, and they exposed him to view on a bier, constructed in the middle of the knight's hall.

An examination of the place showed that the upper arch of the keep had caved in. The weight of the stones forming the key of the arch had crushed in the floor; the beams carried down at the same time, had, under their weight, thrown down a part of the wall, and pierced like arrows the lower stories, so that on opening, in the darkness, the door of the great hall, you could not step into the tower, without falling into a hole more than a hundred feet deep.

The old baron Roderick had predicted the day of his death, and had announced it to Wolfgang, the eldest of his children, on whom fell the entail of R—sitten. This young lord, having received at Vienna the message of his father, started without delay to go to him. On his arrival he found his fears cruelly realized, and fell fainting by the side of the funeral couch.

"My poor father!" exclaimed he, in a voice broken by sobs, after a long pause of inanition and silent despair; "my poor father! the study of the mysteries of the world has not given thee the science of prolonging life."

After the funeral of the old lord, the young baron had narrated to him the details of the ruin of the turret by Daniel; and, as the major-domo asked for his orders for the reparation of it,

"No, never," said Wolfgang. "What to me is this old residence, where my father consumed, in the study of magic, the treasures that I had a right to inherit some day! I do not believe that the turret was destroyed by an ordinary accident. My father perished the victim of the explosion of his accursed crucibles, in which melted away my fortune. I will not give a florin to replace one stone of these ruins. I prefer finishing the villa that one of my ancestors has commenced in the valley."