ntry. I crossed the Alps,
traversed France, and took ship at Calais for Dover.

Behold me, then, upon the swift seas bent upon a double
purpose,--reconciliation with a brother whom I had wronged, and
vengeance,--no, not vengeance, but _justice_ against the criminal I
had discovered. No! it was not revenge: it was no infuriate, no unholy
desire of inflicting punishment upon a personal foe which possessed me;
it was a steady, calm, unwavering resolution, to obtain justice against
the profound and systematized guilt of a villain who had been the bane
of all who had come within his contact, that nerved my arm and engrossed
my heart. Bear witness, Heaven, I am not a vindictive man! I have, it is
true, been extreme in hatred as in love; but I have ever had the power
to control myself from yielding to its impulse. When the full persuasion
of Gerald's crime reigned within me, I had thralled my emotion; I had
curbed it within the circle of my own heart, though there, thus pent and
self-consuming, it was an agony and a torture; I had resisted the voice
of that blood which cried from the earth against a murderer, and which
had consigned the solemn charge of justice to my hands. Year after year
I had nursed an unappeased desire; nor ever when it stung the most,
suffered it to become an actual revenge. I had knelt in tears and in
softness by Aubrey's bed; I had poured forth my pardon over him; I had
felt, while I did so,--no, not so much sternness as would have slain a
worm. By his hand had the murderous stroke been dealt; on his soul was
the crimson stain of that blood which had flowed through the veins of
the gentlest and the most innocent of God's creatures; and yet the blow
was unavenged and the crime forgiven. For him there was a palliative, or
even a gloomy but an unanswerable excuse. In the confession which had so
terribly solved the mystery of my life, the seeds of that curse, which
had grown at last into MADNESS, might be discovered even in the first
dawn of Aubrey's existence. The latent poison might be detected in
the morbid fever of his young devotion, in his jealous cravings of
affection, in the first flush of his ill-omened love,--even before
rivalship and wrath began. Then, too, his guilt had not been regularly
organized into one cold and deliberate system: it broke forth in
impetuous starts, in frantic paroxysms; it was often wrestled with,
though by a feeble mind; it was often conquered by a tender though a
fitful t