“Am I trying to awe you with the fierce words of a boaster and a bully?  Test me, by looking back a little, and discovering what I have abstained from for the sake of my purpose, since I have been here.  A word or two from my lips, in answer to the questions with which I have been baited, day after day, by those about me, would have called you before a magistrate to answer for an assault—­a shocking and a savage assault, even in this country, where hand to hand brutality is a marketable commodity between the Prisoner and the Law.  Your father’s name might have been publicly coupled with your dishonour, if I had but spoken; and I was silent.  I kept the secret—­kept it, because to avenge myself on you by a paltry scandal, which you and your family (opposing to it wealth, position, previous character, and general sympathy) would live down in a few days, was not my revenge:  because to be righted before magistrates and judges by a beggarman’s exhibition of physical injury, and a coward’s confession of physical defeat, was not my way of righting myself.  I have a lifelong retaliation in view, which laws and lawgivers are powerless either to aid or to oppose—­the retaliation which set a mark upon Cain (as I will set a mark on you); and then made his life his punishment (as I will make your life yours).

“How?  Remember what my career has been; and know that I will make your career like it.  As my father’s death by the hangman affected my existence, so the events of that night when you followed me shall affect yours. Your father shall see you living the life to which his evidence against my father condemned me—­shall see the foul stain of your disaster clinging to you wherever you go.  The infamy with which I am determined to pursue you, shall be your own infamy that you cannot get quit of—­for you shall never get quit of me, never get quit of the wife who has dishonoured you.  You may leave your home, and leave England; you may make new friends, and seek new employments; years and years may pass away—­and still, you shall not escape us:  still, you shall never know when we are near, or when we are distant; when we are ready to appear before you, or when we are sure to keep out of your sight.  My deformed face and her fatal beauty shall hunt you through the world.  The terrible secret of your dishonour, and of the atrocity by which you avenged it, shall ooze out through strange channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous intangible processes; ever changing in the manner of its exposure, never remediable by your own resistance, and always directed to the same end—­your isolation as a marked man, in every fresh sphere, among every new community to which you retreat.