He listened, smitten by a vague sense of compunction and regret.
“But you have conquered, Lilith”—he answered—“yours is the victory. And have I not surrendered, willingly, joyfully? O my beautiful Dreamer, what would you have me do?”
“Pray!” said Lilith, with a sudden passionate thrill in her voice—“Pray! Repent!”
El-Râmi drew himself backward from her couch, impatient and angered.
“Repent!” he cried aloud—“And why should I repent? What have I done that calls for repentance? For what sin am I to blame? For doubting a God who, deaf to centuries upon centuries of human prayer and worship, will not declare Himself? and for striving to perceive Him through the cruel darkness by which we are surrounded? What crime can be discovered there? The world is most infinitely sad,—and life is most infinitely dreary,—and may I not strive to comfort those amid the struggle who fain would ‘prove’ and hold fast to the things beyond? Nay!—let the heavens open and cast forth upon me their fiery thunderbolts, I will not repent! For, vast as my doubt is, so vast would be my faith, if God would speak and say to His creatures but once—‘Lo! I am here!’ Tortures of hell-pain would not terrify me, if in the end His Being were made clearly manifest—a cross of endless woe would I endure, to feel and see Him near me at the last, and more than all, to make the world feel and see Him—to prove to wondering, trembling, terror-stricken, famished, heart-broken human beings that He exists,—that He is aware of their misery,—that He cares for them, that it is all well for them,—that there is Eternal Joy hiding itself somewhere amid the great star-thickets of this monstrous universe—that we are not desolate atoms whirled by a blind fierce Force into life against our will, and out of it again without a shadow of reason or a glimmer of hope. Repent for such thoughts as these? I will not! Pray to a God of such inexorable silence? I will not! No, Lilith—my Lilith whom I snatched from greedy death—even you may fail me at the last,—you may break your promise,—the promise that I should see with mortal eyes your own Immortal Self—who can blame you for the promise of a dream, poor child! You may prove yourself nothing but woman; woman, poor, frail, weak, helpless woman to be loved and cherished and pitied and caressed in all the delicate limbs, and kissed in all the dainty golden threads of hair, and then—then—to be laid down like a broken flower in the tomb that has grudged me your beauty all this while,—all this may be, Lilith, and yet I will not pray to an unproved God, nor repent of an unproved sin!”
He uttered his words with extraordinary force and eloquence—one would have thought he was addressing a multitude of hearers instead of that one tranced girl, who, though beautiful as a sculptured saint on a sarcophagus, appeared almost as inanimate, save for the slow parting of her lips when she spoke.
“O superb Angel of the Kingdom!” she murmured—“It is no marvel that you fell!”
He heard her, dimly perplexed; but strengthened in his own convictions by what he had said, he was conscious of power,—power to defy, power to endure, power to command. Such a sense of exhilaration and high confidence had not possessed him for many a long day, and he was about to speak again, when Lilith’s voice once more stole musically on the silence.
“You would reproach God for the world’s misery. Your complaint is unjust. There is a Law,—a Law for the earth as for all worlds; and God cannot alter one iota of that Law without destroying Himself and His Universe. Shall all Beauty, all Order, all Creation come to an end because wilful Man is wilfully miserable? Your world trespasses against the Law in almost everything it does—hence its suffering. Other worlds accept the Law and fulfil it,—and with them, all is well.”
“Who is to know this Law?” demanded El-Râmi impatiently. “And how can the world trespass against what is not explained?”