It was the fight of his life, the fight for his own soul.
Come what might in the future, it was this hour which held the decisive
battle. For if he could not master those things which were surging upon
him, then the things which made him himself were gone for all time. And
when sense of the underlying cunning of the blow brought the surrendering
laugh close to his parched lips it was held back, held under, by that
ever recurring memory of a touch, a voice, a face. It was Ernestine,
their love, fighting against the powers of damnation for the rescue of
his soul.
Even in the battle's heat, he had full grasp of the battle's
significance, knew that all the future hung upon making it right this
hour with his own soul. His face grew grey and old, he concentrated days
of force into minutes, but little by little, through a strength greater
than that strength with which men conquer worlds, a force greater than
the force with which the mind's big battles are won, by a force not given
many since the first of time, he held away, beat back, the black tides
ready to carry him over into that sea of bitterness from which lost souls
send out their curses and their jeers and their unmeetable silences.
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