He looked level out at his
offspring as though he still stood throbbing on the earth and he
spoke to him: "I am not alive to speak to you with my voice, but I
have spoken to you through my blood. When the cup of life is
filled, drain it deep. Why does nature fill it if not to have you
empty it?"
He blew his candle out in the eyes of that passionate face, and
holding it in his hand, a smoking torch, walked slowly backward and
forward in the darkness of the hall with only a little pale
moonlight struggling in through a window here and there.
Then with a second impulse he went over and stood close to the dark
image who had descended into him through the mysteries of nature.
"You," he said, "who helped to make me what I am, you had the
conscience and not the temptation. And you," he said, turning to
the hidden face across the hall, "who helped to make me what I am,
you had the temptation and not the conscience. What does either of
you know of me who had both?
"And what do I know about either of you," he went on, taking up
again the lonely vigil of his walk and questioning; "you who
preached against the Scarlet Woman, how do I know you were not the
scarlet man? I may have derived both from you--both conscience and
sin--without hypocrisy. All those years during which your face was
hardening, your one sincere prayer to God may have been that He
would send you to your appointed place before you were found out by
men on earth.
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