"Peace! and what peace have I had? what respite from gnawing shame, the foulness and leprosy of humiliation and reproach, since--since--? But this is not your fault, you say: no, no,--it is another's; and you are only the mark of my stigma; my disgrace, not its perpetrator. Ha! a nice distinction, truly. My blessing you say! Come, kneel; kneel, boy, and have it!" Clarence approached, and stood bending and bareheaded before his father, but he knelt not. "Why do you not kneel?" cried the old man, vehemently. "It is the attitude of the injurer, not of the injured!" said Clarence, firmly. "Injured! insolent reprobate, is it not I who am injured? Do you not read it in my brow,--here, here?" and the old man struck his clenched hand violently against his temples. "Was I not injured?" he continued, sinking his voice into a key unnaturally low; "did I not trust implicitly? did I not give up my heart without suspicion? was I not duped deliciously? was I not kind enough, blind enough, fool enough and was I not betrayed,--damnably, filthily betrayed? But that was no injury. Was not my old age turned into a sapless tree, a poisoned spring? Were not my days made a curse to me, and my nights a torture? Was I not, am I not, a mock and a by-word, and a miserable, impotent, unavenged old man? Injured! But this is no injury! Boy, boy, what are your wrongs to mine?" "Father!" cried Clarence, deprecatingly, "I am not the cause of your wrongs: is it just that the innocent should suffer for the guilty?" "Speak not in that voice!" cried the old man, "that voice!--fie, fie on it. Hence! away! away, boy! why tarry you? My son! and have that voice? Pooh, you are not my son. Ha! ha!--my son?" "What am I, then?" said Clarence, soothingly: for he was shocked and grieved, rather than irritated by a wrath which partook so strongly of insanity. "I will tell you," cried the father, "I will tell you what you are: you are my curse!" "Farewell!" said Clarence, much agitated, and retiring to the window by which he had entered; "may your heart never smite you for your cruelty! Farewell! may the blessing you have withheld from me be with you!" "Stop! stay!" cried the father; for his fury was checked for one moment, and his nature, fierce as it was, relented: but Clarence was already gone, and the miserable old man was left alone to darkness, and solitude, and the passions which can make a hell of the human heart! CHAPTER LIV. Sed quae praeclara et prospera tanti, Ut rebus laetis par sit mensura malornm?--JUVENAL. ["But what excellence or prosperity so great that there should be an equal measure of evils for our joys?"] We are now transported to a father and a son of a very different stamp. It was about the hour of one p.m., when the door of Mr. Vavasour Mordaunt's study was thrown open, and the servant announced Mr. Brown.