Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind
like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some
rumor of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge
their curiosity; and now, in all the neighboring houses, he divined
them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people,
condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past,
and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise: happy family
parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with
raised finger; every degree and age and humor, but all, by their own
hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang
him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the
clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and
alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the
clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the
very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to
strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and
bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with
elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own
house.
But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one
portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on
the brink of lunacy.
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