He stared again upon the face.

It was long in shape, thin and swarthy, very weary looking, the face of a man who had seen much, who had done very many, very various things.  No face with shut eyes can look, perhaps, completely characteristic.  Yet this face was full of a character that seemed curiously at war with the shape of the features and with the position of the closed eyes, which were very near together.  Julian, in describing Marr to Valentine, had pronounced him Satanic, and this dead face was, in truth, somewhat Mephistophelean.  An artist might well have painted it upon his canvas as a devil.  But he must have reproduced merely the features and colouring, the blue, shaven cheeks, and hollow eye-sockets; for the expression of his devil he would have been obliged to seek another model.  Marr, dead, looked serene, kind, gentle, satisfied, like a man who has shaken himself free from a heavy burden, and who stretches himself to realize the sudden and wonderful ease for which he has longed, and who smiles, thinking, “That ghastly thrall is over.  I am a slave no longer.  I am free.”  The dead face was wonderfully happy.

Julian seemed entirely fascinated by it.  After his last smothered exclamation to Valentine, he sat, leaning one arm upon the head of the bed, gazing till he looked stern, as all utterly ardent observers look.

Valentine, too, was staring at the dead man.

There was a very long silence in the room.  The rain leaped upon the tall windows on each side of the mirror and ran down them with an unceasing chilly vivacity.  Lights from the street flickered through the blinds to join the glare of the gas.  All the music of the town wandered round the house as a panther wanders round a bungalow by night.  And the thin stream of people flowed by on the shining pavement beyond the iron railing of the narrow garden.  They spoke, as they went, of all the minor things of life, details of home, details of petty sins, details of common loves and common hopes and fears, all stirring feebly under umbrellas.  And close by these two friends, under three flaring gas-jets, watched the unwinking dead man, whose face seemed full of relief.  Presently Julian, without looking up, said: 

“Death has utterly changed him.  He is no longer the same man.  Formerly he looked all evil, and now it’s just as if his body were thanking God because it had got rid of a soul it had hated.  Yes, it’s just like that.  Valentine, I feel as if Marr had been rescued.”

As he said the last words Julian looked up across the barrier of the bed at his friend.  His lips opened as if to speak, but he said nothing; for he was under the spell of a wild hallucination.  It seemed to him that there, under the hard glare of the gas-lamps, the soul of Marr spoke, stared from the pure, proud face of Valentine.  That was like a possession of his friend.  It was horrible, as if a devil chose for a moment to lurk and to do evil in the sanctuary of a church, to blaspheme at the very altar.  Valentine did not speak.  He was looking down on the dead serenity of Marr, vindictively.  A busy intellect flashed in his clear blue eyes, meditating vigorously upon the dead man’s escape from bondage, following him craftily to the very door of his freedom, to seize him surely, if it might be.