"I turned you out! You turned yourself out. Why the devil did you come back, then? Why don't you stick to your new trade?"
"You told me either to give up Lucy Burton, or take lodgings in Wapping. I won't give up Lucy Burton."
"Take her to hell, if you like. What do you come back here for with your cursed impudence? There's nobody I want less."
This was far from true. He had been very uneasy about his son. Yet now that he saw him—a prey to the vile demon that ever stirred up his avarice till the disease, which was as the rust spoken of by the prophet St. James, was eating his flesh as it were fire—his tyrannical disposition, maddened by the resistance of his son, and the consequent frustration of his money-making plans, broke out in this fierce, cold, blasting wrath.
"I come here," said Thomas—and he said it merely to discharge himself of a duty, for he had not the thinnest shadow of a hope that it would be of service—"I come here to protest against the extreme to which you are driving your legal rights—which I have only just learned—against Mrs. Boxall."
"And her daughter. But I am not aware that I am driving my rights, as you emphasize the word," said Mr. Worboise, relapsing into his former manner, so cold that it stung; "for I believe I have driven them already almost as far as my knowledge of affairs allows me to consider prudent. I have turned those people out of the house."
"You have!" cried Thomas, starting to his feet. "Father! father! you are worse than even I thought you. It is cruel; it is wicked."
"Don't discompose yourself about it. It is all your own fault, my son."
"I am no son of yours. From this moment I renounce you, and call you father no more," cried Thomas, in mingled wrath and horror and consternation at the atrocity of his father's conduct.