Explore "In the Odour of Sanctity. Mortem Suscepit Cantando (Half-Told Tales)" by Henry Van Dyke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Last of all, the crouching plague leaped upon the Count Angelo (whose / women and boon companions already lay dead around him in his castle of / Montefeltro), and dragged him from the banquet-hall of many delights / into the dim alley of the grave. There he looked, as it were through a / door half open, into the shapeless horror of the face of Death, which / turns all desires into stone. But even while he looked, the teeth of / the black beast that gripped him were loosened, and he crept back into / life as one returning from a far country.
His castle was empty save for the few terror-stricken servants who / lingered because they knew not whither to flee. In the garden withered / the rose and the lily, untended and unplucked. The chairs and couches / where he had seen the faces of his friends were vacant. On the pillows / of his great bed there were no curls of tangled gold, nor plaited / tresses of long black spread out beside him in the morning light.