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.