The
apparition of this venerable vixen, who had hated Richard's son and
now hated him of a later generation, who had seen those that had
talked to Richard himself in his ill-fated lifetime, so stirred his
imagination that it deprived him of utterance. All he could do was
to stand still and stare and stare and stare. He had never seen
anybody so old--she was nearly a hundred, and looked a thousand--and
he stared at the old, old, wrinkled, yellow face, the unhuman face,
in which the beady black eyes burned with wicked fire; at the nearly
bald head, thinly covered with a floating wisp or so of wool-like
white hair; at the claw-like, shriveled, yellow hands, the stringy
neck, the whole sexless meager wreck of what had been a woman. It
was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human
pity, and young disgust. She raised her voice:
"Did you not see those signs? Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher,
didn't you see my sign-boards?" And as she looked down at
him--Richard's blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body:
and _she_ what she was--she fell into one of those futile and
dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled
with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head,
and waved her claw-like hands, screeching insults and abuse.
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