In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in Jean's room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages. Nobody had been forgotten. For her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. Once when I went into his room he said:
"I have been looking in at Jean and envying her. I have never greatly envied any one but the dead. I always envy the dead."
He told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up for lost time.
While they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his health, for the papers had reported him as returning from Bermuda in a critical condition. He had written this playful answer:
MANAGER ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York.
I hear the newspapers say I am dying. The charge is not true. I would not do such a thing at my time of life. I am behaving as good as I can.
Merry Christmas to everybody! MARK TWAIN.
Jean telephoned it for him to the press. It had been the last secretary service she had ever rendered.
She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said good night, and he had not seen her again. The reciting of this was good to him, for it brought the comfort of tears.
Later, when I went in again, he was writing:
"I am setting it down," he said--"everything. It is a relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking."
He continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next day, and the next.
It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey. Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for Clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had not seen. No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life.
They were to start with jean at about six o'clock, and a little before that time Clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had been her favorite music. I said that she seemed always to care most for the Schubert Impromptu.--[Op. 142, No. 2.]--Then he said:
"Play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the Intermezzo for Susy and the Largo for Mrs. Clemens. When I hear the music I shall know that they are starting. Tell them to set lanterns at the door, so I can look down and see them go."
So I sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her away. A soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest days was closing in. There was not the least wind or noise, the whole world was muffled. The lanterns at the door threw their light out on the thickly falling flakes. I remained at the organ; but the little group at the door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair as he stood mournfully gazing down, watching Jean going away from him for the last time. I played steadily on as he had instructed, the Impromptu, the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria," and Handel's Largo. When I had finished I went up and found him.
"Poor little Jean," he said; "but for her it is so good to go."
In his own story of it he wrote:
From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. The cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old Katie--Were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.