Stunned, as he had been at first by the intelligence
conveyed to him through Tom Pinch and John Westlock, of the supposed
manner of his brother's death; overwhelmed as he was by the subsequent
narratives of Chuffey and Nadgett, and the forging of that chain of
circumstances ending in the death of Jonas, of which catastrophe he was
immediately informed; scattered as his purposes and hopes were for the
moment, by the crowding in of all these incidents between him and his
end; still their very intensity and the tumult of their assemblage
nerved him to the rapid and unyielding execution of his scheme. In every
single circumstance, whether it were cruel, cowardly, or false, he
saw the flowering of the same pregnant seed. Self; grasping, eager,
narrow-ranging, overreaching self; with its long train of suspicions,
lusts, deceits, and all their growing consequences; was the root of the
vile tree. Mr Pecksniff had so presented his character before the old
man's eyes, that he--the good, the tolerant, enduring Pecksniff--had
become the incarnation of all selfishness and treachery; and the more
odious the shapes in which those vices ranged themselves before him now,
the sterner consolation he had in his design of setting Mr Pecksniff
right and Mr Pecksniff's victims too.
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