Heathcote rose from his seat—or rather started from it, and walked rapidly up and down the room thrice. He felt sorely troubled; for, hardened as his heart was—obdurate as his soul had become, he could not shut out the whispering voice of conscience which now proclaimed him to be the author of all the deaths that his clerk had enumerated. And, while he was racked by these painful convictions, the thought suddenly flashed to his brain that Green had displayed a savage delight in detailing those horrors; and, man of the world as James Heathcote was, it occurred to him, as a natural sequence to the suspicion just mentioned, that his clerk hated and abhorred him.
Acting under the influence of these impressions, he stopped suddenly short close by the spot where Green was standing; and he fixed his snake-like gaze upon the shabbily-dressed, senile-looking, self-debasing individual, who appeared to be maintaining his eyes bent timidly and reverentially on the floor—as if his master’s emotions were something too sacred to look upon.
“Green!—Mr. Green!” exclaimed Heathcote, laying his hand with such abruptness and also with such violence upon the grovelling wretch’s shoulder, that it made him start convulsively—though he knew all the while that his master had accosted him, and was also gazing on him.
“Yes, sir!” cried the clerk, raising his eyes diffidently toward Heathcote’s countenance.
“Do you conceive that the deaths of those people can be righteously attributed to me?” demanded the lawyer, speaking in a low, measured, and solemn tone, and looking as if he sought to read into the most secret depths of his clerk’s soul: “do you, I say, dare to associate any act or deed of mine with their fate?” he asked, raising his voice, while his face became terrible to gaze upon.
“Who?—I, sir!” ejaculated Green, as if in astonishment at the questions put to him; and his own countenance assumed such a sinister aspect that Heathcote surveyed him with increasing suspicion and distrust.
“Yes—you!” cried the lawyer, ferociously. “Now, mark me, Green,” he continued, in a lower and more composed tone of voice,—“if you dare to harbour ill feelings towards me—if even a scintillation of such feelings should transpire from your words or manner, I will crush you as I would a worm—I will send you to Newgate—abandon you to your fate—and, if necessary, help to have you shipped for eternal exile.”
“My God! how have I deserved these implied reproaches—these terrible menaces?” demanded Green, his countenance expressing real alarm, and his whole frame shivering from head to heel.
“Perhaps you have not deserved them—and in that case they will serve as a warning,” said Heathcote, now becoming suddenly calm and imperiously scornful: “but I think that you did merit all I have uttered—and now you know me better, perhaps, than you knew me before. However, let all this pass. I do not for an instant suppose that I possess your affection; but I will guard against the effects of your hate. Answer me not, sir: you cannot wipe away the impressions which this afternoon’s scene has conjured up in my mind. And now proceed with anything more that you may have to tell me.”
“Fox, the ironmonger, sir,” resumed Green, in a more timid and servile tone than ever, and with a manner so cowed and grovelling that it completely veiled the strong pantings for revenge and the emotions of bitter, burning hate which dwelt in the clerk’s secret soul,—“Fox, the ironmonger, sir, has realised all his property and absconded.”