'Until I come for you.'
'With the dagger, perhaps?' Professor Flick said sarcastically.
'With the dagger certainly, but I hope with no occasion for using it.'
'I hope so too; you might cut your fingers with it.'
'Are you threatening me?' Copping asked fiercely, standing up. He spoke, however, in the lowest of tones.
'I almost think I am. You see you have been threatening me—and I don't like it. I never professed to have as much courage as you have—I mean as you say you have; but I'm like a woman, when I'm driven into a corner I don't much care what I do—ah! then I am dangerous! It's not courage, I know, it's fear; but a man afraid and driven to bay is an ugly creature to deal with. And then it strikes me that I get all the dullest and also the most dangerous part of the work put on me, and I don't like that.'
Copping glanced for a moment at his colleague with eyes from which, according to Carlyle's phrase, 'hell-fire flashed for an instant.' Probably he would have very much liked to employ the dagger there and then. But he knew that that was not exactly the time or place for a quarrel, and he knew too that he had been talking too long with his friend already, and that he might on coming out of Professor Flick's room encounter some guest in the corridor. So by an effort he took off from his face the fierce expression, as one might take off a mask.
'We can't quarrel now, we two,' he said. 'When we come safe out of this business——'
'If we come safe out of this business,' the Professor interposed, with a punctuating emphasis on the 'if.'
Copping answered all unconsciously in the words of Lady Macbeth.