As I descended into the passage I fancied I heard a step coming toward me; and the next moment a dusky shape stood up between me and the dim oblong of lesser darkness that marked where the front door gaped open. I ran forward—grasped at it blindly; and long arms were crooked about me and held me as in a vise.
“Who’s here?” cried Dr. Crackenthorpe, in a mad voice. “Who is it? Say, Renalt Trender, and let me choke the cursed life out of him!”
His passion would hardly allow him to articulate. He dragged me unresisting to the door, up the yard, and thrust his ugly face down till it almost touched mine.
“It is!” he cried, with a scream of fury. “Look—look there! See what you’ve done!”
I had marked it already—a dull glow rising over the houses and chimney pots that lay between us and Chis’ll street—a glow writhed with twisted skeins of smoke, that rolled heavily upward, coiling sluggishly in the calm that had fallen.
“Look!” he screeched; “the priceless treasures of a life—the glories I bartered my soul for—doomed, in a moment, and by your act! Oh, dog, for revenge!”
“You lie!” I cried, outshrieking his rage with a fury that half-shook him from his hold on me. “I had no part in it! You saw it and you know! Go! Attend to your own. I’ve deadlier work in hand.”
I tore myself free of him with a violence that brought him on his knees, and hurried up the yard once more and into the pitchy house. He came upon me again while I was fumbling in my pockets for a match, but he put out no hand to me a second time.
“Listen, you,” he said, and the words rose and burst from his throat like bubbles. “You have been a thorn in my foot ever since I trod this city. If yours wasn’t the act, you were the cause. I would have killed you both on the spot—you and your accomplice—if the fire, blazing out on the curtains, had left me time. Now you shall know what it is to have made me desperate—desperate, do you understand, you fulsome cur? Better take a viper to bed with you than the thought of my revenge.”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I said, very coolly, “you are a ruffian and a blackguard. Which is the more desperate of us two is an open question. Anyhow, I fancy myself the stronger. There’s the door. If you remain this side of it after I have counted twelve you try conclusions with the mill-tail yonder.”