They could no longer ignore it.
"Wull yo look at 'Im, doctor?"
"Better not——." Rowcliffe would have laid his hand on the young man's arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and drawn back the sheet.
What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.
The dead man's face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror before a thing so incredible—that the walls and roof of a man's room should close round him and suffocate him. On this horrified face there were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard and moustache, a stain.
It left nothing to be said. It was the face of the man who had drunk hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.
Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was thinking of it and defied him to think.
Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it. "You'd better come out of this. It isn't good for you," he said.
"I knaw what's good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe."
Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the sheeted mound.