He passed through the door, and the dusky room was still again as though no one had been there....
There is an old German tale, by De la Motte Fouqué, I fancy, of a young traveller who asks his way to a certain castle, his destination. He is given his directions, and his guide tells him that the journey will be easy enough until he reaches a small wood through which he must pass. This wood will be dark and tangled and bewildering, but more sinister than those obstacles will be the inhabitants of it who, evil, malign, foul and bestial, devote their lives to the destruction of all travellers who endeavour to reach the castle on the hill beyond. And the tale tells how the young traveller, proud of his youth and strength, confident in the security of his armour, nevertheless, when he crosses the dark border of the wood, feels as though his whole world has changed, as though everything in which he formerly trusted is of no value, as though the very weapons that were his chief defence now made him most defenceless. He has in the heart of that wood many perilous adventures, but worst of them all, when he is almost at the end of his strength, is the sudden conviction that he has himself changed, and is himself become one of the foul, gibbering, half-visioned monsters by whom he is surrounded.
As Brandon left the Cathedral there was something of that strange sense with him, a sense that had come to him first, perhaps, in its dimmest and most distant form, on the day of the circus and the elephant, and that now, in all its horrible vigour and confidence, was there close at his elbow. He had always held himself immaculate; he had come down to his fellow-men, loving them, indeed, but feeling that they were of some other clay than his own, and that through no especial virtue of his, but simply because God has so wished it. And now he had stood, and a drunken wastrel had cursed him and told him that he was detested by all men and that they waited for his downfall.
It was those last words of Davray's that rang in his ears: "You're one of us now. You're one of us." Drunkard and wastrel though the man was, those words could not be forgotten, would never be forgotten again.
With his head up, his shoulders back, he returned to his house.
The maid met him in the hall. "There's a man waiting for you in the study, sir."
"Who is it?"
"Mr. Samuel Hogg, sir."
Brandon looked at the girl fixedly, but not unkindly.
"Why did you let him in, Gladys?"