I clenched my teeth together to keep myself from uttering a word. The doctor’s safe had been opened and his case-book destroyed uselessly.
CHAPTER XII
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
It was one of those moments in which life seems to cast away the mask of convention and spring upon us like a giant fanged and armed for our destruction; one of those moments in which the bravest heart quails and the strongest hope withers to despair.
My crime had been committed for nothing. Whether the death of that despicable villain lay at my door or not, I did not know, and it hardly seemed to matter any longer. Somewhere there was still in existence the weapon with which he had terrorized his unhappy victim, and I could not tell in what hands, nor when it might be employed to ruin her and me together.
Weathered’s cunning scheme stood revealed in its full atrocity. His patients had been divided into two classes. Those who had nothing serious on their consciences, and those whom it was not worth his while to blackmail received the ordinary treatment given to nervous patients by respectable physicians. Those who came to him to be cured of vicious propensities, on the other hand, were encouraged to indulge them under his eye, under the pretence that they would thus be gradually overcome; and those who sought relief from evil memories were bidden to rid their mind of its secret burden in correspondence which could be preserved for future use.
So far as I could judge he had fallen into those evil courses by degrees. Sarah Neobard’s defence of her step-father might not be far from the truth. I thought it likely that such a man as Weathered, with no strong principle to keep him straight, might naturally have deteriorated under the influence of his patients. All the precautions with which the confessional is surrounded in Catholic churches were wanting in this case. The doctor was probably a man without any religious feeling, and without any real scruples on the subject of morality. Instead of curing his patients he had let himself become infected with their disease. The confessions he had listened to had inflamed his own imagination, and made evil familiar to his thoughts. In the end he had come to take a fiendish pleasure in gloating over tales of guilty indulgence and innocence betrayed. He had delighted in the analysis of women’s hearts; he had learned to play upon their sensitive natures like instruments, and draw the notes of passion and pain. The devils in hell must soothe their own torments with such music.
It was torture enough for me to think of my own tragedy, as well as Violet’s, profaned by the coarse curiosity of a blackmailer. If I had sinned—and I never could admit that she had sinned at all—if I had sinned, at least I had not done so wilfully and basely, but swept away on the overpowering flood of that tremendous impulse by which all the planets move in heaven, and all the earth is wrapped in her green garment, and all the birds burst into song, and all the race of man is renewed for ever.
Our sad romance began in the purest innocence. I did not know of her existence on that morning when I set out with a knapsack on my back to explore the old borderland of England and Wales. I had formed no fixed plans; I meant to walk where fancy took me, and stop when I felt inclined; and the last thing I expected was that I should pass all my holiday on one spot. It was not till I reached the village that I heard of the ruins that lay hidden at the back of the Earl of Ledbury’s stately seat, and was persuaded to turn aside and see them.
I was told that a footpath leading from the churchyard up the hill would bring me past them, and, as far as I could make out, his lordship had laid down no absolute rule against strangers going over them. I was young and irresponsible enough to take the risk of being turned out as a trespasser. I climbed over a gate padlocked and fortified with barbed wire, crossed a meadow, and passed through a gap in the outer wall. I had spent half an hour in scrambling over heaps of fallen masonry, and was just beginning to descend a broken stairway up which I had climbed for the sake of the view, when I saw standing on the grass near its foot the loveliest girl I had ever seen.
She was watching me with the shy wonder of a child, and I came down slowly, scarcely daring to breathe, lest she should turn and run away. But no such thought was in her head. I seemed to her a boy, very little older than herself, and it turned out that she had come to take me under her protection.