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He caught sight of the negress, and without a word having passed between them, the poor woman began to cry: "No! no! I don't want to!" "And I wish it," replied the doctor in a hard tone. One would have said that the negress had been seized by an invincible power. She shuddered from head to foot, and Christian Weber showing her a bench, she sat down with a corpse-like stiffness.
It is the spectre of a human body seen in a phosphoric light; and so exactly did this phantom correspond to the description of such an apparition in Scandinavian fable that I knew not how to give it a better name than that of Scin-Laeca, the shining corpse. There it was before me, corpse-like, yet not dead; there, as in the haunted study of the wizard Forman! the form and the face of Margrave.
The hand was withdrawn and a horrible face took its place a pallid corpse-like mask, with lambent fire sporting on the narrow forehead and the high cheek-bones. It stayed only an instant, but Sam said, "That's the way Bott will look in " "Hush!" said Maud, who was growing too nervous to smile, for fear of laughing or crying. A sound of sobbing came from a seat to the right of them.
Exposure to the damp air on that memorable night had brought on a second severe attack of rheumatism, which had bent her nearly double. Anxiety for Margaret, too, had wasted her to a skeleton, and her thin, sharp face, now of a corpse-like pallor, contrasted strangely with her eyes, from which the wildness all was gone.
There was no strength left in her with which to struggle against the thought of death, no strength with which to fear it. But, as she lay in the little room, her hands folded on her breast, corpse-like already in her placidity, something wailed within her and lamented.
"Father," she cried, in terror, "let me in! It is I, Hannah, and Sam is in the wood-shed." After a moment the key was turned and Hannah stepped inside, locking the door after her. In the middle of the floor her father stood, with his long white hair falling around his corpse-like face and his eyes bright with the excitement of delirium.
They found with surprise not unmixed with joy that corruption had not yet begun its work on the body of the pious maiden. Her features and countenance were smiling like those of a person who is dreaming sweetly. She looked as though she had but just been placed in the coffin, nor did her body exhale any corpse-like smell.
The thought occurred to me before, but it was in a moment of cowardice and with the idea of disappearing and of returning to live in peace in my little nook: whereas now, if I go off, it will be as an avenger, a judge, to cry aloud to all the world from Paris, to proclaim what I have seen in Rome, what men have done there with the Christianity of Jesus, the Vatican falling into dust, the corpse-like odour which comes from it, the idiotic illusions of those who hope that they will one day see a renascence of the modern soul arise from a sepulchre where the remnants of dead centuries rot and slumber.
Some-one came and put spoonfuls of liquid nourishment between his lips, and he swallowed it mechanically without any sign of conscious appreciation. White as white marble, and aged by many years, he remained stretched in his rigid corpse-like attitude, his eyes always fixedly upturned, till one day he was roused from his deepening torpor by the sound of sobbing.
The woman, Martha Pierson, was somewhat above thirty, thin and pale, as a Shaker sister almost invariably is, and not entirely free from that corpse-like appearance which the garb of the sisterhood is so well calculated to impart. "This pair are still in the summer of their years," observed the elder from Harvard, a shrewd old man.
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