It seemed as if a flush passed across his face. He pressed my hand feebly and dropped his head.
“Now,” he muttered; “come the crash of doom! To all else I am ready to answer. Call the——”
Like a glass breaking, his voice snapped and immediate silence befell. He had not stirred in my arms; but now I felt the whole surface of his body moving, as it were, of itself with a light ruffling shudder.
Suddenly he seemed to shrink into himself, rather than away from me, so that he cowered unsupported on the bed. I fell back and looked at his face. His head moved softly from side to side, the eyes following something, unseen of me, hither and thither about the room. In a moment they contracted and fixed themselves horribly on one point, as if the things had come to the bed foot and were softly mounting it. In the same instant on my dull and appalled senses broke the low booming voice of the wheel circling in its black pit far below, and I knew that in the phantom sound no material force spoke, but that the heart of the dying man was transmitting its terrors to me.
Then I saw my father sink slowly back, drawing, as he did so, the sheet up and over his face, as if to shut out the sight, and all the time the convulsive fluttering of my own breath alone stirred the tense silence that reigned about us.
I must have remained in this position many minutes, fixed and motionless in a trance of fear, when the stealthy noise below seemed to cease suddenly as it had begun. At that I leaped to my feet with a strangled cry and tore the bedclothes away from the face. The eyes stared up at me as if I were the secret presence; the jaw was dropped; the whole body collapsed and sunk into the sheets. He had died without a sound—there—in a moment; had died of that that was beyond human speech; of something to which no dreadful human cry could give expression.
* * * * *
Wading near knee deep in the flooded meadows, sense and reason returned to me by slow degrees. Then a wan streak of sunrise gaped like a dead man’s wound on the stormy horizon, and a new day was breaking to wind and deluge that seemed endless.
Ah, surely I had been tried beyond mortal endurance. So I thought, not knowing what was yet to come; what tension the soul’s fetters can be put to without breaking.
The sodden day broadened and found me still wandering. Once during the morning I crept back to the house of terror, and, standing without its door, summoned the old woman, who had come of herself to attend to dead Peggy’s laying out, and told her of my father’s death and directed her to a second task.