V

given me a face to revolt every human being who looks at me? Do you triumph in the remembrance of this atrocity, as you triumphed in the acting of it⁠—believing that you had destroyed my future with Margaret, in destroying my very identity as a man? I tell you, that with the hour when I leave this hospital your day of triumph will be over, and your day of expiation will begin⁠—never to end till the death of one of us. You shall live⁠—refined educated gentleman as you are⁠—to wish, like a ruffian, that you had killed me; and your father shall live to wish it too. > > Am I trying to awe you with the fierce words of a boaster and a bully? Test me, by looking back a little, and discovering what I have abstained from for the sake of my purpose, since I have been here. A word or two from my lips, in answer to the questions with which I have been baited, day after day, by those about me, would have called you before a magistrate to answer for an assault⁠—a shocking and a savage assault, even in this country, where hand to hand brutality is a marketable commodity between the prisoner and the law. Your father’s name might have been publicly coupled with your dishonour, if I had but spoken; and I was silent. I kept the secret⁠—kept it, because to avenge myself on you by a paltry scandal, which you and your family (opposing to it wealth, position, previous character, and general sympathy) would live down in a few days, was not my revenge: because to be righted before magistrates and judges by a beggarman’s exhibition of physical injury, and a coward’s confession of physical defeat, was not my way of righting myself. I have a lifelong retaliation in view, which laws and lawgivers are powerless either to aid or to oppose⁠—the retaliation which set a