Abel smiled, but did not answer. But after a few minutes he said, with a smile,
“I was not there.”
“You are there,” answered Lawrence Newt, with uplifted finger, and in a voice so sad and clear that Abel started.
The two men looked at each other silently for a few moments.
“Good-night, Abel.”
“Good-night, Uncle Lawrence.”
The door closed behind the older man. Abel sat in his chair, intently thinking. His uncle’s words rang in his memory. But as he recalled the tone, the raised finger, the mien, with which they had been spoken, the young man looked around him, and seemed half startled and frightened by the stillness, and awe-struck by the midnight hour. He moved his head rapidly and arose, like a person trying to rouse himself from sleep or nightmare. Passing the mirror, he involuntarily started at the haggard paleness of his face under the clustering black hair. He was trying to shake something off. He went uneasily about the room until he had lighted a match, and a candle, with which he went into the next room, still half-looking over his shoulder, as if fearing that something dogged him. He opened the closet where he kept his wine. He restlessly filled a large glass and poured it down his throat—not as if he were drinking, but as if he were taking an antidote. He rubbed his forehead with his hand, and half-smiled a sickly smile.
But still his eyes wandered nervously to the spot in which his uncle had stood; still he seemed to fear that he should see a ghostly figure standing there and pointing at him; should see himself, in some phantom counterpart, sitting in the chair. His eyes opened as if he were listening intently. For in the midnight he thought he heard, in that dim light he thought he saw, the Prophet and the King. He did not remember more the words his uncle had spoken. But he heard only, “Thou art the man! Thou art the man!”
And all night long, as he dreamed or restlessly awoke, he heard the same words, spoken as if with finger pointed—“Thou art the man! Thou art the man!”