ms and cried
aloud--There _is_ a Providence!"

"Dreadful!"

"Spare your horrors, and your morality. Providence, we know, has willed
it otherwise: the honourable gentlemen, at whom we had levelled,
flourish in prosperity and honour; and my friends moulder beneath the
scaffold."

"Having this origin, I presume that your faith in a Providence is at
present--"

"Unshaken: my dagger was meant for Lord Londonderry: and, although he
has escaped my wrath, yet I know not how, but a curse seems to cling to
my blade, that whomsoever I have once devoted to it with full
determination of purpose, that man ---- ----"

Bertram shuddered, and said, "So then it was a conspirator from
Cato-street that I delivered from death?"

"Well, push the conspirator over the wall, if you repent."

"But what carried you amongst such an atrocious band? What could you
reap from the murder of the English ministers?--no merchant from
Amsterdam stood with a full purse in the back ground."

"One step brings on another, and the rage of licentious mobs cannot be
stopped until it has consumed itself. Upon the smoking ashes of the old
palaces, between the overladen scaffold on one side and the charnel
house on the other, blood from each side floating the slippery
streets,--then is man's worth put to proof; then it is tried not by his
prattling, which he calls eloquence--nor by his overloaded memory which
he calls knowledge: then comes into play the arm, and then the head:"

"And what would you have gained as chief of a maddening populace?"

"What should I have gained? That sort of consideration I leave to the
'learned' and to 'ministers' and such people: my part is--to resolve
and to execute as the crisis arises."

"So then it was mere appetite for destruction that drove you on? For
_that_ I should scarce have thought your misanthropy sufficient."

"Call it folly, call it frenzy, call it what you will--but something
higher it was that stood in the back ground. A beautiful picture it was
when I represented to myself all the great leaders, headless--and in
that point on a level with the poor culprit that has just ascended the
scaffold for stealing some half a pound of trash. This it was that
allured me; and the pleasure of being myself the decapitator! Then
worth should have borne the sway, and merit."

"Merit? What sort of merit?"

"You think a blood-hound has none,"--said Nicholas, with eyes that
shot fire:--"but he can acquire it. Heaven and