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But this she was not, with all her faults, and wherever she went, in the midst of gayest scenes, and in the presence of the grandest and most inspiring scenery, thought and memory, like two spectres that no spell could lay, haunted her and robbed her of peace and any approach to happiness.
The solid and deep night of the jail was revealed to sight; then the whole vision disappeared in the depths of shadow. The knell ceased. All was locked in silence. A sinister incarceration of shadows. A vanished vision; nothing more. A passage of spectres, which had disappeared. The logical arrangement of surmises builds up something which at least resembles evidence.
Smithers's tone was so confident that for the moment Dorothy was startled, remembering yesterday's vague allusion to "sheeted spectres of the dead." "What do you mean?" she demanded. "Miss Carr," returned Mrs. Smithers, with due dignity, "ever since I come 'ere, I've been invited to shut my 'ead whenever I opened it about that there cat or your uncle or anythink, as you well knows.
Brandishing arms and torches, and gaunt with hunger, the dark forms of the frantic Moors seemed like ghouls or spectres, rather than mortal men; as, apparently without an object, save that of venting their own disquietude, or exciting the fears of earth, they swept through the desolate city.
From what land but that before me could have proceeded those portentous beings, who astounded the Old World and filled the New with horror and blood: Alba and Philip, Cortez and Pizarro: stern colossal spectres looming through the gloom of bygone years, like yonder granite mountains through the haze, upon the eye of the mariner.
He feels that he is doing wrong; but the gaunt spectres raised by conscience are always exorcised by the bright vision of to-morrow. To-morrow the truant will go to his books; he will bend himself for that concentrated effort which alone secures success, and his time of carelessness and sloth shall be far left behind.
There was no cessation of the monotonous, dismal chanting of the priests, as these newcomers, whose sinister purpose no one could doubt, moving with the silence of spectres, their bodies draped in shapeless robes of skin, appearing ghostlike beneath the uncertain flickering of flame, moved forward like a great writhing snake, passed along the southern wall beneath the face of the flying dragon overhead, until they found seats on the hard floor between altar and platform; two or three, evidently superior chiefs, by their richer trappings, ascended the raised logs and solemnly squatted thereon, so as to face us.
One can readily see how the imaginative minds of those Celtic fishermen could people their desolate coasts with spectres and phantoms, and indeed we did not need to draw much on our own imagination to see strange figures gliding along the shore in the gloom on a night like this.
The golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked large lips for hours.
The melancholy poet may exult in describing the 'spectres that sit and sigh' amid their ruins; but if I had the gifted eye, my children, I should rather look upon the spirit of Contentment that hovers over our land, and her sweet sister Hope, who points with her finger of promise to the smiling prosperity produced by busy hands and active independent minds."
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