him by Montreuil in the light of groundless and wilful insults; and thus
he had been led to scorn that full and cool explanation which, if it
had not elucidated the mystery of my afflictions, would have removed the
false suspicion of guilt from himself and the real guilt of wrath and
animosity from me.

The crime of the forged will, and the outrage to the dead and to myself,
was a link in his woven guilt which I regarded the least. I looked
rather to the black and the consummate craft by which Aubrey had been
implicated in that sin; and my indignation became mixed with horror when
I saw Montreuil working to that end of fraud by the instigation not
only of a guilty and unlawful passion, but of the yet more unnatural and
terrific engine of _frenzy_,--of a maniac's despair. Over the peace, the
happiness, the honour, the virtue of a whole family, through fraud and
through blood, this priest had marched onward to the goal of his icy and
heartless ambition, unrelenting and unrepenting; "but not," I said, as I
clenched my hand till the nails met in the flesh, "not forever unchecked
and unrequited!"

But in what manner was justice to be obtained? A public court of law?
What! drag forward the deep dishonour of my house, the gloomy and
convulsive history of my departed brother, his crime and his insanity?
What! bring that history, connected as it was with the fate of Isora,
before the curious and the insolent gaze of the babbling world? Bare
that awful record to the jests, to the scrutiny, the marvel and the
pity, of that most coarse of all tribunals,--an English court of law?
and that most torturing of all exposures,--the vulgar comments of an
English public? Could I do this? Yea, in the sternness of my soul,
I felt that I could submit even to that humiliation, if no other way
presented itself by which I could arrive at justice. _Was_ there no
other way?--at that question conjecture paused: I formed no scheme, or
rather, I formed a hundred and rejected them all; my mind settled, at
last, into an indistinct, unquestioned, but prophetic resolution, that,
whenever my path crossed Montreuil's, it should be to his destruction. I
asked not how, nor when, the blow was to be dealt; I felt only a solemn
and exultant certainty that, whether it borrowed the sword of the
law, or the weapon of private justice, _mine_ should be the hand which
brought retribution to the ashes of the dead and the agony of the
survivor.

So soon as my mind h