From Memory's Shrine by Carmen Sylva — Read

Whenever my lips pronounce the beloved name, I am choked with the tears that gather round my heart, and silently overflowing, suffuse my eyes. She was the sunshine of my youth, illuminating it with her own radiant brightness, with her affection, her irrepressible swiftness of perception and joyful play of fancy, with the unspeakable tenderness that was hers. As children we were always together, the three Bibras and we three. There was a perpetual interchange of letters and messages, little notes constantly making their way across the quadrangle that lay between the castle and their house, with some such whimsically worded invitation as the following: "The three little Widgeons request the pleasure of the three little Bearers' company to tea. " Or, it might be, the other way round. We were all of about the same age, Marie being born in the same year as my brother Wilhelm, her brother Berthold and I the preceding year, whilst our poor Otto, had he lived, would be the same age as her sister, Louise, Countess Bernstorff, sole survivor of that trio. But death had already thinned the ranks of the Bibra family, two dear children having been laid quite early in the tomb. These were the baby Anna, who died in our house at Monrepos, and whose little waxen face and cold white hands I well remember, and the little Max, Marie's darling, a fine manly little fellow, whose loss the elder sister never ceased to deplore. Her beautiful eyes, soft and limpid as those of a gazelle, ran over with tears at the mention of his name. Those tears seemed always ready to flow, as if her heart were overfull, and it needed but a word to stir the depths and bring them to the surface. How quietly they coursed down the fair young cheeks, never reddening them or distorting the delicate features, but giving her the appearance of a blossom refreshed by rain. And those lovely lustrous eyes looked only the more brilliant for the tears they had shed, lit up by a soft steady radiance that I have never seen elsewhere. But how can I find words to tell of her sweetness, of all she was to me, my heart's best friend, the dear companion of my youth!

Thrown together as we were by circumstances, and with so much that was sympathetic in our natures, we were drawn yet closer by the hand of Fate, by a certain similarity in the fortunes -- or rather in the ill-fortune that befell our families. There is perhaps no stronger tie than that which springs from an affliction borne in common, and the friendship that united Marie von Bibra and myself, founded on the sorrows we had shared, but little resembled that which ordinarily exists between girls of our age. Young as she was, and naturally light-hearted, she had known much sorrow. After the baby-sister, and the little brother whom she loved so well, she was fated to see the only remaining one, Berthold, called away one springtime in the bloom and pride of youth. It was on a cold dull May day -- how unlike the May mornings of poetry and legend! -- that I stood with her beside the coffin in which her brother had just been laid, and together we afterwards wove the garlands that went with him to the grave. And in all the anguish of the years of Otto's martyrdom it was she who supported and comforted me, when the load of sorrow would otherwise have seemed too heavy to be borne. These were no weak, no ordinary ties, that bound our souls together, and the fellowship of sorrow rests on a firmer basis than any other fraternity. But our joys were in common too, and how much increased, by being shared!