re not aware that in those
moments of irritation and revenge we exaggerated his faults, and
palliated our own. We could see every thing he had done that was harsh,
or disagreeable, or unjust; we could see nothing we had done ourselves
that was not forced upon us in self-defense, and capable of vindication.
We had acted all throughout, upon a necessity he had woven round us like
a net. We were, in fact, the victims, and he was the cool, crafty,
heartless tempter and persecutor. We did all we could to forget the
brief gleam of humanity he had betrayed the evening before. What was
that, weighed against years of oppression and cruelty? And even if we
were inclined to admit that it showed his character in rather a better
light, it came too late to be entitled to any consideration from us. If
he had been capable of such manly feelings, why did he not exhibit them
sooner? But the truth was, we affected not to believe in the genuineness
of his emotions. He was such an habitual mimic, that he could assume any
mood that suited the occasion, and nobody could tell whether he was in
earnest or not, which warranted us in supposing that the whole of that
wild burst of passionate reproaches, apparently welling up out of
baffled and imploring love, might have been put on like any other piece
of cunning gesticulation.

I was quite willing to believe that the deep and harrowing emotion he
exhibited was mere acting, or at least a passing spasm of wounded
vanity, or even of love in its dying throes. It was comfortable to
suppose that he had endeavored to impose upon me to the last, to gull
and outrage me. I wanted some such apology to myself for hating him,
with that heart-rending cry rising up out of the earth, and ascending in
accents of unutterable grief to heaven! It was needful that I should
hate and despise him during the first few hours of that violent
transition which was to alter the whole face of things, and project me
into a new life, in which occupation and intercourse were to be
displaced by lonely wanderings and the isolation of the heart. It was
needful that I should have some strong sophism to bridge over the gulf
that was henceforth to yawn between me and mankind; and I felt that this
detestation of the dwarf was a link that still connected me with the
world I had forsaken.

I had not courage enough to attempt to do any justice to him. I did not
dare to imagine what his agonies must have been, if, indeed, he still
lived.