Several minutes passed before she
roused herself, and then it was to drag herself slowly up the stairs to
the door of her father's room. She opened it without knocking, and then
closed it and stood with her back against it, in the shadow.
CHAPTER XXX
THE VOICE OF BLACK BART
Her father lay propped high with pillows among which his head lolled
back. The only light in the room was near the bed and it cast a glow
upon the face of Joe Cumberland and on the white linen, the white hair,
the white, pointed beard. All the rest of the room swam in darkness. The
chairs were blotches, indistinct, uncertain; even the foot of the bed
trailed off to nothingness. It was like one of those impressionistic,
very modern paintings, where the artist centres upon one point and
throws the rest of his canvas into dull oblivion. The focus here was the
face of the old cattleman. The bedclothes, never stirred, lay in folds
sharply cut out with black shadows, and they had a solid seeming, as the
mort-cloth rendered in marble over the effigy. That suggested weight
exaggerated the frailty of the body beneath the clothes. Exhausted by
that burden, the old man lay in the arms of a deadly languor, so that
there was a kinship of more than blood between him and Kate at this
moment. She stepped to the side of the bed and stood staring down at
him, and there was little gentleness in her expression. So cold was
that settled gaze that her father stirred, at length, shivered, and
without opening his eyes, fumbled at the bed-spread and drew it a little
more closely about his shoulders.
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