“It is,”—he regarded me with a truculent aspect, as if he would pierce through my heart,—“because I hate you!”
“You hate me? Good God! is it possible? What evil have I done to you? What good have I not done you? What supplies have I refused you? What occasions have I neglected of studying your advantage, your interest, and your honour? If thus your hatred is purchased, how shall that man demean himself who is to purchase your love?”
“Oh, think not my hatred idle or capricious! Heaven knows, I would have refrained from hating you if I had been able; I struggled against it with all the energies of my soul. But you have committed towards me the most mortal offences that man ever endured. There is an antipathy between your nature and mine, that all the menstruums in the world could never bring to coalesce.”
“Eternal Providence! and what is the source of this antipathy?”
“And do you profess ignorance? Have you not gone on day after day with the full consciousness and will to torment me? Have I not warned you, and expostulated with you times without number?”
“Of what have you warned me?”
“I hate mankind. I was not born to hate them. I have no native obliquity of character. I have no diabolical maliciousness of constitution. But they have forced me to hate them, and the debt of abhorrence shall be amply paid.
“I loved as never mortal loved. No human heart was ever so devoted, and centred, and enveloped in the kindly affections of family and parentage as mine has been. Was not my wife, were not my children, murdered? When I came home to feast my eyes and tranquillise my soul with the sight of them, did I not find all waste and desolation? Did I not find their bodies naked, pale, disfigured with wounds, plunged in blood, and already putrid? This was the welcome I looked for! This was the object I so speeded to see! No, never was a moment like that! My whole nature was changed in an instant. My eyes were blasted and dried to horn. My blood froze in my well stored veins. I have no longer delight but in human misery.
“My revenge is not causeless; this was not the act of individuals. All men, in the place of these murderers, would have done as they did. They are in a league together. Human pity and forbearance never had a harbour but in my breast; and I have now abjured them. With something more of inwrought vigour and energy, I will become like to my brethren. All men are excited by the same motives, urged by the same temptations, influenced by the same inducements. Why should I attempt a futile distinction, when nature had made none? All men bear the same figure; I cannot view the human figure without a torture the most dreadful.”