The next moment the vast hand of the ogre hung like a great cloud over Gabriel Varney. This last, ever on his guard, sprang aside, and the light gleamed on the steel of a pistol. “Hands off! Or—”
The click of the pistol-cock finished the sentence. The ruffian halted. A glare of disappointed fury gave a momentary lustre to his dull eyes. “P’r’aps I shall meet you again one o’ these days, or nights, and I shall know ye in ten thousand.”
“Nothing like a bird in the hand, Master Grave-stealer. Where can we ever meet again?”
“P’r’aps in the fields, p’r’aps on the road, p’r’aps at the Old Bailey, p’r’aps at the gallows, p’r’aps in the convict-ship. I knows what that is! I was chained night and day once to a chap jist like you. Didn’t I break his spurit; didn’t I spile his sleep! Ho, ho! you looks a bit less varmently howdacious now, my flash cove!”
Varney hitherto had not known one pang of fear, one quicker beat of the heart before. But the image presented to his irritable fancy (always prone to brood over terrors),—the image of that companion chained to him night and day,—suddenly quelled his courage; the image stood before him palpably like the Oulos Oneiros,—the Evil Dream of the Greeks.
He breathed loud. The body-stealer’s stupid sense saw that he had produced the usual effect of terror, which gratified his brutal self-esteem; he retreated slowly, inch by inch, to the door, followed by Varney’s appalled and staring eye, and closed it with such violence that the candle was extinguished.
Varney, not daring,—yes, literally not daring,—to call aloud to Grabman for another light, crept down the dark stairs with hurried, ghostlike steps; and after groping at the door-handle with one hand, while the other grasped his pistol with a strain of horror, he succeeded at last in winning access to the street, and stood a moment to collect himself in the open air,—the damps upon his forehead, and his limbs trembling like one who has escaped by a hairbreadth the crash of a falling house.
CHAPTER VII. THE RAPE OF THE MATTRESS.
That Mr. Grabman slept calmly that night is probable enough, for his gin-bottle was empty the next morning; and it was with eyes more than usually heavy that he dozily followed the movements of Beck, who, according to custom, opened the shutters of the little den adjoining his sitting-room, brushed his clothes, made his fire, set on the kettle to boil, and laid his breakfast things, preparatory to his own departure to the duties of the day. Stretching himself, however, and shaking off slumber, as the remembrance of the enterprise he had undertaken glanced pleasantly across him, Grabman sat up in his bed and said, in a voice that, if not maudlin, was affectionate, and if not affectionate, was maudlin,—