“No, no; you are a devil! a devil!”
“If you were a philosopher, you would know that devils do not exist; even your own not too intellectual Church has rejected demonology. I am simply a physician; yours.”
“Mine! my physician.”
“I have opened your heart, to show you the canker existing within it. I have shown you, in an interesting experiment, that the disease of supersensuous desire, which with you is constitutional and inherited, culminates in moral scrofula, imbecility, hysterical mania, and death. It is, moreover, capable of spreading contagion—a sort of cancerous cell, which, inhaled by the lips or from the polluted atmosphere, must inevitably bring disease and death to others. The kiss of the leper, reverend sir! For the future, I should recommend you to carry a clapper with you, as they do in the East, to warn off the unwary.”
The comparison was a hideous one but indeed, at that moment, it did not seem inappropriate. Wild, ghastly, dishevelled, bloody, and degraded, Santley looked a creature to be avoided and even feared. He listened to the cold periods of his torturer, fixed his pale eyeballs, which seemed vacant of all light, upon his face; then suddenly, with a spasmodic scream, he leapt upon him and seized him by the throat.
The attack was so unexpected and so sudden, that Haldane was taken by surprise. He sprang to his feet, while the other clung around him like a wild cat. But the struggle was only brief.
In another minute he had gripped the vicar with his powerful arms, and pinned him against the wall of the chapel. There he writhed and wrestled, impotent, furious, foaming at the mouth.
“If you don’t control yourself better,” said the philosopher, between his set teeth, “you will soon want a strait-waistcoat. Be quiet, will you?”
And he shook him as a wiry terrier shakes a rat.
“Let me go!”