The person who came thus to have midnight converse with him, stooped his head and body to enter the low and narrow doorway, and halted with his head thrust forward within it to contemplate the object he was about to address.
“Ancient Fenwick,” said he, after a pause of some moments.
Fenwick started at the sound of the voice, and looked towards the little doorway. A pair of keen eyes glared upon him from beneath a dark cowl; and, plunged as he had been in the mysteries of conjuration, it is not wonderful that he should have believed that the Devil himself had appeared to further his studies.
“Avaunt thee, Sathanas!” exclaimed he, speaking with the alternate sides of his mouth, and drawing himself yet more up into the corner—“I say unto thee, Sathanas, avaunt?”
“What?” said the figure, creeping into the place, and seating himself on the floor opposite to him, “what! Master Ancient Fenwick, dost thou wish to conjure up the Devil, and yet art afraid to look on him? I weened that thou hadst been a man of more courage than to be afraid of a friar coming to thee at midnight.”
Fenwick made an exertion to compose himself, seeing his visitor bore all the externals of a mortal about him.
“And what dost thou see in me,” said he, in his usual harsh, discordant, and sepulchral utterance, “that may lead thee to think differently!”
“Umph, why, nothing—nothing now,” said the monk, bending his brows, and throwing a penetrating glance from under them into the Ancient’s face; “nothing now, but methought, for a conjuror, thou wert rather taken unawares.”
“And who art thou, who thus darest to disturb my privacy?” demanded Fenwick, somewhat sternly, and advancing his body [[49]]at the same time, from the more than ordinarily constrained attitude he had assumed.
The monk drew up his lips so as to display a set of long, white teeth, and raising his eyelids so as to show the white of his eye-balls, he glared at the Ancient for some time, and then slowly pronounced in a deep voice, “The Devil! what wouldst thou with me now?”