"O God!" cried Gibbet, literally writhing with mental agony, as the drop fell with a crashing sound, and the jerking noise of the halter met his ear a moment afterwards.
"Now, then, coward!" exclaimed the executioner; and again the leathern thong elicited horrible screams from the hump-back.
The lad was still crying, and his father was in the midst of sundry fearful anathemas, levelled against what he called his son's cowardice, when a knock was heard at the door of the loft.
The invitation was obeyed; and an elderly man, dressed in a shabby suit of black, entered the room with an affected solemnity of gait.
"Holloa, Banks!" exclaimed the executioner. "Got scent of the morning's work—eh, old feller?"
"Alas! my dear Mr. Smithers," returned the undertaker, shaking his head in a lachrymose manner, "if men will perpetrate such enormities, they must expect to go to their last home by means of a dance upon nothing."
And, according to a custom which years had rendered a part of Mr. Banks's nature, he wiped his eyes with a dingy white pocket-handkerchief.
"There he is again, the old fool!" ejaculated Smithers, with a coarse guffaw; "always a-whimpering! Why, you don't mean to say, Banks, that you care two straws about the feller that's going to be tucked up this morning?"
"Ah! Smithers, you don't know my heart: I weeps for frail human natur', and not only for the unhappy being that's so soon to be a blessed defunct carkiss. But, Smithers—my boy——"
"How much is it to be this time for the rope?" asked Mr. Banks, in a tremulous tone and with another solemn shake of the head.
"Five shillings—not a mag under," was the prompt reply.
"That's too much, Mr. Smithers—too much," observed the undertaker of Globe Lane. "The last one I bought I lost by: times is changed, Mr. Smithers—sadly changed."
"Ain't the _morbid feelings_, as the press calls 'em, as powerful as ever?" demanded the executioner savagely.
"The morbid feelings, thank God, is right as a trivet," answered Banks; "but it's the blunt that falls off, Smithers—the blunt! And what's the use of the morbid feelings if there's no blunt to gratify 'em?"
"Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Banks," cried the executioner, "that you can't get as ready a sale for the halters as you used to do?"