And Eliza, now that he could deny her no longer, now that his fierce bright eyes could no longer turn from her in pain and aversion, sat near his head beside him, clutching his cold hand between her rough worn palms.
She did not seem conscious of the life around her.
She seemed under a powerful hypnosis: she sat very stiff and erect in her chair, her white face set stonily, her dull black eyes fixed upon the gray cold face.
They sat waiting.
Midnight came.
A cock crew.
Eugene went quietly to a window and stood looking out.
The great beast of night prowled softly about the house.
The walls, the windows seemed to bend inward from the thrusting pressure of the dark.
The low noise in the wasted body seemed almost to have stopped.
It came infrequently, almost inaudibly, with a faint fluttering respiration.
Helen made a sign to Gant and Luke.
They rose and went quietly out.
At the door she paused, and beckoned to Eugene.
He went to her.
“You stay here with her,” she said.
“You’re her youngest.
When it’s over come and tell us.”
He nodded, and closed the door behind her.
When they had gone, he waited, listening for a moment.
Then he went to where Eliza was sitting.
He bent over her.
“Mama!” he whispered.
“Mama!”
She gave no sign that she had heard him.
Her face did not move; she did not turn her eyes from their fixed stare.
“Mama!” he said more loudly.
“Mama!”
He touched her.
She made no response.
“Mama!
Mama!”
She sat there stiffly and primly like a little child.
Swarming pity rose in him.
Gently, desperately, he tried to detach her fingers from Ben’s hand.
Her rough clasp on the cold hand tightened.
Then, slowly, stonily, from right to left, without expression, she shook her head.
He fell back, beaten, weeping, before that implacable gesture.
Suddenly, with horror, he saw that she was watching her own death, that the unloosening grip of her hand on Ben’s hand was an act of union with her own flesh, that, for her, Ben was not dying — but that a part of HER, of HER life, HER blood, HER body, was dying.
Part of her, the younger, the lovelier, the better part, coined in her flesh, borne and nourished and begun with so much pain there twenty-six years before, and forgotten since, was dying.
Eugene stumbled to the other side of the bed and fell upon his knees.
He began to pray.
He did not believe in God, nor in Heaven or Hell, but he was afraid they might be true.
He did not believe in angels with soft faces and bright wings, but he believed in the dark spirits that hovered above the heads of lonely men.
He did not believe in devils or angels, but he believed in Ben’s bright demon to whom he had seen him speak so many times.
Eugene did not believe in these things, but he was afraid they might be true.
He was afraid that Ben would get lost again.
He felt that no one but he could pray for Ben now: that the dark union of their spirits made only HIS prayers valid.
All that he had read in books, all the tranquil wisdom he had professed so glibly in his philosophy course, and the great names of Plato and Plotinus, of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, of Hegel and Descartes, left him now, under the mastering surge of his wild Celtic superstition.
He felt that he must pray frantically as long as the little ebbing flicker of breath remained in his brother’s body.