h 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
mark upon Cain (as I will set a mark on you); and then made his life his
punishment (as I will make your life yours).

"How? Remember what my career has been; and know that I will make
your career like it. As my father's death by the hangman affected _my_
existence, so the events of that night when you followed me shall affect
_yours._ Your father shall see you living the life to which his evidence
against _my_ father condemned _me_--shall see the foul stain of your
disaster clinging to you wherever you go. The infamy with which I am
determined to pursue you, shall be your own infamy that you cannot get
quit of--for you shall never get quit of me, never get quit of the wife
who has dishonoured you. You may leave your home, and leave England; you
may make new friends, and seek new employments; years and years may pass
away--and still, you shall not escape us: still, you shall never know
when we are near, or when we are distant; when we are ready to appear
before you, or when we are sure to keep out of your sight. My deformed
face and her fatal beauty shall hunt you through the world. The terrible
secret of your dishonour, and of the atrocity by which you avenged it,
shall ooze out through strange channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous
intangible processes; ever changing in the manner of its exposure,
never remediable by your own resistance, and always directed to the same
end--your isolation as a marked man, in every fresh sphere, among every
new community to which you retreat.

"Do you call this a very madne