“Nay!” he said. “Neither were your lovers in the past nothing. They were much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for salvation from your own excess. And I, in my mission, I too ran to excess. I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation. Don’t run to excess now in living, Madeleine. It only means another death.”
She pondered bitterly, for the need for excessive giving was in her, and she could not bear to be denied.
“And will you not come back to us?” she said. “Have you risen for yourself alone?”
He heard the sarcasm in her voice, and looked at her beautiful face which still was dense with excessive need for salvation from the woman she had been, the female who had caught men at her will. The cloud of necessity was on her, to be saved from the old, wilful Eve, who had embraced many men and taken more than she gave. Now the other doom was on her. She wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the warm body.
“I have not risen from the dead in order to seek death again,” he said.
She glanced up at him, and saw the weariness settling again on his waxy face, and the vast disillusion in his dark eyes, and the underlying indifference. He felt her glance, and said to himself:
“Now my own followers will want to do me to death again, for having risen up different from their expectation.”
“But you will come to us, to see us, us who love you?” she said.
He laughed a little and said:
“Ah, yes.” Then he added: “Have you a little money? Will you give me a little money? I owe it.”
She had not much, but it pleased her to give it to him.
“Do you think,” he said to her, “that I might come and live with you in your house?”
She looked up at him with large blue eyes, that gleamed strangely.
“Now?” she said with peculiar triumph.
And he, who shrank now from triumph of any sort, his own or another’s, said:
“Not now! Later, when I am healed, and…and I am in touch with the flesh.”
The words faltered in him. And in his heart he knew he would never go to live in her house. For the flicker of triumph had gleamed in her eyes; the greed of giving. But she murmured in a humming rapture:
“Ah, you know I would give up everything to you.”
“Nay!” he said. “I didn’t ask that.”
A revulsion from all the life he had known came over him again, the great nausea of disillusion, and the spear-thrust through his bowels. He crouched under the myrtle bushes, without strength. Yet his eyes were open. And she looked at him again, and she saw that it was not the Messiah. The Messiah had not risen. The enthusiasm and the burning purity were gone, and the rapt youth. His youth was dead. This man was middle-aged and disillusioned, with a certain terrible indifference, and a resoluteness which love would never conquer. This was not the Master she had so adored, the young, flamy, unphysical exalter of her soul. This was nearer to the lovers she had known of old, but with a greater indifference to the personal issue, and a lesser susceptibility.
She was thrown out of the balance of her rapturous, anguished adoration. This risen man was the death of her dream.
“You should go now,” he said to her. “Do not touch me, I am in death. I shall come again here, on the third day. Come if you will, at dawn. And we will speak again.”
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