"That I may die in happiness, your honor, but I'm afeard to tell
you--but, sure, if you'd give your promise, sir--your bright word of
honor, that you'd not pay me off for it, I'll tell you."

"Ah! you d----d crawling reptile, out with it--I won't pay you off."

[Illustration: PAGE 142-- there's as many curses before you in hell]

"Well, then, here it is--oh! the curse o' Cromwell on them this day,
for an ungrateful pack! they said, your honor, that--bad luck to them I
pray--that there wasn't so black-hearted a scoundrel on the face of the
airth as your four quarthers--that the gallows is gapin' for you--and
that there's as many curses before you in hell as 'ud blisther a
griddle."

M'Clutchy's face assumed its usual expression of diabolical malignity,
whilst, at the same time, he gave a look so piercing at Darby, as if
suspecting that the curse, from its peculiar character, was at least
partially his own invention,--that the latter, who stood like a
criminal, looking towards the floor, felt precisely what was going
forward in the other's mind, and knew that he had nothing else for
it but to look him steadily in the face, as a mark of his perfect
innocence. Gradually, therefore, and slowly he raised his small gray
eyes until they met those of M'Clutchy, and thus the gaze continued
for nearly a minute between them, and that with such steadiness on both
sides, that they resembled a mesmeric doctor and his patient, rather
than anything else to which we could compare them. On the part of
M'Clutchy the gaze was that of an inquisitor looking into the heart of
him whom he suspected; on that of Darby, the eye, unconscious of evil,
betrayed nothing but the purest simplicity and candor.