Luke noted, as another factor in the phenomena of death, the peculiar nature of the coldness of his brother’s skin, as he bent down once and again to touch his forehead. It was different from the coldness of water or ice or marble. It was a clammy coldness; the coldness of a substance that was neither—in the words of the children’s game—“animal, vegetable, nor mineral.”
Luke remembered the story of that play of Webster’s, in which the unhappy heroine, in the blank darkness of her dungeon, is presented with a dead hand to caress. The abominably wicked wish crossed his mind once, as he unclosed those stark fingers, that he could cause the gentle Lacrima, whom he regarded,—not altogether fairly,—as responsible for his brother’s death, to feel the touch of such a hand.
There came over him, at other times, as he inhaled the cool, hushed air from the slumbering fields, and surveyed the great regal planet,—Mr. Romer’s star, he thought grimly,—as it hung so formidably close to the silvery pallid moon, a queer dreamy feeling that the whole thing were a scene in a play or a story, absolutely unreal; and that he would only have to rouse himself and shake off the unnatural spell, to have his brother with him again, alive and in full consciousness.
The odd thing about it was that he found himself refusing to believe that this was his brother at all,—this mask beneath the white sheet,—and even fancying that at any moment the familiar voice might call to him from the garden, and he have to descend to unlock the door.
That thought of his brother’s voice sent a pang through him of sick misgiving. Surely it couldn’t be possible, that never, not through the whole of eternity, would he hear that voice again?
He moved to the window and listened. Owls were hooting somewhere up at Wild Pine, and from the pastures towards Hullaway came the harsh cry of a night-jar.
He gazed up at the glittering heavens, sprinkled with those proud constellations whose identity it was one of his pastimes to recognize. How little they cared! How appallingly little they cared! What a farce, what an obscene, unpardonable farce, the whole business was!
He caught the sound of an angry bark in some distant yard.
Luke cursed the irrelevant intrusive noise. “Ah! thou vile Larva!” he muttered. “What! Shall a dog, a cat, a rat, have life; and thou no breath at all?”
He leant far out of the window, breathing the perfumes of the night. He noticed, as an interesting fact, that it was neither the phloxes nor the late roses whose scent filled the air, but that new exotic tobacco-plant,—a thing whose sticky, quickly-fading, trumpet-shaped petals were one of his brother’s especial aversions.