as I
saw the beauty of thy thought, thy large compassion, the purity of thy
life amid temptations that made me jealous as a woman of Damascus,
then I knew thee a God indeed."

"Nay, when I knew thee I knew myself man. But as our followers grew,
as faith and fortune trod in my footsteps, my blasphemous dream
revived; I believed in thy vision of the Kingdom. When I divided the
world I thought myself Messiah indeed. But as I sat on my throne at
Abydos, with worshippers from the world's end kissing my feet, a
hollow doubt came over me, a sense of dream, and hollow voices echoed
ever in my ear, asking, 'Art thou Messiah? Art thou Messiah? Art thou
Messiah?' I strove to drown them in the festive song; but in the
stillness of the night, when thou wast sleeping at my side, the voices
came back, and they cried mockingly, 'Man! Man! Man!' And when
Nehemiah came--"

"Man!" interrupted Melisselda impatiently. "Cease to cozen me. Have I
not known men? Ay, who more? Their weaknesses, their vanities, their
lewdnesses--enough! To-morrow thou shalt assert the God."

He threw himself back on the divan and sighed wearily. "Leave me,
Melisselda. Go to thy rest; to-night I must keep vigil alone.
Perchance it is my last night on earth."

Her countenance lit up. "Yea, to-morrow comes the Kingdom of Heaven."
And smiling ineffable trust, she stooped down and lightly kissed his
hair, then glided from the room.

And in his sleepless brain and racked soul went on, through that
unending night, the terrible tragedy of doubt, tempered by spells of
spasmodic prayer. A God, or a Man? A Messiah undergoing his Father's
last temptation; or a martyr on the eve of horrible death? And if the
victim of a monstrous self-delusion, what mattered whether one lived
out one's years of shame as Jew or Mussulman? Nobler, perhaps, to die,
and live as an heroic memory--but then to leave Melisselda! To leave
her warm breast and the sunlight and the green earth, and all that
beauty of the world and of human life to which his eyes had only been
unsealed after a lifetime of self-torturing blindness?

"O God! O God!" he cried, "wherefore hast Thou mocked and abandoned
me?"

XXIV

Early in the forenoon the light touch of a loved hand upon his
shoulder roused him from deeps of reverie.

He uplifted a white, haggard face. Melisselda stood before him in all
her dazzling freshness, like a radiant spirit come to chase the demons
of the night. The ancient Spanish so