A sick dread sense came over me; I stopped--
I could not stir. A cold and clammy sweat
Oozed out all over me; and all my limbs,
Bending with tremulous weakness like a child's,
Gave way beneath me. Then a sense of shame
Aroused me. I advanced, stretched forth my hand
And pushed the shapeless mass; and at my touch
It yielding swung--the branch above it creaked--
And back returning struck against my face.
A human body! Was it dead or not?
Swiftly my sword I drew and cut it down,
And on the sand all heavily it dropped.
I plucked the robes away, exposed the face--
'Twas Judas, as I feared, cold, stiff, and dead;
That suffering heart of his had ceased to beat."
Thus Lysias spoke, and ended. I confess
This story of poor Judas touched me much.
What horrible revulsions must have passed
Across that spirit in those few last hours!
What storms, that tore up life even to its roots!
Say what you will--grant all the guilt--and still
What pangs of dread remorse--what agonies
Of desperate repentance, all too late,
In that wild interval between the crime
And its last sad atonement!--life, the while,
Laden with horror all too great to bear,
And pressing madly on to death's abyss;
This was no common mind that thus could feel--
No vulgar villain sinning for reward!
_Was_ he a villain lost to sense of shame?
Ay, so say John and Peter and the rest;
And yet--and yet this tale that Lysias tells
Weighs with me more the more I ponder it;
For thus I put it: Either Judas was,
As John affirms, a villain and a thief,
A creature lost to shame and base at heart--
Or else, which is the view that Lysias takes,
He was a rash and visionary man
Whose faith was firm, who had no thought of crime,
But whom a terrible mistake drove mad.
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