"I asked thee to make thy peace. Thou hast made bitterer war. I cannot
fight against my father and all Israel. Farewell!"
Uriel's face grew grim: the puckers in his brow that her fingers had
touched showed once more as terrible lines of suffering; his teeth
were clenched. The old look of the hunted man came back. He took out
her first note, which he kept nearest his heart, and re-read it
slowly--
"Why ruin thy life for a mere abstraction? Canst thou not make peace?"
A mere abstraction! Ah! Why had that not warned him of the woman's
calibre? Nay, why had he forgotten--and here he had a vivid vision of
a little girl bringing in Passover cakes--her training in a double
life? Not that woman needed that--Dom Diego was right. False, frail
creatures! No sympathy with principles, no recognition of the great
fight he had made. Tears of self-pity started to his eyes. Well, she
had, at least, saved him from cowardly surrender. The old fire flamed
in his veins. He would fight to the death.
And as he tore up her notes, a strange sense of relief mingled with
the bitterness and fierceness of his mood; relief to think that never
again would he be called upon to jabber with the apes, to grasp their
loathly paws, to join in their solemnly absurd posturings, never would
he be tempted from the peace and seclusion of his book-lined study.
The habits of fifteen years tugged him back like ropes of which he had
exhausted the tether.
He seated himself at his desk, and took up his pen to resume his
manuscript. "All evils come from not following Right Reason and the
Law of Nature." He wrote on for hours, pausing from time to time to
select his Latin phrases. Suddenly a hollow sense of the futility of
his words, of Reason, of Nature, of everything, overcame him. What
was this dreadful void at his breast? He leaned his tired, aching head
on his desk and sobbed, as little Daniel had never sobbed yet.