"You have changed your outward man, too, since I saw you last," said Morton, looking at his companion's costume, which consisted of a gray volunteer uniform.
"Yes, I'm in Uncle Sam's pay now.—Off for Mexico in a day or two;—revel in the Halls of the Montezumas, you know."
"What rank do you hold in the service, Dick?"
"You'll please to address me as Major Rosny; that is, till good luck and the Mexican bullets make a colonel of me.—I have just dropped in to shake hands with you. I have an appointment to keep in five minutes. You have nothing particular to do to-day—have you?"
"Nothing very particular," said Morton, hesitating.
"Then come and dine with me at Delmonico's at four o'clock. What!—you don't mean to say no, do you?—Is that the way you treat your friends? Come, I shall be here at four, precisely. Au revoir."
And, with his usual celerity of motion, Rosny left the hotel.
Morton slowly remounted to his room, locked the door this time, to keep out intruders, seated himself, and gave himself up to his dark and morbid reveries.
"God! of what is this world made! Villany thrives, and innocent men are racked with the pangs of hell. Poverty starving its victims,—luxury poisoning them;—the passions of tigers and the mean vices of reptiles;—treacherous hatred, faithless love;—deceitful hope, vain struggles, endless suffering,—a hell of misery and darkness. A fair sunrise, to cheat the eye;—then clouds and storms, blackness and desolation! To look back over the last five years! Then I was basking in sunshine; and out of that brightness what a doom is fallen on me! My life—my guiding star quenched in a vile morass—lost forever in the arms of this accursed villain!"
Morton rose abruptly, went to the window, and stood looking out with a fixed gaze, wholly unconscious of what was before him. In a moment he turned again, and there was a wild and deadly light in his eyes. A thought had struck him, shooting an electric life through all his veins, and kindling him into a kind of fierce ecstasy. He would go to Vinal, charge him with his perfidy, challenge him, and put him to death. He paced the room in great disorder. A resistless power seemed to have seized upon him, sweeping him forward with the force of a torrent. He clinched his teeth and breathed deeply. The thought of action and of vengeance lighted up his perturbed and gloomy mind as the baleful glare of a conflagration lights up a stormy midnight. Suddenly he stopped, seated himself again, and remained for some minutes in violent mental conflict. "I thank God," he murmured at length, apostrophizing his enemy, "that you were not just now within my reach. You have ruined me for this life; you shall not ruin me for the next. Live, and work out your own destruction."