The swinging open of the outer gate of
his castle sounded uncomfortably behind him, like an invitation to
shapeless danger to step in after him. The further he left it behind
him, the more in his spirit was the gaping void between his two little
piers associated with the idea of exposure, defencelessness, and
rashness. 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.
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