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Updated: May 4, 2025
The man on whom Bostwick was gazing was a tall, slender, slightly stooped individual of perhaps forty-five, with a wonderful opal in his tie, from which he had derived his sobriquet. He was clean-shaved, big featured, and gifted with a pair of heavy-lidded eyes as lustreless as old buttons. He had never been seen without a cigar in his mouth, but the weed was never lighted.
The streets preserve their contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons, roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last fire.
He was clad in a half-secular, half-priestly garb, and was an humble, extremely devout man, whose yielding nature had rendered him popular among the servants at the court. His bullet-shaped head was unusually large, and his face, with its narrow brow and small, lustreless eyes, showed that he was not prone to thinking.
Noon found them still searching for some pocket of stale rain-water; but once only did they discover the slightest trace of moisture a crust of slime in a rocky basin, and from it a blind lizard was slowly creeping a heavy, lustreless, crippled thing that toiled aimlessly and painfully up the rock, only to slide back into the slime again, leaving a trail of iridescent moisture where its sagging belly dragged.
Polly thought the nicer way would have been to do the housework together and then go to the fields together; but she was a good soul, so she worked alone and brooded in silence, and watched up the road for a glimpse of Henry Peters, who liked to hear her talk, and to whom it mattered not a mite that her hair was lustreless, her eyes steel coloured, and her nose like that of a woman he never had seen.
Neither would it assuage his torment in the least to be compelled to gaze up at the dark old pictures, the ugly ghosts of what may once have been beautiful. I am not going to try any more to receive pleasure from a faded, tarnished, lustreless picture, especially if it be a landscape.
But occasionally there comes a sickly radiance from behind the curtain of cloud that glimmers lustreless, like an incandescent lamp seen through a fog: it is the sun shining brightly in the pure regions of the upper air. Here, under the trees, the wind is scarce felt, though you can perceive it by the fretful clashing of the palm branches overhead.
She comes not yet! the shadowy stars seem sad and lustreless without their Queen. She comes not yet! 'She comes not yet! her sacred form, not yet it summons to our holy feast. She comes not yet! our brethren far wait mute and motionless the saintly beam. She comes not yet! 'She comes, she comes! her beauteous form sails with soft splendour in the glittering air. She comes, she comes!
Hobart rushed to another room with the tumbler. I could hear him fumbling. I stooped over Harry. But he held up his hand. "No, Charlotte, no. You must not. If " He stopped. Again the strange attention, as if he was listening to something far off in the distance; the pupils of his hollow, worn, lustreless eyes were pin-points. He stood on his feet rigid, quivering; then he held up his hand.
"Yes, transfer the money to the Zemstvo and they will steal it," laughed the fair-haired doctor. "That's what it always comes to," the member of the council assented, and he also laughed. Andrey Yefimitch looked with apathetic, lustreless eyes at the fair-haired doctor and said: "One should be just." Again there was silence. Tea was brought in.
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