‘And yet there is but a step between us and death,’ he pursued with a sneer. ‘Hollo! I’m quoting Scripture, I declare. You wouldn’t have expected that of me; would you?’
‘Oh, anybody can quote Scripture, you know,’ I responded with a ghastly attempt at airiness. ‘But I say, Hesketh, let go my arm, will you? You’re hurting me.’
‘Hurting you, am I? Ha, ha! I beg your pardon, I’m sure,’ he laughed, increasing instead of diminishing the vice-like pressure of his fingers. ‘I wouldn’t hurt you for the world; O no! But now, if you’ve quite finished with the scenery, Mr Frederick Carleton, I’ll trouble you to give me your attention for a moment. I’m going to ask you a question, which you may perhaps consider somewhat curiously timed. I am not a vain man, that I know of; but I should like to have your opinion respecting my personal appearance. Should you feel justified now, for instance, in describing me as a well-built, powerful kind of man?’
Considering that he was upwards of six feet in height, broad and stout in proportion, with well-developed sinewy limbs, the description would have been accurate; and I said so.
‘If you feel any doubt of it,’ he resumed, still in the same peculiar tone, ‘oblige me by examining that muscle.’ And he stretched out for my inspection an arm that could have felled an ox—firm and strong as a bar of iron.
‘I am quite satisfied of your muscular strength and powerful physical development, Mr Hesketh,’ I said, with an effort to appear unconcerned and amused, which I was conscious was a dead failure. ‘And now, with your permission, I think we had better descend.’
‘Not just this moment, my precious little bantam cock,’ was the startling rejoinder. ‘Sorry to detain you, believe me, but I must trouble you with another question. Supposing, now, that you and I, dear friend, were to have a tussle at the top of this chimney, and that each of us was trying to throw the other over, which, should you think, would have the better chance of accomplishing his purpose?’
Summoning to my aid all the manliness of which I was possessed, I courageously declined to answer this question—asserting that the case was not a supposable one, seeing that I entertained towards him no feelings of enmity, and that I felt sure he had no desire to injure me.
‘Look in my face and see if I haven’t!’ he rejoined in loud fierce accents, very different from those he had hitherto employed. ‘Look in my face, Mr Frederick Carleton, and see if I haven’t!’
I did look, and my heart died within me—for on the face of the man who still retained my arm in his iron grip on the top of that terrible chimney, I saw an expression of fiendish hate and malignance, of the like of which I could not have believed a human countenance capable.