All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his
head to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.
"It's hell, ain't it?--you with a strong body and servants to carry
for you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that
puts the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?"
How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he
uttered these words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down
the hall past my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of
safety. Being alone in the room with this man seemed much the same
as if I were locked in a cage with a tiger-cat. The devilishness,
the wickedness, and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with
which the man eyed me and addressed me, were most unpleasant. I
swear I knew fear--not calculated caution, not timid apprehension,
but blind, panic, unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the creature
was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it: it poured
from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his withered,
twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked talons of
hands. And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and
repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take
the throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the
malformed life out of it.
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