“You have hit him off, Upton, with all your own subtlety; and it was to speak of that boy I have been so eager to see you.”
Glencore paused as he said these words, and passed his hand over his brow, as though to prepare himself for the task before him.
“Upton,” said he, at last, in a voice of deep and solemn meaning, “the resolution I am about to impart to you is not unlikely to meet your strenuous opposition; you will be disposed to show me strong reasons against it on every ground; you may refuse me that amount of assistance I shall ask of you to carry out my purpose; but if your arguments were all unanswerable, and if your denial to aid me was to sever the old friendship between us, I 'd still persist in my determination. For more than two years the project has been before my mind. The long hours of the day, the longer ones of the night, have found me deep in the consideration of it. I have repeated over to myself everything that my ingenuity could suggest against it; I have said to my own heart all that my worst enemy could utter, were he to read the scheme and detect my plan; I have done more,—I have struggled with myself to abandon it; but in vain. My heart is linked to it; it forms the one sole tie that attaches me to life. Without it, the apathy that I feel stealing over me would be complete, and my existence become a mournful dream. In a word, Upton, all is passionless within me, save one sentiment; and I drag on life merely for a 'Vendetta.'”
Upton shook his head mournfully, as the other paused here, and said,—
“This is disease, Glencore!”
“Be it so; the malady is beyond cure,” said he, sternly.
“Trust me it is not so,” said Upton, gently; “you listened to my persuasions on a more—”
“Ay, that I did!” cried Glencore, interrupting; “and have I ever ceased to rue the day I did so? But for your arguments, and I had not lived this life of bitter, self-reproaching misery; but for you, and my vengeance had been sated ere this!”
“Remember, Glencore,” said the other, “that you had obtained all the world has decreed as satisfaction. He met you and received your fire; you shot him through the chest,—not mortally, it is true, but to carry to his grave a painful, lingering disease. To have insisted on his again meeting you would have been little less than murder. No man could have stood your friend in such a quarrel. I told you so then, I repeat it now, he could not fire at you; what, then, was it possible for you to do?”
“Shoot him,—shoot him like a dog!” cried Glencore, while his eyes gleamed like the glittering eyes of an enraged beast. “You talk of his lingering life of pain: think of mine; have some sympathy for what I suffer! Would all the agony of his whole existence equal one hour of the torment he has bequeathed to me, its shame and ignominy?”