“‘Have you seen Tyrrell?’ said he, ‘he is at it again; what’s bred in the bone, you know, etc.’ I turned pale with the mention of Tyrrell’s name, and replied very laconically, to what purpose I forget. ‘Ah! ah!’ rejoined Thornton, eying me with an air of impertinent familiarity, ‘I see you have not forgiven him; he played you but a shabby trick at ———; seduced your mistress, or something of that sort; he told me all about it: pray, how is the poor girl now?’
“I made no reply; I sank down and gasped for breath. All I had suffered seemed nothing to the indignity I then endured. She—she—who had once been my pride—my honour—life—to be thus spoken of—and—. I could not pursue the idea. I rose hastily, looked at Thornton with a glance which might have abashed a man less shameless and callous than himself, and left the room.
“That night, as I tossed restless and feverish on my bed of, thorns, I saw how useful Thornton might be to me in the prosecution of the scheme I had entered into; and the next morning I sought him out, and purchased (no very difficult matter) both his secrecy and his assistance. My plan of vengeance, to one who had seen and observed less of the varieties of human nature than you have done, might seem far-fetched and unnatural; for while the superficial are ready to allow eccentricity as natural in the coolness of ordinary life, they never suppose it can exist in the heat of the passions,—as if, in such moments, anything was ever considered absurd in the means which was favourable to the end. Were the secrets of one passionate and irregulated heart laid bare, there would be more romance in them than in all the fables which we turn from with incredulity and disdain, as exaggerated and overdrawn.
“Among the thousand schemes for retribution which had chased each other across my mind, the death of my victim was only the ulterior object. Death, indeed—the pang of one moment—appeared to me but very feeble justice for the life of lingering and restless anguish to which his treachery had condemned me; but my penance, my doom, I could have forgiven: it was the fate of a more innocent and injured being which irritated the sting and fed the venom of my revenge. That revenge no ordinary punishment could appease. If fanaticism can only be satisfied by the rack and the flames, you may readily conceive a like unappeasable fury in a hatred so deadly, so concentrated, and so just as mine; and if fanaticism persuades itself into a virtue, so also did my hatred.
“The scheme which I resolved upon was to attach Tyrrell more and more to the gaming-table, to be present at his infatuation, to feast my eyes upon the feverish intensity of his suspense; to reduce him, step by step, to the lowest abyss of poverty; to glut my soul with the abjectness and humiliation of his penury; to strip him of all aid, consolation, sympathy, and friendship; to follow him, unseen, to his wretched and squalid home; to mark the struggles of the craving nature with the loathing pride; and, finally, to watch the frame wear, the eye sink, the lip grow livid, and all the terrible and torturing progress of gnawing want to utter starvation. Then, in that last state, but not before, I might reveal myself; stand by the hopeless and succourless bed of death; shriek out in the dizzy ear a name, which could treble the horrors of remembrance; snatch from the struggling and agonizing conscience the last plank, the last straw, to which, in its madness, it could cling, and blacken the shadows of departing life, by opening to the shuddering sense the threshold of an impatient and yawning hell.
“Hurried away by the unhallowed fever of these projects, I thought of nothing but their accomplishment. I employed Thornton, who still maintained his intimacy with Tyrrell, to decoy him more and more to the gambling-house; and, as the unequal chances of the public table were not rapid enough in their termination to consummate the ruin even of an impetuous and vehement gamester like Tyrrell so soon as my impatience desired, Thornton took every opportunity of engaging him in private play, and accelerating my object by the unlawful arts of which he was master. My enemy was every day approaching the farthest verge of ruin; near relations he had none,—all his distant ones he had disobliged; all his friends, and even his acquaintance, he had fatigued by his importunity or disgusted by his conduct. In the whole world there seemed not a being who would stretch forth a helping hand to save him from the total and penniless beggary to which he was hopelessly advancing. Out of the wrecks of his former property and the generosity of former friends, whatever he had already wrung had been immediately staked at the gaming-house and as immediately lost.
“Perhaps this would not so soon have been the case, if Thornton had not artfully fed and sustained his expectations. He had been long employed by Tyrrell in a professional capacity, and he knew well all the gamester’s domestic affairs: and when he promised, should things come to the worst, to find some expedient to restore them, Tyrrell easily adopted so flattering a belief.
“Meanwhile I had taken the name and disguise under favour of which you met me at Paris, and Thornton had introduced me to Tyrrell as a young Englishman of great wealth and still greater inexperience. The gambler grasped eagerly at an acquaintance which Thornton readily persuaded him he could turn to such account; and I had thus every facility of marking, day by day, how my plot thickened and my vengeance hastened to its triumph.
“This was not all. I said there was not in the wide world a being who would have saved Tyrrell from the fate he deserved and was approaching. I forgot, there was one who still clung to him with affection, and for whom he still seemed to harbour the better and purer feelings of less degraded and guilty times. This person (you will guess readily it was a woman) I made it my especial business and care to wean away from my prey; I would not suffer him a consolation he had denied to me. I used all the arts of seduction to obtain the transfer of her affections. Whatever promises and vows—whether of love or wealth—could effect were tried; nor, at last, without success: I triumphed. The woman became my slave. It was she who, whenever Tyrrell faltered in his course to destruction, combated his scruples and urged on his reluctance; it was she who informed me minutely of his pitiful finances, and assisted, to her utmost, in expediting their decay. The still more bitter treachery of deserting him in his veriest want I reserved till the fittest occasion, and contemplated with a savage delight.
“I was embarrassed in my scheme by two circumstances: first, Thornton’s acquaintance with you; and, secondly, Tyrrell’s receipt (some time afterwards) of a very unexpected sum of two hundred pounds, in return for renouncing all further and possible claim on the purchasers of his estate. To the former, so far as it might interfere with my plans or lead to my detection, you must pardon me for having put a speedy termination: the latter threw me into great consternation; for Tyrrell’s first idea was to renounce the gaming-table, and endeavour to live upon the trifling pittance he had acquired as long as the utmost economy would permit.