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Updated: May 2, 2025
Around Helene stretched the cemetery, enveloped in its snowy pall, through which rose rusty monuments and iron crosses, like arms thrown up in agony. There was only one path visible in this lonely corner, and that had been made by the footmarks of Helene and Monsieur Rambaud. It was a spotless solitude where the dead lay sleeping. The walks were outlined by the shadowy, phantom-like trees.
Their appearance and their movements throughout had been as phantom-like and silent as the shadows which were now engulfing the house. Anyone who had seen them come and go might almost have doubted his own eyes. Daunt the Keeper returned leisurely to his quarters in some back premises of Monk Lawrence, at the southeastern corner of the house.
These phantom-like forms, steering their rafts through the black and silent waters, were grotesquely lit up from time to time by the pulsating red firelight. It might have been a scene from Dante's 'Inferno'!
Indeed, it went even further: it taught that the world was of evil and that we needed deliverance; consequently it preached contempt of the world, self-denial, chastity, the giving up of one's own will, that is to say, turning away from life and its phantom-like pleasures; it taught further the healing power of suffering, and that an instrument of torture is the symbol of Christianity, I willingly admit that this serious and only correct view of life had spread in other forms throughout Asia thousands of years previously, independently of Christianity as it is still; but this view of life was a new and tremendous revelation to European humanity.
The same compassionate sympathy was arising from all the beds in the ward. That hospital inferno with its nocturnal wretchedness, its pestilential atmosphere, its pallets of anguish heaped together, its weary lady-hospitallers and Sisters flitting phantom-like hither and thither, now seemed to be illumined by a ray of divine charity.
Feeling bitterly his own incompetency to exercise any protective influence on the fate of his companion, Theos said nothing, but silently followed him, as he thrust aside the drooping cypress boughs and made his way out to more open ground, his lithe, graceful figure looking even more brilliant and phantom-like than ever, contrasted with the deep green gloom spread about him by the hoary moss-covered trees that were as twisted and grotesque in shape as a group of fetich idols.
What real nay, what terrible suffering in the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over human life. 'It is very hard, he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that our old friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little!
Phantom-like women who, when young, had led lives of infamy in wealth, and who now, old and faded, led lives of infamy in poverty, were still and ever wandering past him in search of bread, when suddenly a shadowy form grazed him, and a voice murmured in his ear: "Warn your brother, the police are on Salvat's track, he may be arrested at any moment."
All those other Katherines, in short, whom she might have been, and who had seemed to drop away from her, vanishing phantom-like before the uncompromising realities of her husband's death and her child's birth, crowded about her, importuning her with vague desires, vague regrets. The confines of Brockhurst grew narrow, while all that which lay beyond them called to her.
With no confusion, under the direction of Captain Haas and "Scotty" Allan, who was to go with them as far as Quebec, they had been placed on board the "Senator" lying out in the roadstead. A silent little group stood on the dreary beach watching the twinkling lights of the distant ship as she sailed, phantom-like, out into the misty grayness of Bering Sea.
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