I took Dorothy Beltham into my arms.  She was trembling excessively, yet found time to say, ‘Bear up, dearest; keep still.’  All I thought and felt foundered in tears.

For a while I heard little distinctly of the tremendous tirade which the vindictive old man, rendered thrice venomous by the immobility of the petrified large figure opposed to him, poured forth.  My poor father did not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in the form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home thrusts and most vehement imprecatory denunciations, that our protesting voices quailed.  Janet plucked at my aunt Dorothy’s dress to bear her away.

‘I can’t leave my father,’ I said.

‘Nor I you, dear,’ said the tender woman; and so we remained to be scourged by this tongue of incarnate rage.

‘You pensioner of a silly country spinster!’ sounded like a return to mildness.  My father’s chest heaved up.

I took advantage of the lull to make myself heard:  I did but heap fuel on fire, though the old man’s splenetic impetus had partly abated.

’You Richmond! do you hear him? he swears he’s your son, and asks to be tied to the stake beside you.  Disown him, and I’ll pay you money and thank you.  I’ll thank my God for anything short of your foul blood in the family.  You married the boy’s mother to craze and kill her, and guttle her property.  You waited for the boy to come of age to swallow what was settled on him.  You wait for me to lie in my coffin to pounce on the strongbox you think me the fool to toss to a young donkey ready to ruin all his belongings for you!  For nine-and-twenty years you’ve sucked the veins of my family, and struck through my house like a rotting-disease.  Nine-and-twenty years ago you gave a singing-lesson in my house:  the pest has been in it ever since!  You breed vermin in the brain to think of you!  Your wife, your son, your dupes, every soul that touches you, mildews from a blight!  You were born of ropery, and you go at it straight, like a webfoot to water.  What’s your boast?—­your mother’s disgrace!  You shame your mother.  Your whole life’s a ballad o’ bastardy.  You cry up the woman’s infamy to hook at a father.  You swell and strut on her pickings.  You’re a cock forced from the smoke of the dunghill!  You shame your mother, damned adventurer!  You train your boy for a swindler after your own pattern; you twirl him in your curst harlequinade to a damnation as sure as your own.  The day you crossed my threshold the devils danced on their flooring.  I’ve never seen the sun shine fair on me after it.  With your guitar under the windows, of moonlight nights! your Spanish fopperies and trickeries! your French phrases and toeings!  I was touched by a leper.  You set your traps for both my girls:  you caught the brown one first, did you, and flung