Jimmy shivered a little as he went with her into the adjoining room, and set his lips tight when with a steady hand she drew the coverlet down. Then, while his eyes grew a trifle hazy, he drew in a little breath of relief, for Tom Wheelock lay white and serene at last, with closed eyes and no sign of pain in his quiet face, from which all the weariness had vanished. Only a clean linen bandage, which ran from one temple to behind the other ear, was laid upon it. There was nothing that one could shrink from, and Jimmy made a gesture of protest when Eleanor laid her hand on the bandage.
She met his eyes with something that suggested contempt in hers, and quietly drew back the bandage, and then the soft white sheet from the shoulder of the rigid figure. Jimmy sickened suddenly, and seized her arm in a constraining grasp.
"Put it back!" he said. "That is enough—enough, I tell you!"
Then, while the girl obeyed him, he turned from her with a groan, gasped once or twice, and sat down limply. He could not look around again until her task was concluded, and he would not look at her. It seemed an almost interminable time before she spoke.
"Still," she said, "you must look at him again; I should like you to remember him as he is now. Perhaps you can, Jimmy, but that relief is not for me."
Jimmy rose, and in another few moments turned his head away. He stood still, with a whirl of confused emotions that left him half-dazed rioting within him, while he glanced vacantly round the room. It was scantily furnished, and generally comfortless and mean. Long smears of resinous matter exuded from the rough frame boarding of its walls, and there were shrinkage rents in part of it that let the cool night air in. In one place he could see where a drip from the shingle roof had spread into a wide damp patch on the uncovered floor, and it seemed an almost insufferable thing that his father should have spent his last days in such surroundings. Then he glanced at Eleanor, standing a rigid, somber figure with the lamp in her hand, and it seemed that she guessed what he was thinking.
"It does not matter now—but he was once considered a prosperous man," she said. "The contrast was one of the things he never complained of; but I think he felt it."
Jimmy turned and went out with her, and, sitting down in the adjoining room, she looked at him with the quietness he was commencing to shrink from. She seemed to understand that, too.
"You think I am unnatural," she said. "Perhaps you are right—but even if you are, what does it matter? Still, I believe I was fonder of him than you ever were. If I hadn't been, could I have done all this for you and him?"
She stopped for a moment, and the hard gleam flashed back into her pale-blue eyes. "He was horribly burned, Jimmy, and until the last few minutes crazed with drink and pain. Still, he was driven to his death and degradation."