“I’m not!” said Josiah, indignantly, aroused to sudden defiance. “How dare you say I am!”
“How dare I!—How dare I!” crooned the Goblin, clasping its legs again and rocking itself to and fro—“Oh, Beelzebub! How high and mighty we are! I dare do anything, McNason! Anything! I’ll skin your soul!”
Josiah gave a smothered cry of terror. Such eyes as were now bent upon him were like nothing in the world except railway signal lamps with the light in them very much intensified and enlarged.
“I’ll skin your soul!” repeated the Goblin, severely—“And you won’t like the process. Do you know what the process is called, McNason? No? Then I’ll tell you! It’s a blistering, flaying, scorching, boiling, steaming, tearing, crunching, blasting, stripping—(don’t groan like that, McNason!)—stabbing, cutting, piercing process called Truth! It will rip off all the lies in which you are so comfortably wadded, as lightning rips off the bark from a tree! And it will show you to be exactly what I say—a Humbug! A pious Fraud, McNason! A rich man who does no good with his money! A hard man who grinds down poor lives into ill-gotten gold! A cruel, avaricious, grasping, selfish man! And yet you go to Church every Sunday and pretend that you’re a Christian! Oh, hoo-roo! Uncharitable, mean, narrow-minded and hypocritical, you are anything but a good man, McNason!—and I’ve come to tell you so!”
Gathering up his courage under this volley of abuse McNason turned round in his chair and deliberately faced his accuser.
“You’re a Bad Dream!” he said slowly—“You’re the result of Cold and Indigestion! You’re—you’re Nothing! But if you were Anything, I should tell you you are an impudent scoundrel and liar! I should tell you to get out of this room before you are kicked out! But you are only an Illusion!—a horrible, horrible Fancy!—and—and you’ll Go!—presently!—in a little while—when I am better—when my brain recovers itself——”
Here he broke off, appalled at the indescribably hideous grimace with which his unpleasant companion favoured him.
“Your brain!” echoed the Goblin. “Your brain indeed! Pooh! When you are better! Hoo-roo! You never will be better—never—not unless I doctor you! I must sk—k——”
“No, no!” cried Josiah, seized by a paroxysm of fear—“Don’t skin me! Anything but that! Don’t,”—and his teeth clattered together—“don’t ski—i—in me!”
“Professor” Goblin relaxed its writhing features and smoothed them into a kind of wise impassibility such as is seen on the physiognomy of a Chinese idol.