"You are harsh, sir," Laurence was permitted to remark.
Mr. Rivers turned his head on the pillow. His expression was distinctly malevolent.
"I begin to gauge the average man," he replied calmly. "I begin to recognise that he is a willing, probably wilful, self-deceiver—that he is incapable of mental advance, that he will never expunge the mythological element from his religious outlook, or learn to discriminate between emotion, the product of the senses, and accurate knowledge, the product of laborious enquiry and elevated thought."
"Perhaps he is wiser so," Laurence said. "Perhaps—I speak subject to correction, sir—but perhaps he gets into touch, that way, with things not altogether unimportant in the long history of the human race."
"Here, within measurable distance of dissolution, I grow somewhat weary of perhaps. Yet I deserve that you should answer me this, since I have shown myself very weak. I had not courage to embrace the remarkable opportunity of investigating the phenomena of which we have spoken when it was offered me in my prime. Now, in my decadence, surreptitiously and at second hand, I try to acquire the knowledge I then repudiated. I clutch at straws, and the straws sink with me. It is just. For the second time I am untrue to my principles. I accept the rebuke."
During the last half hour there had been a lull in the storm; but now the wind, shifting to a point north of west, hurled itself against the house-front with renewed fury, and screamed against the shuddering casements as though determined to gain entrance. The effect was that of personal violence intended, and, with difficulty, repulsed. To Laurence an inrush of the tempest would have been hardly unwelcome, for the heat of the atmosphere oppressed him to the point of distress. Nor was this all. Once more he became aware, so it seemed to him, of the tremendous, unseen presence with which he had struggled earlier this same evening in the yellow drawing-room below. He was aware that it stood on the far side of the great, ebony bed, waiting, and the young man's heart stood still. He saw Mr. Rivers gather the sable cape more closely about him, as he lay staring out into the austere yet luxurious room; and he recognised that for all his mortal weakness there was a certain magnificence in the dying man's aspect.
"And beyond the superb, and always unredeemed, promise of human life, a blank," Mr. Rivers said at last, his voice hollow, and, though so small, asserting itself strangely against the tumult of the storm. "Reason, learning, the senses, carry us thus far, only to project us against a gateless barrier at the last!"
But Laurence's whole nature arose in fierce revolt. Again he renewed that awful struggle, but this time in articulate speech.
"No, no, sir," he cried sharply, authoritatively, "the barrier is not gateless—that is, to any one of us who has ever, even dimly and passingly, known true-love, and that of which true-love is the everlasting exponent and blessed symbol, namely, Almighty God."
"And I have known neither," Mr. Rivers answered. "Love I have never felt. God I have never needed, either as an object of worship, or as incentive to prayer. Therefore, for me, on your own showing, the barrier needs must remain gateless."