He nodded slowly. “'Twas to that end that I was reared,” he answered, and put aside his pipe, which had gone out. “The spirit of revenge was educated into me until I came to look upon revenge as the best and holiest of emotions; until I believed that if I failed to wreak it I must be a craven and a dastard. All this seemed so until the moment came to set my hand to the task. And then—” He shrugged.
“And then?” she questioned.
“I couldn't. The full horror of it burst upon me. I saw the thing in its true and hideous proportions, and it revolted me.”
“It must have been so,” she approved him.
“I told my foster-father; but I met with neither sympathy nor understanding. He renewed his old-time arguments, and again he seemed to prove to me that did I fail I should be false to my duty and to my mother's memory—a weakling, a thing of shame.”
“The monster! Oh, the monster! He is an evil man for all that you have said of him.”
“Not so. There is no nobler gentleman in all the world. I who know him, know that. It is through the very nobility of it that this warp has come into his nature. Sane in all things else, he is—I see it now, I understand it at last—insane on this one subject. Much brooding has made him mad upon this matter—a fanatic whose gospel is Vengeance, and, like all fanatics, he is harsh and intolerant when resisted on the point of his fanaticism. This is something I have come to realize in these past days, when I lay with naught else to do but ponder.
“In all things else he sees as deep and clear as any man; in this his vision is distorted. He has looked at nothing else for thirty years; can you wonder that his sight is blurred?”
“He is to be pitied then,” she said, “deeply to be pitied.”
“True. And because I pitied him, because I valued his regard-however mistaken he might be—above all else, I was hesitating again—this time between my duty to myself and my duty to him. I was so hesitating—though I scarce can doubt which had prevailed in the end—when came this sword-thrust so very opportunely to put me out of case of doing one thing or the other.”