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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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353 forehead, and the nerves about his mouth worked as though some unendurable emotion wrung them; but he smiled disdainfully, and again pointed to the door. ‘Do you know me, you old madman?’ asked Sir Mulberry. ‘Well,’ said Ralph. The fashionable vagabond for the moment quite quailed under the steady look of the older sinner, and walked towards the door, muttering as he went. ‘You wanted the lord, did you?’ he said, stopping short when he reached the door, as if a new light had broken in upon him, and confronting Ralph again. ‘Damme, I was in the way, was I?’ Ralph smiled again, but made no answer. ‘Who brought him to you first?’ pursued Sir Mulberry; ‘and how, without me, could you ever have wound him in your net as you have?’ ‘The net is a large one, and rather full,’ said Ralph. ‘Take care that it chokes nobody in the meshes.’ ‘You would sell your flesh and blood for money; yourself, if you have not already made a bargain with the devil,’ retorted the other. ‘Do you mean to tell me that your pretty niece was not brought here as a decoy for the drunken boy downstairs?’ Although this hurried dialogue was carried on in a suppressed tone on both sides, Ralph looked involuntarily round to ascertain that Kate had not moved her position so as to be within hearing. His adversary saw the advantage he had gained, and followed it up. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he asked again, ‘that it is not so? Do you mean to say that if he had found his way up here instead of me, you wouldn’t have been a little more blind, and a little more deaf, and a little less flourishing, than you have been? Come, |
