“You cannot put me off, my deliverer. Henceforward your ways are my ways. I go with you to the bright fields of your native kingdom, or I return to the horrors of my own. I beseech you to take me by the hand and lead me along the golden paths to those mountain fastnesses in which you were born, in which the sun shines forever. You know how I have been dreaming that some saint and hero would lead me to them; you must make my dreams come true again, my deliverer, as you did but yesterday.”
“Oh, why did you come to me?” cried Northcote weakly, as he strove in vain to free himself of the yoke that was already on his neck.
He seemed hardly to understand that he had to deal with a desperate gambler who was staking all upon a final cast.
“Do not let me perish,” cried the woman. “Do not say this is an illusion upon which I have built my miraculous faith. Do not tell me that the gods walk the earth no more!”
The tragic distension of her countenance filled the young man with horror, yet also with a sense of its weird poetry.
“You must not hurl me back into the abyss out of which I have crawled with bare life,” she cried, seizing his hands with an astounding passion. “You are the god who has breathed upon the poor outcast who knows no heaven apart from your nobility; you cannot, you must not, reject her.”
Again the wretched creature sank down upon her knees before him.
XXXV
DELILAH
As Northcote gazed upon her, despair beat him down like a flail. It was not for him, man of genius as he was, to heal this outcast with his touch. Only a perfect chastity could do that; and this was the jewel with which he had parted two days before to save her from the gallows. If he touched her now, it would be as the inhabitant of her own level. She cried for the living god, yet now he was become a counterfeit of arid clay. She had asked for bread, and he had only a stone to yield.
“You must go,” he said, and the words seemed to thicken as they fell from his throat. “You must fly from me. I have nothing to offer you.”