To any one knowing the old Saxon custom of touching a corpse as a means of finding its unconfessed murderer the scene would have been more intense from the moment that the first hand—a woman’s—was laid on the least sore member of Jarlsen’s wrecked body.
None but Miss Bentley knew that the custom was a primitive habit of the race. She alone had a vision of spurting blood as the guilty hand touched its victim. That vision was usual to her at the blast rites, and she felt a strange thrill of uncertainty when she put her own innocent, helping hand on a blasted labourer.
The greater part of the crowd strolled off, subdued, into the bright morning. The rest lingered to lay hands on an old friend.
Jarlsen, the man who had given his ear to their sorrows and lent his high, searching voice to all their social joys, was virtually dead to them; and it was in tense silence that the heavy-footed workmen approached the table. Then there would be a sobbing sigh, and some one would pass out at the door. Few people can touch the dead without tears, and as Jerry Black said, “The blasts is dead men with live tongues.”
They had all gone; the room grew light as the crowd moved from the windows. Sunlight bathed the floor at Emma’s feet, and Black stood beside her, knowing she feared to be without him when Jarlsen was deaf to her and Quarry spoke his kind of love to her, and her father was only a peevish old child. Quarry laid a nervous hand on Jarlsen, who had been roused more than once through his tactile sense as some old friend’s hand had lain for a moment on his.
When Quarry’s touch fell on him, he cried out, “O Emma, Emma! am I dead, that I can not hear you? Is your voice gone behind the sky, that you hold your mouth yet? Is your hand cut off you? Don’t marry Quarry till I am home again! Emma, tell me where you are. It is all black inside me!”
Emma leaped to him. She was “swift as a wicked cat,” Quarry told her later on when he cursed her.
She hurt him cruelly, but Jarlsen smiled, and his blackened face grew brighter. “I shall not marry until Heaven—” she vowed, but he could not hear. The pain of her embrace was fearful, but she clung fast, and called out in her big voice the loyalty he longed for and that he felt in the suffering her strong arms caused him, even though he could not hear.
And then Jerry touched her. “I’m afraid he’s fainted,” he said, as though he apologized.