He started. He could have been sure that somebody had spoken. Yet there was nobody by his side. He was alone in the road. “It must have been my own voice,” he thought. “I must have been thinking aloud.” And then he resumed his walk and his meditation.
“And if it is a lie, is it therefore a crime?” he asked himself. “Sure it is—how very sure!—it was a wise man that said so—a great fault once committed is the first link in a chain. The other links seem to be crimes also, but they are not—they are consequences. Our fault was long ago, and even then it was partly the fault of Fate. If the past could be recalled we could not act differently unless our fates were different. And what has followed has been only the consequence. It was the consequence when Kate was married to Pete; it was the consequence when she left him—and this is the consequence.”
“It is a lie,” said the same voice by his side.
He stopped. The darkness was gross around him—he could see nothing.
“Who's there?” he demanded.
There was no answer. He stretched his hand out nervously. There was no one at his side. “It must have been the wind in the trees,” he thought; but there could be no wind in the stagnant dampness of that air. “It was like my own voice,” he thought. Then he remembered how his man in Douglas had told him that he had contracted a habit of talking to himself of late. “It was my own voice,” he thought, and he went on again.
“A lie is a bad foundation to build on—that's certain. The thing that should be cannot rest on the thing that is not. It will topple down; it will come to ruin; it will wreck everything. Still——”
“It is a lie,” said the voice again. There could be no mistaking it this time. It was a low, deep whisper. It seemed to be spoken in the very cavity of his ear. It was not his own voice, and yet it struck upon his sense with the sound as of his own. It must be his own voice speaking to himself!
When this idea took hold of him, he was seized with a deadly shuddering. His heart knocked against his ribs, and an icy coldness came over him. “Only the same tormenting dream,” he thought. “Before it was a vision; now it is a voice. It is generated by solitude and separation. I must resist it I must be strong. It will drive me into an oppression as of madness. Men do not 'see their souls' until they are bordering on madness from religious mania or crime.”
“A lie! a lie!” said the voice.