“Where is he?” I said, when I had finished.
“In bed as he was left,” said Jason. “I went in this morning, while you were asleep, and found him—ah, he looks horrible,” he cried, and broke off with a shudder.
I did not shrink; I felt braced up to any ordeal.
They were all in the room when we entered it. My father, Dr. Crackenthorpe, Zyp—even old Peggy, who was busying herself, with the vulture relish of her kind, over the little artificial decencies of dress and posture that seem such an outrage on the solemn unresistance of the dead.
Directly we came in Zyp ran to Jason and clung to him sobbing. I noticed it with a sort of dull resignation, and that was all; for Peggy, who had drawn a sheet over the lifeless face, pulled it down that I might look.
Then, for all my stoicism, I gave a cry.
I had left my brother the night before tired, needing rest, but, save for the extra pallor of his complexion that never boasted a great deal of color, much like his usual self. Now the dead face lying back on the pillows was awful to look upon. Spots and bars of livid purple disfigured its waxen whiteness—on the cheeks, the ears, the throat, where a deep patch was. It was greatly swollen, too, and the mouth so rigidly open that it had defied all effort to bind it close. A couple of pennies, like a hideous pair of glasses, lay, one over each eye, where they could only be kept in position by means of a filament drawn tightly round the head. The hands, stiffly crossed, with the fingers crooked like talons, lay over the breast, fastened into position with a ligature.
I turned away, feeling sick and faint. I think I reeled, for presently I found that Dr. Crackenthorpe was supporting me against his arm.
“Oh, why is he like that?” I whispered.
“’Tis a common afterclap in deaths by drowning,” said he, speaking in a loud, insistent voice, as if not for the first time. “A stoppage—a relapse. During the weak small hours, when the patient’s strength is at its lowest, the overwrought lungs refuse to work—collapse, and he dies of suffocation.”