“No more to-night!” she repeated aloud—“It is your will that I return here no more to-night?”
He gave a slow but decided gesture of assent,—there was no mistaking it.
Zaroba paused an instant, and then with a swift noiseless step went to the couch of Lilith and bent yearningly above that exquisite sleeping form.
“Star of my heart!” she muttered—“Child whose outward fairness I have ever loved, unheedful of the soul within,—may there still be strength enough left in the old gods to bid thee wake!”
El-Râmi caught her words, and a faint smile, proud yet bitter, curved his delicate lips.
“The old gods or the new—does it matter which?” he mused vaguely.—“And what is their strength compared with the Will of Man by which the very elements are conquered and made the slaves of his service? ‘My Will is God’s Will’ should be every strong man’s motto. But I—am I strong—or the weakest of the weak? ... and ... shall the Christ claim all?”
The soft fall of the velvet portière startled him as it dropped behind the retreating figure of Zaroba—she had left the room, and he was alone,—alone with Lilith.
XXXIII.
He remained quite still, standing near the tall vase that held the clustered roses,—in his hand he grasped unconsciously the stalk of the one he had pulled to pieces. He was aware of his own strange passiveness,—it was a sort of inexplicable inertia which like temporary paralysis seemed to incapacitate him from any action. It would have appeared well and natural to him that he should stay there so, dreamily, with the scented rose-stalk in his hand, for any length of time. A noise in the outer street roused him a little,—the whistling, hooting, and laughing of drunken men reeling homewards,—and, lifting his eyes from their studious observation of the floor, he sighed deeply.
“That is the way the great majority of men amuse themselves,”—he mused. “Drink, stupidity, brutality, sensuality—all blatant proofs of miserable unresisted weakness,—can it be possible that God can care for such? Could even the pity of Christ pardon such wilful workers of their own ruin? The pity of Christ, said I?—nay, at times even He was pitiless. Did He not curse a fig-tree because it was barren?—though truly we are not told the cause of its barrenness. Of course the lesson is that Life—the fig-tree—has no right to be barren of results,—but why curse it, if it is? What is the use of a curse at any time? And what, may equally be asked, is the use of a blessing? Neither are heard; the curse is seldom, if ever, wreaked,—and the blessing, so the sorrowful say, is never granted.”