‘Why, Rufus, what’s the matter?’ asked Mrs. Jenny. ‘Don’t look like that at a body.’
‘It’s you, mum?’ said the necromancer. A look of relief came into his wizened face. ‘I didn’t know but what it might be——’ His voice trailed off into an indistinct murmur, and he smeared his hand heavily across his face, and looked at it, mistrustfully, as if he rather expected to find something else in its place. ‘Cuss her!’ he said again, looking round for the cat.
‘What’s she done?’ demanded Mrs. Jenny.
‘Done? Ate up all my brekfus, that’s what she’s done,’ rejoined the wizard. The familiar grinned with a relish of the situation so fiendishly human that Dick clung closer to Mrs. Rusker’s hand, and devoutly wished himself back in the trap. To his childish sense the incongruity of one gifted with demoniac powers being helpless to prevent the depredations of his own domestic animal did not appeal. As for Mrs. Jenny, she had piously believed in witchcraft all her life, and was quite as insensible to the absurdity as he.
‘I want you to look at this young gentleman’s hands,’ said Mrs. Busker. ‘He’s got warts that bad. I suppose you can charm ‘em away for him?’
Appealed to on a point of his art, the wizard’s air changed altogether. He assumed an aspect of wooden majesty.
‘Why, yis,’ he said. ‘I think I’m equal to that Step inside, mum, and bring the young gentleman with you.’
‘Couldn’t you———-’ Mrs. Busker hesitatingly began, ‘couldn’t you do it outside?’
‘The forms and ceremonies,’ said the necromancer, with an increase of woodenness in his manner, ‘cannot be applied out o’ doors. Arter you, mum.’
He ushered them into the one room of his hut, and the cat, with her tail floating above her like a banner, entered too, evading a kick, and sprang upon a rotten deal shelf, which apparently acted as both dresser and table.