CHAPTER XI.

Dr. Riccabocca, awakened out of his revery by the sound of footsteps,
was still so little sensible of the indignity of his position, that he
enjoyed exceedingly, and with all the malice of his natural humour, the
astonishment and stupor manifested by Stirn, when that functionary beheld
the extraordinary substitute which fate and philosophy had found for
Lenny Fairfield. Instead of the weeping, crushed, broken-hearted captive
whom he had reluctantly come to deliver, he stared speechless and aghast
upon the grotesque but tranquil figure of the doctor enjoying his pipe,
and cooling himself under his umbrella, with a sangfroid that was truly
appalling and diabolical. Indeed, considering that Stirn always
suspected the Papisher of having had a hand in the whole of that black
and midnight business, in which the stocks had been broken, bunged up,
and consigned to perdition, and that the Papisher had the evil reputation
of dabbling in the Black Art, the hocus-pocus way in which the Lenny he
had incarcerated was transformed into the doctor he found, conjoined with
the peculiarly strange eldrich and Mephistophelean physiognomy and person
of Riccabocca, could not but strike a thrill of superstitious dismay into
the breast of the parochial tyrant; while to his first confused and
stammered exclamations and interrogatories, Riccabocca replied with so
tragic an air, such ominous shakes of the head, such mysterious
equivocating, long-worded sentences, that Stirn every moment felt more
and more convinced that the boy had sold himself to the Powers of
Darkness, and that he himself, prematurely and in the flesh, stood face
to face with the Arch-Enemy.