What to thyself thou wishest to be done.
—Armstrong.
Nathan Gomer withdrew his hands from before his eyes.
A sharp spasm which had almost convulsed his frame had passed away, and he commenced his revelation.
He addressed himself to Wilton, rather than to his other auditors, and it soon became evident that his story possessed for the old man a most absorbing interest.
“I was separated from my family at a very early age,” he commenced, “being taken under the roof and tender care of a sister of my mother. My father was a wild, dissipated spendthrift, in perpetual pecuniary difficulties. My mother, a gentle, timid, tender creature, passed a life of incessant fright, care and distressing misery, after her union with him. She had been married to him some five years before I was born, and at that period she had reached the very climax of wretchedness with the miserable man to whom she was tied; a series of wild excesses drove him into an infuriated insanity, during a fearful paroxysm of which life was snatched from him. In my mother’s horror at this event, I was prematurely born. My mother never recovered the shock. Within two years of my father’s decease, she was placed in the same grave, and I was taken charge of by her sister.
“My boyhood was passed in comparative seclusion; for I was, from my earliest recollection, possessed of personal defects; and idle, thoughtless boys, when I appeared amongst them, found a delight in wounding my susceptibility, by jeering at me, mocking my stunted growth and my sallow visage. I was on that account kept as much within doors as possible, and was educated at home. I had kind instructors and an extensive library to consult, and naturally acquired a passion for reading, especially as legendary lore was rather an extensive element in the collection. I was, perhaps, the more urged to devote myself to books, because, by comparison, I became quite aware of my physical deficiencies, and because—with a kind motive—-my father’s terrible example was always held up in terrorem before me. So I became dull and thoughtful, and shunned society as much as it was possible for me to do, and I began to feel like Cain. Strangers met me with a smile of derision, or their lips were curled with scorn. I was bantered by my own kind; and was the scoff of the other sex. No wonder that I hated the human race; for it appeared to hate me. Even the servants of the house in which I lived made me the butt at which to level the shafts of their vulgar ridicule. How much of this I really deserved I do not now pretend to measure; but I hurled back the contumely I received with fierce; intemperate defiance. I spurned; and spat; and sneered; too; even though beneath that scornful rage my heart was breaking.
“I had nearly arrived at man’s estate; a dwarf still in stature, harbouring against the world the most rancorous animosity; when I became sensible that there was one gentle spirit who was out of the pale of my hate. Years before, a quiet, dove-like, mild girl was a frequent visitor at my aunt’s, and she was often invited when, in an irritated, turbulent mood, I wandered about threatening mischief to others as to myself. At first I repelled her, but somehow she discovered the way to soften my violence, and to lead my thoughts into a gentler train. As we grew up together, her influence over me increased, until her lightest wish became the law I implicitly obeyed. Her face and form were of faultless beauty, and her mind was not less perfect in purity and excellence. Her coming seemed to me as the opening of the gates of Paradise, in which I wandered with her—her going, as though I had been thrust back into darkness and gloom. In my most morose fits, her smiling eyes and soft words wooed me into placidity and to kinder thoughts of others. Her gentle touch unloosed my clenched hands, unlocked my hard-set teeth, and her appealing look toned down the bitterness of my heart against those who were, as it seemed to me, lashing me into fury.
“Lo! by chance I learned that she had been wooed and won by a youth of fairer proportions than myself, that tender words of affection had been poured into a not unwilling ear, and that she had promised to give her hand, with her heart in it, to him whose form and features had pleased her eye, and whose honied language had beguiled her of her love.
“I know not how to describe the overwhelming agony of my heart at the discovery. I brooded over it, nursed the most terrible schemes of vengeance on him who was thus about to rob me of the only being who had sympathised with me, had reasoned with me, and had brought me back from almost brute barbarism into the realms of a common humanity; who had extirpated many of my worst failings, and replaced them by implanting virtues resembling her own. I took the first opportunity of challenging her with the tale I had heard, and she at once, with blushing face, acknowledged its truth. Then, then, in frantic terms, I confessed the idolatry with which I worshipped her; then, by an involuntary exclamation, she revealed to me that she had done all for me in commiserating pity and nought in love. Oh! the intense torture of that admission!