"So now we've done the pinioning," continued Smithers, once more busying himself with the puppet, which he surveyed with an admiration almost amounting to a kind of love. "Well, we can suppose that our chap has marched from the cell, and has just got on the scaffold. So far, so good. We can't do better than polish him off decently now that he is here," proceeded Smithers, alluding to the figure, and rather musing aloud than addressing himself to his son. "Now all we've got to do is to imagine that the bell's a-ringing:—there stands the parson, reading the funeral service. Here I am. I take the halter that's already tied nicely round the poor devil's neck—I fix the loop on this hook that hangs down from the beam of the gibbet—then I leave the scaffold—I go underneath—I pull the bolt—and down he falls so!"
"O God!" cried Gibbet, literally writhing with mental agony, as the drop fell with a crashing sound, and the jerking noise of the halter met his ear a moment afterwards.
"Now, then, coward!" exclaimed the executioner; and again the leathern thong elicited horrible screams from the hump-back.
The lad was still crying, and his father was in the midst of sundry fearful anathemas, levelled against what he called his son's cowardice, when a knock was heard at the door of the loft.
"Come in!" shouted the executioner.
The invitation was obeyed; and an elderly man, dressed in a shabby suit of black, entered the room with an affected solemnity of gait.
CHAPTER CXLIII.
MORBID FEELINGS.—KATHERINE.
"Holloa, Banks!" exclaimed the executioner. "Got scent of the morning's work—eh, old feller?"
"Alas! my dear Mr. Smithers," returned the undertaker, shaking his head in a lachrymose manner, "if men will perpetrate such enormities, they must expect to go to their last home by means of a dance upon nothing."
And, according to a custom which years had rendered a part of Mr. Banks's nature, he wiped his eyes with a dingy white pocket-handkerchief.