We carried the body upstairs and laid it on the bed. I strove to regard
it merely as the “instrument” _he_ had used awhile, strove to find
still his real undying Presence close to me--but that comfort failed me
too. The face was very white. Upon the pale marble features lay still
that signature of “Other Places” which haunted his life and soul. We
closed the staring eyes and covered him with a sheet. And there the
servant crouched upon the floor for the remaining five hours until the
dawn, when I came up from watching that other figure of sleep in the
room below, and found him in the same position. All that day as well
he watched indeed, until at last I made him realise that the sooner he
got the farmer’s horse below and summoned a doctor, the better for all
concerned.
But that was many hours later in the day, and meanwhile he just
crouched there, difficult of approach, eyeing me savagely almost when
I came, his eyes aflame with a kind of ugly, sullen resentment, but
faithful to the last. What the silent, devoted being had heard or seen
during our long hours of sinister struggle and experiment, I never
knew, nor ever shall know.
My memory hardly lingers upon that; nor upon the unprofitable detail of
the doctor’s tardy arrival in the evening, his ill-concealed suspicion
and eventual granting of a death certificate according to Swiss law;
nor, again, upon his obvious verdict of a violent heart-stroke, or the
course of procedure that he bade us follow.
Even the distressing details of the burial have somewhat faded, and I
recall chiefly the fact that the Man established himself in the village
where the churchyard was and began his watch that kept him near the
grave, I believe, till death relieved him. My memory lingers rather
upon the hours that I watched beside the sleeping woman, and upon the
dreadful scene of her awakening and discovery of the truth.
For hours we had the darkness and the silence to ourselves, a silence
broken only by the steady breathing of her slumber. I dared not wake
her; knowing that the trance condition in time exhausts itself and
the subject returns to normal waking consciousness without effort or
distress, I let her slumber on, dreading the moment when the eyes would
open and she must question me. The cold increased with the early hours
of the morning, and I spread a rug about her stretched-out form. Slowly
with the failing of the oil, the little lamp flame flickered and died,
then finally went out, leaving us in the chill gloom together. All heat
had long since left the fire of peat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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