And then he began to be sorry for himself as well as for Glory. How could he live in the world without her? Although he had lost her, although an impassable gulf divided them, although he had not seen her for six months until today, yet it was something to know she was alive and that he could go at night to the place where she was and look up and think, “She is there.” “It is true, I am going mad,” he thought, and he trembled again.
His mind oscillated among these conflicting ideas, until the more hideous thought returned to him of Drake and the smile exchanged with Glory. Then the blood rushed to his head, and strong emotions paralyzed his reason. When he asked himself if it was right in England and in the nineteenth century to contemplate a course which might have been proper to Palestine and the first century, the answer came instantaneously that it was right. Glory was in peril. She was tottering on the verge of hell. It would not be wrong, but a noble duty, to prevent the possibility of such a hideous catastrophe. Better a life ended than a life degraded and a soul destroyed.
On this the sophism worked. It was true that he would lose her; she would be gone from him, she who was all his joy, his vision by day, his dream by night. But could he be so selfish as to keep her in the flesh, and thus expose her soul to eternal torment? And after all she would be his in the other world, his forever, his alone. Nay, in this world also, for being dead he would love her still. “But, O God, must I do it?” he asked himself at one moment, and at the next came his answer: “Yes, yes, for I am God's minister.”
That sent him back to his text again. “Deliver him up to Satan——” But there was a marginal reference to Timothy, and he turned it up with a trembling hand. Satan again, but the Revised Version gave “the Lord's servant,” and thus the text should read, “Deliver him up to the Lord's servant for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” This made him cry out. He drank it in with inebriate delight. The thing was irrevocably decided. He was justified, he was authorized, he was the instrument of a fixed purpose. No other consideration could move him now.
By this time his heart and temples were beating violently, and he felt as if he were being carried up into a burning cloud. Before his eyes rose the vision of Isaiah, the meek lamb converted into an inexorable avenger descending from the summit of Edom. It was right to shed blood at the divine command—nay, it was necessary, it was inevitable. And as God had commanded Abraham to take the life of Isaac, whom he loved, so did God call on him, John Storm, to take the life of Glory that he might save her from the risk of everlasting damnation!
There may have been intervals in which his sense of hearing left him, for it was only now that he became conscious that somebody was calling to him from the other side of the door.
“Is anybody there?” he asked, and a voice replied:
“Dear heart, yes, this five minutes and better, but I didna dare come in, thinking surely there was somebody talking with you. Is there no somebody here then? No?”
It was Mrs. Callender, who was carrying a small glad-stone bag.
“Oh, it's you, is it?”