I received his answer with a little start. Were these the hands that had dug the grave for my dead brother?
“They call you? What do you call yourself?” I said.
“High priest to the worms, wi’ your honor’s leave.”
He stuck his tongue in his cheek and whipped out his fly again. This time it disappeared with a fat blob and his hand came smartly up. I watched him while he wheeled in his floundering prize.
“Ay,” he went on, as he stooped to unhook the trout, “the worms and I works on the mutual-profit system. I feeds them and they feeds me. Sometimes”—he looked round and up at me slyly—“they shows a power o’ gratitoode ower an uncommon rich meal and makes me a particlar acknowledgment o’ my services.”
CHAPTER XXXIII.
FACE TO FACE.
In the cool of the evening I knocked at Dr. Crackenthorpe’s front door. No one answering—his one servant was gadding, probably—I tried the handle, found it to be on the latch only, and walked in. The house was quiet as a desert, save that from the doctor’s private consulting-room, as he called it, issued a little, weak, snoring sound.
I paused in the dusky passage before tapping at the closed door of this room. The whole place was faintly stringent with the atmosphere that comes from a poor habit of ventilation—an atmosphere like that emitted from crumbling old leather-bound folios. A ragged strip of carpet, so trodden up its middle to the very string as to give the impression of a cinder-path running between dully flowering borders, climbed the flight of stairs before me, and stretched itself upon the landing above in an exhausted condition.
In a shallow alcove to one side of me stood a gaunt and voiceless old grandfather clock. A gas-browned bust of Pitt, rendered ridiculous by a perfect skull-cap of dust, stood on a bracket over a door opposite and a few anatomical prints of a dark and melancholy cast broke the monotony of the yellow walls.
Rendered none the less depressed in my errand by these dismal surroundings, I pulled myself together and tapped roundly on the doctor’s door. No response followed. I knocked again and again, without result. At length I turned the handle and stepped of my own accord into the room.