“My God, father, what is the matter?”

Val literally gasped, as if seeking for breath, and then putting his hand upon his heart, he said—­

“Phil, I am sick here—­”

“I see you are,"’ said Phil, “but what is the matter, I say again? why are you sick?”

“Vengeance, Phil; I am sick with vengeance!  The moment is now near, and at last I have it within my clutch;” and here he extended his hand, and literally made a clutch at some imaginary object in the air.

“Upon my honor,” said Philip, “I envy you; you are a fine, consistent old villain.”

“The sick woman, Phil!  By the great heavens, and by all that they contain—­if they do contain anything—­I swear, that if every individual of them, men and women, were at the last gasp, and within one single moment of death—­ha! hold,” said he, checking himself, “that would never do.  Death! why death would end all their sufferings.”

“Oh, not all, I hope,” said Phil, winking again.

“No matter,” resumed Val, “their sufferings in this life it would end, and so I should no longer be either eye-witness or ear-witness of their destitution and miseries.  I would see them, Phil, without house or home—­without a friend on earth—­without raiment, without food—­ragged, starved—­starved out of their very virtues—­despised, spat upon, and trampled on by all!  To these, Phil, I thought to have added shame—­shame; but we failed—­we have failed.”

“No,” replied Phil, “I give you my word, we did not.”

“We did, sir,” said the father; “Harman and she are now reconciled, and this is enough for the people, who loved her.  Yes, by heavens, we have failed.”  Val sat, or almost dropped on a chair as he spoke, for he had been pacing through the parlor until now; and putting his two hands over his face, he sobbed out—­groaned even with agony—­until the tears literally gushed in torrents through his fingers.  “I thought to have added shame to all I shall make them suffer,” he exclaimed; “but in that I am frustrated.”  He here naturally clenched his hands and gnashed his teeth, like a man in the last stage of madness.

On removing his hands, too, his face, now terribly distorted out of its lineaments by the convulsive workings of this tremendous passion, presented an appearance which one might rather suppose to have been shaped in hell, so unnaturally savage and diabolical were all its outlines.

Phil, who had sat down at the same time, with his face to the back of the chair, on which his two hands were placed, supporting his chin, kept his beautiful eyes, seated as he was in that graceful attitude, fixed upon his father with a good deal of surprise.  Indeed it would be a difficult thing, considering their character and situation, to find two countenances more beautifully expressive of their respective dispositions.  If one could conceive the existence of any such thing as a moral looking-glass placed between them, it might naturally be supposed that Val, in looking at Phil, saw himself; and that Phil in his virtuous father’s face also saw his own.  The son’s face and character, however, had considerably the advantage over his father’s.  Val’s presented merely what you felt you must hate, even to abhorrence; but the son’s, that which you felt to be despicable besides, and yet more detestable still.