In looking at her now she had lost half of her strangeness, half of her mystery. The foulness and ugliness that must recently have been stamped upon her was now effaced. He could not doubt that since she had been brought into prison her nature had been sanctified by a new birth. This squalid criminal whom life had pressed out of the ranks had actually gained eyes to see and ears to hear. Such a confession was not a charlatan’s trick; this enkindling experience of the divine beauty was a true renascence; a cleansing of a fœtid heart by the instinct of joy. Faith in its childlike naïveté had appeared by some miracle amid that expanse of corruption. It was as though a violet had raised its head in a sewer.
Now that the young man had become the witness of the phenomenon that he himself had wrought he was abashed, yet also he was sensible of recompense. Not in vain had he suffered those creative pangs by which so strange a thing was born. Fame and money were the only guerdons he had sought to compensate his gifts in their highest walk; yet that travail of the mind, that expenditure of spirit were to receive emolument more fitting. This wanton, with her crimes and her sores upon her, whom he had delivered from the last indignity her fellows could devise, would issue from Gehenna healed and purified into the mellow light of the afternoon.
Northcote had suffered extreme misgiving throughout that day, but now as he stood to gaze upon her who was undergoing a resurrection by the wand of his genius, he felt an exquisite joy in this special and peculiar gift that heaven had vouchsafed to him. It had wrought beyond his knowledge. This genie which had derided and tormented him had achieved an intrinsic glory in allowing itself to be called to the highest, the most disinterested of human offices. Here was the apologia for the art he had practised. The black magic in which he had dealt, the shame of which had stricken him, had actually wrought a divine miracle. In the light of its sanction he need repine no more.
“It is truly wonderful,” the woman muttered softly as if to herself, “to live forty years without knowledge and without curiosity, and then to awake in a night to the seas of color, the harmonies of music that make the enchantments of the life we have never perceived.”
“You are like a bird,” said the young man, “who has been born in a cage, yet who contrives at last to break through its bars. It flies into heaven, mounting rapturously into the void, and it sees the sun, the tops of the trees, the green fields, the fleecy clouds, and it tastes the bright air.”
“Yes; and hears for the first time the free and joyous songs of its kind.”
They seemed to pause to look upon one another with violently beating hearts: the man in his strength, in his insolent domination; the woman in her weakness, in her pitiful need.
“Strange, is it not,” said the young advocate, speaking aloud his thought involuntarily, “that I should not be acquainted with your history when I made my appeal?”
“Would it have been made had you known all?”
“Indeed, yes,” said Northcote, with a fervor in which he tried to rejoice; “your baseness is now less in my sight than it then was.”