But it was the constant shadow of my
presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most
vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this
perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not
err, there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a
human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment."
The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted
his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some
frightful shape, which he could not recognise, usurping the
place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those
moments--which sometimes occur only at the interval of
years--when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his
mind's eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as
he did now.
"Hast thou not tortured him enough?" said Hester, noticing the
old man's look. "Has he not paid thee all?"
"No, no! He has but increased the debt!" answered the
physician, and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer
characteristics, and subsided into gloom. "Dost thou remember
me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then I was in the
autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn.
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