Читать книгу Dick Rodney; or, The Adventures of an Eton Boy онлайн

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"'Adrian,' I exclaimed, throwing myself on my knees at his bedside, 'tell me how fares it with you?'*

* This story is nearly similar to one which a friend related to me as having occurred in his own family not long ago.

"He turned his ghastly face toward me with the same expression of affection and reproach, which I had seen in the face of the vision in my cabin, and at that moment his last breath passed away; the jaw fell, his head turned on one side, and a mortal pallor spread over his features.

"How such things come to pass I can no more say than where a hurricane begins, or where it ends; I relate but the events as they happened.

"My brother was dead, and I became stupefied!

"I was afterwards told that a fatal fever had seized him, and that he had been given over by the doctor to the grim king at the very time we had come to anchor in the Zuid-vliet. On a further comparison of notes, we found that he had fallen into a trance at each time I had been awakened in my cabin; and that at the moment I had thrown the marlinspike (you may see the mark of it there on the cabin floor), he had uttered my name with a cry of agony; but Heaven rest him," added the captain, once more filling the bowl of his meerschaum, "he lies at rest now in the old burying-ground of Smouts Kerk."