“Revenge! Oh, cruel!” exclaimed Violante, laying her hand on his arm. “And in revenge, it is your own life that you will risk!”
“My life, simple child! This is no contest of life against life. Could I bare to all the world my wrongs for their ribald laughter, I should only give to my foe the triumph to pity my frenzy, to shun the contest; or grant it, if I could find a second—and then fire in the air. And all the world would say, ‘Generous Egerton! soul of honour!’”
“Egerton, Mr. Egerton! He cannot be this foe? It is not on him you can design revenge,—you who spend all your hours in serving his cause, you to whom he trusts so fondly, you who leaned yesterday on his shoulder, and smiled so cheeringly in his face?”
“Did I? Hypocrisy against hypocrisy, snare against snare: that is my revenge.”
“Harley, Harley! Cease, cease!”
The storm of passion rushed on unheeding.
“I seem to promote his ambition but to crush it into the mire. I have delivered him from the gentler gripe of an usurer, so that he shall hold at my option alms or a prison—”
“Friend, friend! Hush, hush!”
“I have made the youth he has reared and fostered into treachery like his own (your father’s precious choice, Randal Leslie) mine instrument in the galling lesson how ingratitude can sting. His very son shall avenge the mother, and be led to his father’s breast as victor, with Randal Leslie, in the contest that deprives sire and benefactor of all that makes life dear to ambitious egotism. And if, in the breast of Audley Egerton, there can yet lurk one memory of what I was to him and to truth, not his least punishment will be the sense that his own perfidy has so changed the man whose very scorn of falsehood has taught him to find in fraud itself the power of retribution.”
“If this be not a terrible dream,” murmured Violante, recoiling, “it is not your foe alone that you will deprive of all that makes life dear. Act thus—and what, in the future, is left to me?”