"Is it so?" he said, slowly. "Well—the world refuses me fame; but I do not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your admiration."
"The world?" she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. "The world? You care for the world—you?—who have painted that?"
Arslàn did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.
He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a worldly success.
Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?
It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious and mature intellect of the man of genius.
He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.
"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters, can see the truth and can tell it,—we are prophets so far,—but when we come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."
She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.
Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there kneeled and prayed.