I nodded without speaking, for then, just as if Monty had heard his name spoken, he rolled over onto his elbow and sat up. First he looked at the Judge and then I saw that his eyes were turning toward me. I felt my spine alive with a thousand needle pricks.
“Will he know me?” thought I.
He looked at me with the same surprised look—the same old look I thought, but he only rubbed his neck with one hand and crept up and sat in the big chair, and tried to look up into the Judge’s face. He tried to meet the eyes of the master. They were fixed on him. He could not seem to meet the gaze. And there were the two men—one a wreck and a murderer, the other made out of the finest steel. One bowed his head with its mat of hair, the other looked down on him, pouring something on him out of his soul.
“Well, I’m sober now,” said Cranch, after a long time. “I know what you’re thinking. I know it all. I know it all.”
“You are not human,” whispered the Judge.
Can you say that certain words call up magic? I do not know. But those words worked a miracle. In a second, like something bursting out of its shell, the Monty Cranch I had treasured in my heart tossed off the murderer, the drunkard, the worthless wretch who had been throttling him and holding him locked up somewhere in that worn and tired body, and came up to the surface like a drowning man struggling for life.
“Human?” he said in a clearing voice. “Human? Am I human? My God! that is the curse of all of us—we’re human. To be human is to be a man. To be human is to be born. To be human is to have the blood and bone and brain that you didn’t make or choose. To be human is to be the son of another without choice. To be human is to be the yesterday of your blood and marked with a hundred yesterdays of others’ evil.”
He jumped up. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot.
“Am I responsible for what I am?” he roared. “Are any of us?”
The Judge looked frightened, I thought.