Lay dead but I and thou,
Could we be so now!”
But waking up, late next forenoon, he came to his senses—realized what he had done, and reflected upon it. He hardly dared to credit his memory. He hardly dared to believe that what he remembered was the very truth, and not an hallucination born of his desire. And yet—No; dreams were not made of such circumstantial stuff.
“I love her, I love her,” he cried exultantly. “And she loves me!”
What had become of his Judaism? his race-pride? his superstition? Love, apparently, had swept them clean away. Not a vestige of them remained. At a touch, it seemed, love had converted Elias Bacharach from the most reactionary sort of orthodoxy, to a rationalism, the bare contemplation of which, a few days ago, would have appalled him.
“Surely,” he argued, “the Law of God as the hands of men have written it in books, is not to be weighed against the Law of God as the hand of Nature has written it in my own heart.”
He could not realize that he had ever thought otherwise. He could not realize that he had ever shrunk in terror from the idea of marrying Christine Redwood. He could not realize that he had ever professed a creed by which such a marriage would have been accounted sin. When he recollected how, less than a week ago, that same creed had kept him awake, praying, all night long—when he recollected how, for six days, he had told himself that he did not love her, and never would—he was nonplused; he could not admit it; it was like the recollection of a bad, fantastic dream.
The man had got the better of the Jew.