"Do you threaten me?" said I.
"No; I do not threaten you. Look at your arm and mine—compare your muscles with my shrunken and stunted frame," he cried, with an expression of pain and bitterness; "I do not threaten you, but I warn you—mark me, I warn you! Heed my warning, I beseech, I implore you—nay, heed it for your life!"
I could not but admire the sibyl-like grandeur of his head and outstretched arms as he uttered these strange words. His voice was hoarse with some surging emotion; and if so poor a creature could have been the recipient of a supernatural inspiration, he might have sat at that moment for the portrait of one of the deformed soothsayers in a tale of magic.
"Do I understand you correctly?" said I; "or are you only playing off some new freak upon me? Answer me frankly one question, and I shall be better able to comprehend the meaning of your mysterious menace. Are you—but I know it is absurd, I feel that the question is very ridiculous, only that your reply to it will, perhaps, set us both right—do you love Astræa? I really can not conceive any thing short of some such feeling to justify this violence."
"Love her? I love Astræa? If there be a mortal I hate in the core of my heart, it is Astræa. Are you satisfied?" he replied, with an expression of fiendish satisfaction in his face, as if he were glad of the excuse for giving vent to his malignity.
"Hate her?" said I, calmly; "that is unreasonable: but the whole discussion is unreasonable. I have given you my answer; none other shall you have from me. So, good-night."
"One word," he said, leaping out of his chair into the middle of the room. "One word before you go. I am a dwarf—do not delude yourself into any contempt of me on that account. I know as well as you do my disadvantages in the world; I am as conscious as you are of my physical defects and shortcomings, my distorted spine, and the parsimony of nature in all particulars when she made me. But I have passions like other men; and I pursue them like other men, only, as I am shut out from the summary and open process, I am compelled, perchance, to the choice of dark and crooked means. Perhaps, too, my passions are all the more turbulent and dangerous because they are pent up in an incapable frame, and denied the vents and appliances which men like you have at their command. Mark me! see Astræa no more. Let your last interview with her be your last forever. Enter our house no more; that interdict, at least, I have a right to pronounce. But for myself, and from myself, and apart from the privilege of my own roof, I warn you at your peril, and on my own responsibility, never to see Astræa again."
"Are you mad?" I exclaimed. "Never to see Astræa again! To forsake her society at your bidding! Wherefore do you make this monstrous demand? Do you not feel how preposterous it is to thrust yourself into a quarrel with me in a matter which not only does not concern you, but which involves the feelings, perhaps the whole future happiness, of a person whom you have just ostentatiously declared is the object of your hate?"
"I make no quarrel with you," he answered; "I will not quarrel with you. I should be mad, indeed, if I did. What! set myself against your thews and sinews? No, no—I break no bones with you—but I tell you, once again, your fate is in my hands. I am your destiny, if you will have it so. You may trample on the oracle; but you can not, with all your show of bravery and your proud pretensions, with the lady, too, in triumph on your side, escape its denunciations."
"Did you, or did you not," I inquired, bewildered by his language, and not quite satisfied that he was in possession of his senses, "did you, or did you not, observe those attentions some months ago of which you now complain for the first time?"