As the weeks passed he perceived more and more clearly that there was
every kind of division and trouble in the Chapel. Many members left and
wrote to him telling him why they had done so. In his own household he
felt that Amy no longer gave him any confidence. She attended to him
more carefully than before, watched over him as though he were a baby,
but made no allusion to the services or the Chapel or any meeting. He
seemed, as the weeks passed, to be lonelier and lonelier, and he looked
upon this as punishment for his own earlier selfishness. He was pulled
then two ways. On the one hand it seemed to him that he would only hear
God's full message if he withdrew further and further from the world,
on the other he felt that he was letting his followers slip away from
him now at the very moment when he should be closest to them, advising,
helping, encouraging. This divided impulse was a torture, and as the
weeks went on he ate less and less and slept scarcely at all. He had
been for a long time past in delicate health owing to the weakness of
his heart, and now he began to look strange indeed, with his bright
gaunt face with its prominent cheek-bones, his eyes straining to see
beyond his actual vision, his flowing white beard. His doctor, a
cheerful, commonplace little man, a member of the Chapel, although not
a Saint, tried to do his best with him, but his visits only led to
scenes of irritation, and Warlock obeyed none of his commands. After a
visit on the afternoon of Christmas Eve he took Amy aside:
"Look here," he said, "unless you keep a stricter eye on your father
than you have been doing he'll be leaving you altogether."
She looked up at him with that odd dark impassivity that seemed to
remove her so deliberately from her fellow-beings.
"It's very well to talk like that," she said. "But how is any one to
have any control over him? He listens to nothing that we say, and if we
insist he's in a frenzy of irritation."
"Can your mother do nothing?" the doctor asked.
"Mother?" Amy smiled. "No, mother can do nothing."
"Well," said the doctor, "any sudden shock will kill him--I warn you."
When the fog came down upon the city Warlock was already in too thick a
fog of his own to perceive it.
He was sure now of nothing. It seemed as though all the spirits of the
other world now were taunting him, but he felt that this was the work
of the Devil, who wished to destroy his faith before the Great Day
arrived. He thought now that the Devil was closely pursuing him, and he
seemed to hear first his taunting whisper and then the voice of God
encouraging him: "Well done, my good and faithful servant."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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