Chapter 23 - Page 2

then, so difficult?" said Redclyffe.

"My master! Who was speaking of him?" said the old man, as if
surprised. "Ah, I was thinking of Dr. Grimshawe. He was my master, you
know."

And Redclyffe was again inconceivably struck with the strength of the
impression that was made on the poor old man's mind by the character of
the old Doctor; so that, after thirty years of other service, he still
felt him to be the master, and could not in the least release himself
from those earlier bonds. He remembered a story that the Doctor used to
tell of his once recovering a hanged person, and more and more came to
the conclusion that this was the man, and that, as the Doctor had said,
this hold of a strong mind over a weak one, strengthened by the idea
that he had made him, had subjected the man to him in a kind of slavery
that embraced the soul.

And then, again, the lord of the estate interested him greatly, and not
unpleasantly. He compared what he seemed to be now with what, according
to all reports, he had been in the past, and could make nothing of it,
nor reconcile the two characters in the least. It seemed as if the
estate were possessed by a devil,--a foul and melancholy fiend,--who
resented the attempted possession of others by subjecting them to
himself. One had turned from quiet and sober habits to reckless
dissipation; another had turned from the usual gayety of life to
recluse habits, and both, apparently, by the same influence; at least,
so it appeared to Redclyffe, as he insulated their story from all other
circumstances, and looked at them by one light. He even thought that he
felt a similar influence coming over himself, even in this little time
that he had spent here; gradually, should this be his permanent
residence,--and not so very gradually either,--there would come its own
individual mode of change over him. That quick suggestive mind would
gather the moss and lichens of decay. Palsy of its powers would
probably be the form it would assume. He looked back through the
vanished years to the time which he had spent with the old Doctor, and
he felt unaccountably as if the mysterious old man were yet ruling him,
as he did in his boyhood; as if his inscrutable, inevitable eye were
upon him in all his movements; nay, as if he had guided every step that
he took in coming hither, and were stalking mistily before him, leading
him about. He sometimes would gladly have given up all these wild and
enticing prospects, these dreams that had occupied him so long, if he
could only have gone away and looked back upon the house, its inmates,
and his own recollections no more; but there came a fate, and took the
shape of the old Doctor's apparition, holding him back.

And then,