第56章

"No," replied her conductor, "unless a morbid and excessive sensibility on such a subject can be termed insanity."Yet Iwill not deny that this governing feeling and apprehension carried the person who entertained it, to lengths which indicated a deranged imagination.He appeared to think that it was necessary for him, by exuberant, and not always well-chosen instances of liberality, and even profusion, to unite himself to the human race, from which he conceived himself naturally dissevered.The benefits which he bestowed, from a disposition naturally philanthropical in an uncommon degree, were exaggerated by the influence of the goading reflection, that more was necessary from him than from others,--lavishing his treasures as if to bribe mankind to receive him into their class.It is scarcely necessary to say, that the bounty which flowed from a source so capricious was often abused, and his confidence frequently betrayed.These disappointments, which occur to all, more or less, and most to such as confer benefits without just discrimination, his diseased fancy set down to the hatred and contempt excited by his personal deformity.-- But I fatigue you, Miss Vere?""No, by no means; I--I could not prevent my attention from wandering an instant; pray proceed.""He became at length," continued Ratcliffe, "the most ingenious self-tormentor of whom I have ever heard; the scoff of the rabble, and the sneer of the yet more brutal vulgar of his own rank, was to him agony and breaking on the wheel.He regarded the laugh of the common people whom he passed on the street, and the suppressed titter, or yet more offensive terror, of the young girls to whom he was introduced in company, as proofs of the true sense which the world entertained of him, as a prodigy unfit to be received among them on the usual terms of society, and as vindicating the wisdom of his purpose in withdrawing himself from among them.On the faith and sincerity of two persons alone, he seemed to rely implicitly--on that of his betrothed bride, and of a friend eminently gifted in personal accomplishments, who seemed, and indeed probably was, sincerely attached to him.He ought to have been so at least, for he was literally loaded with benefits by him whom you are now about to see.The parents of the subject of my story died within a short space of each other.