[The House by the Church-Yard by J. Sheridan Le Fanu]@TWC D-Link bookThe House by the Church-Yard CHAPTER XC 2/12
This feeling grew so strong, that he turned about before he reached his hall-door, and, with a sensation akin to fury, retraced the fifteen or twenty steps that intervened, and grasped the cold iron with the fiercest tension of his sinews, as if it had resented his first violence by a dogged defiance of his wishes, and spluttering a curse between his teeth, he dashed it to again--and again, as once more it sprang open from the shock. 'Who's master _now_ ?' snarled Mr.Paul Dangerfield, through his clenched teeth, and smiting the senseless iron with a vindictive swoop of his cane.
I fancy his face at this moment had some of the peculiar lines and corrugations which we observe in that of Retzsch's Mephistopheles, when he gripes the arm of Faust to drag him from Margaret's cell.
So he stood behind his iron grating, glaring and grinning defiance into the darkness, with his fingers clenched hard upon his cane. Black Dillon's failure was a blow to the progress of his plans.
It incensed him.
'That d----d outcast! That _he_ should presume so to treat a man who could master him so easily at any game, and buy and sell him body and soul, and had actually bargained to give him five hundred guineas--the needy, swinish miscreant! and paid him earnest beside--the stupid cheat! Drink--dice--women! Why, five hundred guineas made him free of his filthy paradise for a twelvemonth, and the leprous oaf could not quit his impurities for an hour, and keep the appointment that was to have made him master of his heart's desires.' At his hall-door he paused, listening intently, with his spectacles glimmering toward Chapelizod, for the sound of a distant step; but there was no messenger afoot.
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