Kate, as I have said, was originally finely pure and finely dowered with the blessings of faith in a divine Providence, trust in the eventual redemption of the world, hope that sin, sorrow, and sighing would, indeed, flee away, and all mankind find eternal and unutterable peace. In my worst moments I had never tried to destroy this beauty of her soul; and, in her fall, now repaired, she had never abandoned her religion. It was, I know, a haunting memory of the last moments of the doctor that held me back from ever attacking the faith of another. For myself, I did not think much of my future beyond death. Life filled my horizon then.
But now, after a short absence in England, during which I left Kate at Carlounie, I returned to find her infected with Fraser's pestilent notions. She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was better to act up to her real convictions than to set what is called a good example to her dependants. She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually how the matter struck me when I began carefully to consider it. Men often see only what irreligion really is and means when they find it existing in a woman. I was appalled at this deadly fire flaring up in the heart of Kate, and I set myself, at first feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and stamp it out.
But I fought against my own former self. I fought against the influence of the spectre that surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose originally from the very bosom of the burn at my summons. Am I mad to think so? No, no. Oh, the eternal horror that may spring from one wild and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic litany! This was surely the strangest, subtlest reparation that ever beat in the inexorable heart of Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence, still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor Wedderburn had formerly—before the fever—dominated my influence, so now it dominated my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now. He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me.
Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust—I was as Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey boy's words at the thought of the Cæsar of hell whose tribute was three human souls.
Kate and I were taking tea one evening with Fraser. We sat around the hearth, by which was placed the table with the tea-service and the hot cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss religious subjects and to rail against the professors of faith. Kate listened to him eagerly—a filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes. I was silent, watching. And presently it seemed to me that Fraser's gestures in talking grew like the dead gestures of the doctor. He threw his hands abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of Wedderburn's. He struck his knees sharply, and simultaneously, with both his palms to emphasise his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So vehement was the similarity that I began presently to feel that the doctor himself declaimed in the firelight, and I was seized with a desire to combat effectively his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in, then, upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of religion. He turned upon me, dealt with my pleas, scattered my contentions—growing, I fancied, very old and with the rumbling voice of age,—thrust at me with the lances of sarcasm, sore belaboured me into silence and mute fury. And all the time Kate sat by, and I seemed to see her soul, with fluttering outstretched wings, sinking down to hell, as a hawk drops out of sight into a dark cleft of the mountains. And then, in the last resort, Fraser struck his hand down on mine to clinch his defeat of me. And I, looking upon that poor Kate, cried out:—
“God forgive you, Fraser, for what you're doing—murderer! murderer!”
Scarcely had my cry died away than I knew I had borrowed the very words of Wedderburn to me. A cold, like ice, came upon me. This reversal of the past in the present was too ironic. I heard the doctor chuckling drearily in Hades. I suddenly sprang up like one pursued, and got away into the night, leaving Kate and Fraser together by the fire. But the spectre of the Manse surely pursued me. I heard its soft but heavy footsteps coming in my wake. I heard its old laughter in the dark behind me; and I sickened and faltered, and was in fear beyond all human fear of an enemy. The next day I told Fraser he must leave the Manse; I would build him a shooting-lodge on any part of my estate that he preferred.
“No,” he said, “no; I have grown to love the old place; I never feel alone there.”
I looked in his eyes, searching after his meaning.
“I would rather pull down the Manse,” I said.