"Oh! you needn't be afraid. I'm not goin' to hit you. Leadin' him away was what you said." Mrs. Brunger paused dramatically, and leaned back slightly, as if to get a more comprehensive view of her antagonist. "Well, he must be a pretty damn short-sighted fool to want leadin' away from a thing like you. I'd run hell-hard if I was him."
The biting scorn of the words, the insultingly contemptuous tone in which they were uttered, for a moment seemed to daze Mrs. Bindle; but only for a breathing space.
Making a swift recovery, she turned upon her antagonist a stream of accusation and reproach.
She told how a fellow-worshipper at the Alton Road Chapel had witnessed the return of Bindle the night of the altercation in the front garden. She accused mother and daughter of unthinkable crimes, bringing Scriptural quotation to her aid.
She confused Fulham and Hammersmith with Sodom and Gomorrah. She called upon an all-seeing Providence to purge the district in general, and Arloes Road in particular, of its pestilential populace.
She traced the descent of Mrs. Brunger down generations of infamy and sin. She threatened her with punishment in this world and the next. She told of Bindle's neglect and wickedness, and cast him out into the tooth-gnashing darkness. She trampled him under foot, arranged that Providence should spurn him and his associates, and consign them all to eternal and fiery damnation.
Gradually she worked herself up into a frenzy of hysterical invective. Little points of foam formed at the corners of her mouth. Her bonnet had slipped off backwards, and hung by its strings round her neck. Her right-hand glove of biscuit brown had split across the palm.
Mrs. Bindle had lost all control of herself.
"He's here! He's here! I saw him come! You Jezebel! You're hiding him; but I'll find him. I'll find him. You—you——"
With a wild, hysterical scream, she darted to the door, tore it open, dashed along the passage, and burst into the kitchen.