The Devil

And it seemed to him that, look where one pleased, one could see the real work of the finger of God. It had been giving him, William Dale, faint imperceptible pushes for fifteen years, and see now at the end where it had pushed him. First it had pushed him upward, higher and higher, to a position of conspicuous pride, to the topmost summit of a fair mountain, where he could look round and say, "I have all that I pined for. This is the world's castle, and I am the king of the castle." Then it had begun to push him down the other side of this mountain, the dark side, the side that was always in shadow, downward and still downward to the miasmic unhealthy plain where all was rankness, downward to the level of corruption and death. Yes, it had brought him, the bold, proud law-maker, down and down till he stood no higher than the victim of his law.

He remembered the common phrase--so often employed by himself--comparing mice with men. Am I a man or a mouse? And it seemed that no cat had ever played with a mouse as the Infinite Ruling Power of the universe had been playing with the man William Dale. He had been allowed to break loose, to frisk and jump, to fancy he was free to run right round the earth if he wished to do so; and all the while he had truly been a prisoner, the helpless prey of his captor, held close to the place of ultimate doom.

If he had been promptly convicted and hanged, it would have been no punishment at all compared with what was happening now. The long delay was the essential part of the punishment, and of the lesson. The fact that no one suspected his crime had given him the period of agonized suspense, with all those dream-torments, the fear of death which was worse than death itself.

He thought of all the things that had appeared to be blind chances but were really stern decrees. The true function of the money that came from the dead man's hand was to keep him always on the rack of memory. And with the aid of the money he had been made to move a little nearer to the site of his crime. He had been made to buy Bates' business so that he might dwell right up against Hadleigh Wood, see it every day from his windows, hear it whispering to him every night when he was not asleep and dreaming of it. But for that apparently lucky chance of Mr. Bates' retirement, he would have gone to some splendid new country, and severing ties of locality, would have shattered associations of ideas, and been able to forget. He had made up his mind to go to one of the Australian colonies and make a fresh start there. But that didn't match with God's intentions by any manner of means.