Complete Works

Man and officer would go forth from the house together.  For Byrne was certain now that he would have to die before the morning — and in the same mysterious manner, leaving behind him an unmarked body.
    The sight of a smashed head, of a throat cut, of a gaping gunshot wound, would have been an inexpressible relief.  It would have soothed all his fears.  His soul cried within him to that dead man whom he had never found wanting in danger.  “Why don’t you tell me what I am to look for, Tom?  Why don’t you?”  But in rigid immobility, extended on his back, he seemed to preserve an austere silence, as if disdaining in the finality of his awful knowledge to hold converse with the living.
    Suddenly Byrne flung himself on his knees by the side of the body, and dry-eyed, fierce, opened the shirt wide on the breast, as if to tear the secret forcibly from that cold heart which had been so loyal to him in life!  Nothing!  Nothing!  He raised the lamp, and all the sign vouchsafed to him by that face which used to be so kindly in expression was a small bruise on the forehead — the least thing, a mere mark.  The skin even was not broken.  He stared at it a long time as if lost in a dreadful dream.  Then he observed that Tom’s hands were clenched as though he had fallen facing somebody in a fight with fists.  His knuckles, on closer view, appeared somewhat abraded.  Both hands.
    The discovery of these slight signs was more appalling to Byrne than the absolute absence of every mark would have been.  So Tom had died striking against something which could be hit, and yet could kill one without leaving a wound — by a breath.
    Terror, hot terror, began to play about Byrne’s heart like a tongue of flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes.  He backed away from the body as far as he could, then came forward stealthily casting fearful glances to steal another look at the bruised forehead.  There would perhaps be such a faint bruise on his own forehead — before the morning.
    “I can’t bear it,” he whispered to himself.  Tom was for him now an object of horror, a sight at once tempting and revolting to his fear.  He couldn’t bear to look at him.
    At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing horror, he stepped forward from the wall against which he had been leaning, seized the corpse under the armpits, and began to lug it over to the bed.  The bare heels of the seaman trailed on the floor noiselessly.  He was heavy with the dead weight of inanimate objects.  With a last effort Byrne landed him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him over, snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet with which he covered it over.  Then he spread the curtains at head and foot so that joining together as he shook their folds they hid the bed altogether from his sight.
    He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it.  The perspiration poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to carry for a while a thin stream of half, frozen blood.  Complete terror had possession of him now, a nameless terror which had turned his heart to ashes.
    He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning at his feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the end of the table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets round the walls, over the ceiling, over the floor, in the expectation of a mysterious and appalling vision.  The thing which could deal death in a breath was outside that bolted door.  But Byrne believed neither in walls nor bolts now.  Unreasoning terror turning everything to account, his old time boyish admiration of the athletic Tom, the undaunted Tom (he had seemed to him invincible), helped to paralyse his faculties, added to his despair.
    He was no longer Edgar Byrne.  He was a tortured soul suffering more anguish than any sinner’s body had ever suffered from rack or boot.  The depth of his torment may be measured when I say that this young man, as brave at least as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol and firing into his own head.  But a deadly, chilly, langour was spreading over his limbs.  It was as if his flesh had been wet plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs.  Presently, he thought, the two witches will be coming in, with crutch and stick — horrible, grotesque, monstrous — affiliated to the devil — to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny little bruise of death.  And he