"A strange beggar!" exclaimed Walter, now. "You pester a man until he beats you, yet refuse alms when cheerfully offered. By heavens perhaps he was not so wrong. At least, you are an ungrateful churl."
"I am not ungrateful," the fellow answered, turning suddenly upon Walter, and showing a blotched, liquor-stained face. "No; yet I will not take your money. It would blister me."
"In heaven's name, who are you?" Walter exclaimed, utterly amazed.
"Look at me and see!" And now the man thrust his blotchy visage close up to the other's, as though inviting the most open inspection.
"I protest I never set eyes on you before. My friend, you have injured someone else--evidently you must have injured him!--and mistake me for that person."
"I do not mistake. You are the man who was set upon and done to death, left for dead--as all supposed--on the night when Law's bubble was nearly pricked; the man whose newly-married wife was flung into the prison----"
"Ah! My God! What?"
"Of St. Martin des Champs, and thence deported to America. Nay, nay," the fellow shrieked suddenly, seeing the effect of his words; "do not swoon, nor faint. Heavens!" he added to himself, "he is about to drop dead at my feet."
He might well have thought so! The man before him had become as rigid as a corpse that had been placed upright on its dead feet and left to topple over to the earth as soon as all support was withdrawn.
Clarges' eyes were open, it was true--better, the appalled man thought, they should have been shut than look at him as they did!--yet they were glassy, staring, dreadful. His face was not white now with the whiteness of human flesh--it was marble--alabaster--ghastly as the dead! So, too, with his lips--they being but a thin, grey, livid line upon that face. And he spoke not, no muscle twitched, no limb moved. Only--one thing happened; one sign was given by the statue standing before the shaking outcast. That sign consisted of a clink upon the stones at his feet--the coin which that outcast had refused to take had dropped from the other's nerveless, relaxed hand.