"Ah, now I know I am dying. You cannot despise a man who is facing eternity."
"I should not have despised you then, if—you had cared.—You see, Joseph, after all, we're brothers. Your God is also mine. We both wanted to serve Him in the same fashion; for all the arts are kin. And I knew how great your talent was: how fine would be the expression of the best in you."
"Ah! That is it!" Joseph sat forward, eagerly, and his faint voice wavered. "'The expression of the best,'—that, Ivan Mikhailovitch, is what you tried to give me the chance for: what you always have done yourself. You were moving steadily upward. I was always plunging farther down.—And it was my wilful choice. I think I know the truth now. My service of God was never freely given. It was not the best I could do: the finest work I was capable of, just for the sake of the work, and the high thoughts it brought, to me and to others. There were more sordid motives. I wanted—first, fame: adulation from people; secondly, no, perhaps most of all, money. For of that I had never had enough for common necessities in all my life. So, even if there had been no—woman" (that word almost inaudibly,) "I should not have done what you believed I could do.
"Art!—the great sun-goddess, that shines afar! She it is that gives us the gift: the chance to work. But she knows all our hearts; and she judges our deeds honestly. That which she accepts of us, she lays at the feet of the Most High.—Is it well?—Thou art Abel. Thine offering of the lamb is more pleasing than the first-fruits of the harvest. On me,—Cain, God frowns, and the devil grins.—He is grinning through the wine. I hear his laugh amid the clink of the coin.—He is in red; and I flaunt my mistress in his colors. Then we dance: first for sheer delight, with the music. Then the whips come down on our shoulders, and we go on.—Faster!—Higher!—Leap and prance, and watch the grin expand.—Ah-h-h-h!—Are the shadows there deep enough, rich enough, do you think? And are the lips too much a 'thread of scarlet'?—Oh the opalline lights in that cloud!—How to blend such colors on a palette?—Nature? She is mocking, too.
"But oh, Irina, I see it now, at last! The dawn—the dawn is here. The night is gone. I have dreamed, I suppose: ugly dreams.—But they, too, are done with.—Look, my beloved, it is morning! The first sunbeam shines there—and is reflected in your dear eyes!" And, lifting his thin body, arms wide-stretched, eyes a-glitter, Joseph made his last reach up, after the great sun-shaft he had sought so long:—reached, and so, with a faint, far cry of satisfaction, had it, and was gone.
Ivan, feeling his way to the window, opened the curtains and looked out through blurred eyes upon the holy city. The dying man had, indeed, beheld the day. Yet no sunlight glittered upon the Kremlin domes; only the velvet blackness of the dark hour had melted, and given place to a twilight of sullen gray. Then, through the mind of Ivan, exhausted by the emotions of a sleepless day and night, there shot a pang—not of sorrow, but of deep, irresistible envy, for the man who had passed away, out of the Russian autumn, into the glory of the everlasting sun-land.