CHAPTER XXIII
AVE ATQUE VALE!
James Andersen lay dead in the brothers’ little bedroom at the station-master’s cottage. It could not be maintained that his face wore the unruffled calm conventionally attributed to mortality’s last repose. On the other hand, his expression was not that of one who has gone down in hopeless despair.
What his look really conveyed to his grief-worn brother, as he hung over him all that August night, was the feeling that he had been struck in mid-contest, with equal chance of victory or defeat, and with the indelible imprint upon his visage of the stress and strain of the terrific struggle.
It was a long and strange vigil that Luke found himself thus bound to keep, when the first paroxysm of his grief had subsided and his sympathetic landlady had left him alone with his dead.
He laughed aloud,—a merciless little laugh,—at one point in the night, to note how even this blow, rending as it did the very ground beneath his feet, had yet left quite untouched and untamed his irresistible instinct towards self-analysis. Not a single one of the innumerable, and in many cases astounding, thoughts that passed through his mind, but he watched it, and isolated it, and played with it,—just in the old way.
Luke was not by any means struck dumb or paralyzed by this event. His intelligence had never been more acute, or his senses more responsive, than they remained through those long hours of watching.
It is true he could neither eat nor sleep. The influence of the motionless figure beside him seemed to lie in a vivid and abnormal stimulation of all his intellectual faculties.
Not a sound arose from the sleeping house, from the darkened fields, from the distant village, but he noted it and made a mental record of its cause. He kept two candles alight at his brother’s head, three times refilling the candlesticks, as though the guttering and hissing of the dwindling flames would tease and disturb the dead.
He had been careful to push the two windows of the room wide open; but the night was so still that not a breath of wind entered to make the candles flicker, or to lift the edge of the white sheet stretched beneath his brother’s bandaged chin. This horrible bandage,—one of the little incidents that Luke marked as unexpectedly ghastly,—seemed to slip its knot at a certain moment, causing the dead man’s mouth to fall open, in a manner that made the watcher shudder, so suggestive did it seem of one about to utter a cry for help.