There was
scarcely half-an-hour in the day during which the honest maids and their
worthy little mistress did not discuss the dreadful Mary Matchwell. They
were one and all, though in different degrees, indescribably afraid of
her. Her necromantic pretensions gave an indistinctness and poignancy to
their horror. She seemed to know, by a diabolical intuition, what
everybody was about--she was so noiseless and stealthy, and always at
your elbow when you least expected. Those large dismal eyes of hers,
they said, glared green in the dark like a cat's; her voice was
sometimes so coarse and deep, and her strength so unnatural, that they
were often on the point of believing her to be a man in disguise. She
was such a blasphemer, too; and could drink what would lay a trooper
under the table, and yet show it in nothing but the superintensity of
her Satanic propensities. She was so malignant, and seemed to bear to
all God's creatures so general a malevolence, that her consistent and
superlative wickedness cowed and paralysed them. The enigma grew more
horrible every day and night, and they felt, or fancied, a sort of
influence stealing over them which benumbed their faculty of resistance,
and altogether unstrung their nerves.
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