although the misty moonlight somewhat mingled with and confused it, was sufficient for me to watch the changes that came quickly one on the other.
He fixed his eyes upon the opposite shutter. They soon lost intelligence and became filmy. A shade, as it seemed to me, rather than a paleness, came over his face. A slight wind through the open window moved a lock of his long hair to and fro, and gave a flickering movement to the light. He had said that noise disturbed him. I suppose he meant noises close at hand. The organ, arrived at the conclusion of the anthem, was pouring forth tempests of sound. The air throbbed to the deep tumultuous notes. Of this he was quite unconscious.
That which had seemed to me a shadow upon his face whitened, not gradually, but by distinct changes, degree upon degree. Perhaps it was the flickering light and the measured notes of music which caused this appearance of regular and successive gradations in the changes. My own heart was beating in time to these outward pulses. I have seen twilight in summer deepen in very much the same way, veil after veil seeming to be dropped suddenly between the sunset and the earth, the exact moment when each fell being apparent. To me it seemed as if each increase of pallor marked a fresh movement of the will—as if by successive impulses it were driving the life out of the body.
The face had become intensely white; the eyes were fixed; the eyelids dropped slowly over them. There was a subsidence of the whole body; the head slowly declined over the right shoulder towards the window.
Suddenly the tumults of the organ ceased, and with the silence came a spasm at my heart. The regular beating died into a convulsion or a paralysis, I scarcely know which. I stooped over the body, there was a bubbling in the throat; then (whether it was imagination or fact I cannot say), I saw a bluish-white vapour issue from the mouth. That was all. I was in the presence of a corpse. The man, who a few minutes before had been talking with me, lay dead in my sight.
Appalled as I was I took out my watch. Five minutes was to be the greatest duration. By Heaven, how slowly the minutes crept by!
The five minutes were up. I fancied I saw a change in the body, the air of distress and pain and effort had left the face and given place to a perfect quietude; the contour of the limbs had subsided yet more.
The minute hand of my watch was creeping past the five minutes, and into the next five. A terror seized me . . . . . .
It is impossible for me to describe what I felt; the horror of what was, the dread of what might be; the impression of a great crime upon my conscience, and the first overshadowing of an awful remorse. I cannot realise that scene again, save in a bewilderment of grief and terror; description of it is impossible.
Ten minutes had passed, it might have been years; there was no difference in the body, save that, as I fancied, it settled down yet more and more into the quietness and vacancy of death.
I fell upon my knees beside it, I tried to pray. Heaven knows what I did or how I got through the time.
While I was still on my knees, still counting the tardy minutes on my watch, I became conscious of a darkening of the room. I turned round. The lamp was becoming dimmer. Soon the sound at intervals of the suction of the last drops of oil impressed upon me that the lamp was going out. This measured sound, and the accompanying flash of the expiring flame throbbed through me. In many ways on that night my attention had been drawn by the pulsing of exterior things. The musical waves of the organ, this noise from the lamp recurring at regular intervals, the ticking of my watch, all connected themselves with the measured and successive shades of change which had passed over the face of the corpse. Any audible throbbing to this day brings at once before me that scene.
The light grew dimmer and dimmer. The figures on my watch became invisible. More than a quarter of an hour had passed when I ceased to be able to watch the movement of the hands further. The face of the corpse, no longer illumined by the red lamplight, looked yet more ghastly in the wan glimmer of the moon.
An uncontrollable panic took possession of me. I started to my feet and rushed out of the room. I shut-to the outer door as I came out. Every barrier that I placed between me and that fearful thing in the window-seat seemed a relief.
My sudden panic has often reminded me of an adventure that Rousseau relates of himself somewhere in his Confessions. A friend with whom he had for long been travelling, being seized with a fit in the market-place of some foreign town through which they were passing, Rousseau, on the instant, deserted him and hastened away, never seeing him again. There was no cause for the desertion; reason had no influence in it; it was merely an impulse of blind terror.
It was an impulse of blind terror in my case. Anything to get clear of the horror which had gradually accumulated in that room.
Instead of at once giving the alarm and calling in medical aid, I never spoke to a soul. For the life of me I could not have spoken on the subject. I hastened from the college, through the streets to the outskirts of the town. When I began to get among the hedges, I, in part, recovered my power of reasoning. I acknowledged that I ought to have given the alarm. It came home to me that I was little less than the murderer of Mauleverer. Still I kept moving away from, not on my return to the town. It was too late now. With that thought I comforted myself—yes, comforted myself, for it was a relief to me to dismiss, or determine to dismiss, the whole matter from my thoughts in any possible manner.
I remained wandering about the outskirts of the town for the greater part of the night, and returned to my rooms at length (I was in lodgings) utterly worn out.
I went to bed, not to sleep, however. I will not attempt to give a notion of the agonies of that night. I was haunted by the idea of Mauleverer’s soul pursuing me. Strange to say, not the face of the corpse upon the
