"'Tis well you remind me! It required six stabs to finish your bungling work! See to it, that you do not again deceive me!"
"You say six stabs?" replied Dom Sabbat, looking up from the task he was engaged in, of mixing some substances in a mortar. "Yet Mars was in the Cancer and the fourth house of the Sun. But perhaps the gentleman had eaten river-snails with nutmeg or taken a bath in snake skins and stags-antlers?"
"Looking up from the task he was engaged in."
"To the devil with your river-snails!" exploded Benilo. "The love-philtre and quickly,—else I will have you smoked out of your devil's lair ere the moon be two hours older!"
The alchemist shook his head, as if pained by his patron's ill temper. Yet he could not abstain from tantalizing him by assuming a misapprehension of his meaning.
"The hour," he mumbled slowly, and with studied hesitation, "is not propitious. Evil planets are in the ascendant and the influence of your good genius is counteracted by antagonistic spells."
"Fool!" growled Benilo, at the same time raising his foot as if to spurn the impostor like a dog. "You keep but one sort of wares such as I require,—let me have the strongest."
Neither the gesture nor the insult were lost on Dom Sabbat, yet he preserved a calm and imperturbable demeanour, while, as if soliloquizing, he continued his irritating inquiries.
"A love-philtre? They are priceless indeed;—even a nun,—three drops of that clear tasteless fluid,—and she were yours."