But spite of these thoughts, and spite of the metropolitan magnificence around me, I was mysteriously alive to a dreadful feeling, which I had never before felt, except when penetrating into the lowest and most squalid haunts of sailor iniquity in Liverpool. All the mirrors and marbles around me seemed crawling over with lizards; and I thought to myself, that though gilded and golden, the serpent of vice is a serpent still.
It was now grown very late; and faint with excitement, I threw myself upon a lounge; but for some time tossed about restless, in a sort of night-mare. Every few moments, spite of my oath, I was upon the point of starting up, and rushing into the street, to inquire where I was; but remembering Harry’s injunctions, and my own ignorance of the town, and that it was now so late, I again tried to be composed.
At last, I fell asleep, dreaming about Harry fighting a duel of dice-boxes with the military-looking man below; and the next thing I knew, was the glare of a light before my eyes, and Harry himself, very pale, stood before me.
“The letter and paper,” he cried.
I fumbled in my pockets, and handed them to him.
“There! there! there! thus I tear you,” he cried, wrenching the letter to pieces with both hands like a madman, and stamping upon the fragments. “I am off for America; the game is up.”
“For God’s sake explain,” said I, now utterly bewildered, and frightened. “Tell me, Harry, what is it? You have not been gambling?”
“Ha, ha,” he deliriously laughed. “Gambling? red and white, you mean?—cards?—dice?—the bones?—Ha, ha!—Gambling? gambling?” he ground out between his teeth—“what two devilish, stiletto-sounding syllables they are!”
“Wellingborough,” he added, marching up to me slowly, but with his eyes blazing into mine—“Wellingborough”—and fumbling in his breast-pocket, he drew forth a dirk—“Here, Wellingborough, take it—take it, I say—are you stupid?—there, there”—and he pushed it into my hands. “Keep it away from me—keep it out of my sight—I don’t want it near me, while I feel as I do. They serve suicides scurvily here, Wellingborough; they don’t bury them decently. See that bell-rope! By Heaven, it’s an invitation to hang myself"—and seizing it by the gilded handle at the end, he twitched it down from the wall.
“In God’s name, what ails you?” I cried.