“But how can it possibly be any good that those two should have behaved like this to me?” he cried, speaking directly for the first time. “What monstrous image do you make of the controller of the world and all our destinies, if it is by his will that this is done to me which turns all that may have been good in me into hatred and bitterness? Is that the lesson that I am meant to learn—that those whom one loves best are one’s bitterest foes, and will hurt one most?”
Tom stopped in his walk and sat down on the edge of the table by Philip.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “Oliver Cromwell will help us again. Is it not just possible that you too are mistaken when you assume that your trouble was sent you in order that your love might be turned into hate? That it should have happened so may (just possibly again) be in some measure your fault. Could you not have done otherwise, and done better? I don’t want to preach, you know.”
Philip sat silent, but his face hardened again.
“If I could have done better, it would not have been I,” he said. “It would have been altogether another man.”
Tom got down off the table.
“Ah, you repudiate moral responsibility for your own acts,” he said.
“Not exactly that. I say that there may be circumstances under which one’s will is crumpled up like a piece of waste paper, and one’s powers of resistance are paralysed. Don’t you believe that?”
Merivale shook his head.
“No, I don’t believe that the power of choice is ever taken away from one while one remains sane,” he said. “The moment one cannot choose, the doors of Bedlam are opened.”