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With a curve and a sweep he circles round, down come the long bony legs, the bald and hideous neck is extended, and with talons quivering for the rotting flesh, and cruel beak agape, he hurries on to his repast, the embodiment of everything ghoul-like and ghastly.
So great, indeed, was this stillness that the click of the man's sabots upon the uneven pavement reverberated, ghoul-like and weird. And it was through that awesome stillness that a sound suddenly struck her ear, which, in the instant, made her feel that she was not really alive, or, if alive, was sleeping and dreaming strange and impossible dreams.
Ghoul-like he bent over the pages of delicate writing, the intimate, passionate cry of a soul seeking for its mate. They were no ordinary love-letters. Mostly they were beyond the comprehension of the creature who spelt them out word for word, seeking all the time to appraise their exact monetary value to himself. But for what he had heard he would have found them disappointing.
So vividly did this fancy impress me that I half shuddered as I looked, wondering if this sweet creature did not know what had occurred in this house since the happy yesterday; and if so, how she could stand there smiling so invitingly, when suddenly I became aware that I had been watching the little crowd of men about me with as complete an absorption as if nothing else in the room had attracted my attention; that the face of the coroner, sternly intelligent and attentive, was as distinctly imprinted upon my mind as that of this lovely picture, or the clearer-cut and more noble features of the sculptured Psyche, shining in mellow beauty from the crimson-hung window at his right; yes, even that the various countenances of the jurymen clustered before me, commonplace and insignificant as most of them were; the trembling forms of the excited servants crowded into a far corner; and the still more disagreeable aspect of the pale-faced, seedy reporter, seated at a small table and writing with a ghoul-like avidity that made my flesh creep, were each and all as fixed an element in the remarkable scene before me as the splendor of the surroundings which made their presence such a nightmare of discord and unreality.
To him it seemed that some gigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, to solve it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-like demon were flailing him until he answered and that he could not answer! He had a dim realization of straining madly at his straps till the veins started big and swollen in his hammering brows. Then consciousness lapsed.
The eyes were of ruby which, catching the light, burned with ghoul-like ferocity, while the mouth grinned, grinned with a smile which strangely resembled that of the Priest. The image was of gold. To the right and left, piled up as though they had been hastily thrown together, was a jumble of vases, bowls, plates, shields, all of beaten gold.
Within the narrow limits of these walls neither seemed able to support the barest contact with the other. They glared at each other in the dim light with ghoul-like eyes, and at night they lay down at opposite sides of the floor on bundles of straw for beds. This straw, having served them in their poverty for weeks and even months, had fermented and become filthy and damp.
Somehow or other, as the young heir to all this helpless poverty stood in the courtyard, with his sharp, refined, intelligent features, and his strange elegance of dress and aspect, one better comprehended how, left solely to the egotism of his knowledge and his ambition, in such a family, and without any of the sweet nameless lessons of Home, he had grown up into such close and secret solitude of soul, how the mind had taken so little nutriment from the heart, and how that affection and respect which the warm circle of the heart usually calls forth had passed with him to the graves of dead fathers, growing, as it were, bloodless and ghoul-like amidst the charnels on which they fed.
Bells rang three times before the gloomy chambermaid could be induced to present herself; and the negro waiter, a ghoul-like looking creature from Congo, obeyed the summons only when one's patience was exhausted or one's want satisfied in some other way. When he did come, one felt sorry that he had not stayed away altogether, so sullen and savage did he appear.
Without comprehending a word that is said, Seagriff knows too well what they are talking about; their gestures are too intelligible with the lurid glare in their ghoul-like eyes. All that he sees portends a danger that he shrinks from declaring to his companions. They will doubtless learn it soon enough.
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