"Writing? Only a letter to town," he said, looking at me in wonder.
"Not a sermon?" I blurted forth.
"A sermon? Good heavens, no. Why should I write a sermon?"
"Oh," I replied, forcing an uneasy laugh. "You--you live in a Manse.
Doctor Wedderburn used to write his sermons in that room."
That evening I remember that I said to Kate:
"Don't you think Fraser is getting to look very old at times?"
"I haven't observed it," she replied coldly.
Another curious thing. Very soon after he took up his abode in the
Manse, Fraser, who had been a godly youth, became markedly averse to
religion. He informed us, with some excitement, that he had changed his
views, and seemed much inclined to carry on an atheistical propaganda
among the devout people of the neighbourhood. He declared that much evil
had been wrought by faith in Carlounie, and appeared to deem it as his
special duty to preach some sort of a crusade against the accepted
Christianity of the parish. I began to combat his views, and once sought
the reason of his ardour and self-election to the post of teacher. His
answer struck me exceedingly. He said:--
"Why should I be the one to clear away these senseless beliefs in
phantasms, you say? Why, because I suppose they were woven by my
predecessor in the Manse. Didn't the minister live and die there? Do you
know, Ralston, sometimes, as I sit in that study at night, I have a
feeling that instead of turning to what is called repentance when he
died, the minister turned the other way, recanted in his last hour the
faith he had professed all through his life, and expired before he could
give words to his new mind and heart. And then I feel as if his
influence was left behind him in that room, and fell upon me and imposed
on me this mission."
And as he spoke, he suddenly plucked at his face with an old, habitual
action of Doctor Wedderburn's when excited. I scarcely restrained a cry,
and with difficulty forced myself to go out slowly from his presence.
Nevertheless, I felt strongly impelled to fight against the atheism of
this boy, I who had formerly sown the seeds of destruction in the soul
of Doctor Wedderburn. But it was as if my own act of the past rose and
conquered me in the present. I declare solemnly it was so. Some
emanation from the poor dead creature's soul clung round that cursed
place of his doom, and, seizing upon the soul of Fraser, spread tyranny
from its throne. And whom did it take first as its victim, think you?
Kate, my wife.
Let our individual beliefs be what they may, one thing we must all--when
we think--acknowledge, that the pulse which beats eternally in the heart
of life is reparation.
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 Caesar 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."