"The blood of Jesus will wash out those stains. The law was fully satisfied when He hung on Calvary; there, ample atonement was made for just such sins as yours, and you have only to claim and plead his sufferings to secure your salvation. St. Elmo, bury your past here, in Murray's grave, and give all your thoughts to the future. Half of your life has ebbed out, and yet your life-work remains undone, untouched. You have no time to spend in looking over your unimproved years."
"'Bury my past!' Impossible, even for one hour. I tell you I am chained to it, as the Aloides were chained to the pillars of Tartarus! and the croaking fiend that will not let me sleep in memory! Memory of sins that--that avenge your wrongs, old man! that goad me sometimes to the very verge of suicide! Do you know, ha! how could you possibly know? Shall I tell you that only one thought has often stood between me and self-destruction? It was not the fear of death, no, no, no! It was not even the dread of facing an outraged God! but it was the horrible fear of meeting Murray! Not all eternity was wide enough to hold us both! The hate I bore him made me shrink from a deed which I felt would instantly set us face to face once more in the land of souls. Ah! a change has come over me; now if I could see his face, I might learn to forget that look it wore when last I gazed upon it. Time bears healing for some natures; to mine it has brought only poison. It is useless to bid me forget. Memory is earth's retribution for man's sins. I have bought at a terrible price my conviction of the melancholy truth, that he who touches the weapons of Nemesis effectually slaughters his own peace of mind, and challenges her maledictions, from which there is no escape. In my insanity I said, 'Vengeance is mine! I will repay!' and in the hour when I daringly grasped the prerogative of God, His curse smote me! Mr. Hammond, friend of my happy youth, guide of my innocent boyhood! if you could know all the depths of my abasement, you would pity me indeed! My miserable heart is like the crater of some extinct volcano: the flames of sin have burned out, and left it rugged, rent, blackened. I do not think that--"
"St. Elmo, do not upbraid yourself so bitterly--"
"Sir, your words are kind and noble and full of Christian charity; they are well meant, and I thank you; but they cannot comfort me. My desolation, my utter wretchedness isolate me from the sympathy of my race, whom I have despised and trampled so relentlessly. Yesterday I read a passage which depicts so accurately my dreary isolation, that I have been unable to expel it; I find it creeping even now to my lips: "'O misery and mourning! I have felt--Yes, I have felt like some deserted world That God hath done with, and had cast aside To rock and stagger through the gulfs of space, He never looking on it any more; Unfilled, no use, no pleasure, not desired, Nor lighted on by angels in their flight From heaven to happier planets; and the race That once hath dwelt on it withdrawn or dead. Could such a world have hope that some blest day God would remember her, and fashion her Anew?'"