And all the time that pallid
swarm came crowding on: messengers from the inexorable spectre. He felt
them creeping about with ghostly tread, blighting the radiance of his
life, tainting the very air he breathed. Hateful intruders! They wailed
among his lilies. The garden was full of their horrid footsteps.
In their presence Mr. Keith began to experience an uncomfortable
sensation, a kind of chill--as though something evil had stepped between
himself and the brave light of the sun. It was a fleeting feeling which
he would have diagnosed, in other people, as perilously akin to a moral
stomach-ache.
CHAPTER XXIX
Only one other person on Nepenthe found cause to complain of the
municipal music. It was Mr. Heard. Altogether, he was not greatly
edified by this, the first funeral of its kind he had ever witnessed. A
rowdy-dowdy business, he called it. The music was too lively and
blatant for so solemn an occasion; the gorgeous vestments of the
clergy, the loud chattering among the mourners, the violent gestures
that accompanied Torquemada's well-meant and carefully prepared oration
(Don Francesco, a born speaker, would have done it better, but the
defunct was no friend or even client of his)--all these things savoured
slightly of irreverence.
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