Then raising his voice harshly, he exclaimed:
“Curse you, curse you!”
I was thunderstruck. I declare it here, for it is true. I had defamed—and deliberately—the doctor's dearest idols. I had driven my lance into his convictions. I had blasphemed what he worshipped, and had denied all he affirmed. But that I had made so terrific an impression upon his mind, his soul—this astounded me. Yet what else could his passionate denunciation mean? Had I, a boy, unused to controversy, unskilled in dialectics, overthrown with my hasty words the faith of this strong and fervent man? The thought thrilled one side of my dual nature with triumph, pierced the other with grim horror. My emotions were divided and complex. As I sat silent, my face dogged yet ashamed, the doctor got up from his chair trembling like one with the palsy.
“Away from me—away,” he cried in a hoarse voice, and pointing at the door. “I'll have no more talk with the Devil, no more—no more!”
I had not a word. I got up and went, bending a steady, fascinated look upon this old mentor of mine, who now proclaimed himself my victim. Arrived in the garden I found a thin moon riding above the sycamores, and soft airs of Spring playing round the doctor's habitation. Strangely, I had no mind to begone from it immediately. I crossed the garden bit and paced up and down the country lane that skirted it, keeping an eye upon the lighted window of the study. So I went back and forth for full an hour, I suppose. Then I heard a sound in the Spring night. The doctor's hall door banged, and, peering through the privet hedge that protected his meagre domain, I perceived him come out into the air bareheaded. He took his way to the small path that ran by the hedge parallel to the lane, coming close to the place by which I crouched, spying upon his privacy. And there he paced, bemoaning aloud the ill fate that had come upon him. I heard all the awful complaining of this soul in distress, besieged by doubts, deserted by the faith and hope of a lifetime. It was villainous to be his audience. Yet, I could not go. Sometimes the poor man prayed with a desolate voice, calling upon God for a sign, imploring against temptation. Sometimes—and this was terrible—he blasphemed, he imprecated. And then again he prayed—to the Devil, as do the Satanists. I heard him weeping in his garden in the night, alone under the sycamores. It was a new agony of the garden and it wrung my heart. Yet I watched it till the spectral moon waned, and the trees were black as sins against the faded sky.
About this time, as I have said, his parishioners began to mark the outward change of Dr Wedderburn that signified the inward change in him. The talking ploughmen had their fellows. All who sat under the doctor were conscious of a difference, at first vague, in his eloquent discourses, of a diminuendo in the full fervour of his delivery and manner. Gossip flowed about him, and presently there were whisperings of change in his bodily habits. He had been seen by night wandering about his garden in very unholy condition, he who had so often rebuked excess. Children, passing his gate in the dark of evening, had endured with terror his tipsy shoutings. A maidservant left him, and spread doleful reports of his conduct through the village. By degrees, rumours of our minister's shortcomings stole, like snakes, into the local papers, carefully shrouded by the wrappings that protect scandal-mongers against libel actions. The congregation beneath the doctor's pulpit dwindled. Women looked at him askance. Men were surly to him, or—and that was less kind—jocular. I, alone, followed with fascination the paling to dusk of a bright and useful career. I, alone, partially understood the hell this poor creature carried within him. For I often heard his dreary night-thoughts, and assisted, unperceived of him, at the vigils that he kept. The lamp within his study burned till dawn while he wrestled, but in vain, with the disease of his soul, the malady of his tortured heart.
One night in Summer time, towards midnight, I bent my steps furtively to the Manse. It was very dark and the weather was dumb and agitating. No leaf danced, no grass quivered. Breathless, dead, seemed the woods and fields, the ocean of moorland, the assemblage of the mountains. I heard no step upon the lonely road but my own, and life seemed to have left the world until I came upon the Manse. Then I saw the light in the doctor's window, and, drawing near, observed that the blind was up and the lattice thrust open among the climbing dog-roses. Craftily I stole up the narrow garden path, and, keeping to the side of the window, looked into the room.
Doctor Wedderburn lounged within at the table facing me. A pen was in his shaking hand. A shuffle of manuscript paper was before him, and a Bible, in which he thrust his fingers as if to keep texts already looked out. Beyond the Bible was a bottle, three-quarters full of whiskey, and a glass. His muttering lips and dull yet shining eyes betokened his condition. I saw before me a drunkard writing a sermon. The vision was sufficiently bizarre. A tragedy of infinite pathos mingled with a comedy of hideous yet undeniable humour in the live picture. I neither wept nor did I laugh. I only watched, shrouded by the inarticulate night. The doctor took a pull at the bottle, then swept the leaves of the Bible....
“Let me die the death of the righteous,” he murmured thickly. “That's it—that's—that's—” He wrote on the paper before him with a wandering pen, then pushed the sheet from him. It fell on the floor by the window.