Then, hiding his face in his hands, he went away weeping. Some months after, a monk of the Order of St. Francis assisted Ambrosia di Castello in her last moments. This monk was the alchemist, Raymund Lully. The romance ends here and the legend follows. This legend merges several bearers at different periods of the name Raymund Lully into a single personality, and thus endows the repentant alchemist with a few centuries of existence and expiation. On the day when the unfortunate adept should have expired naturally, he experienced all the agonies of dissolution; then, at the supreme crisis, he felt life again take possession of his frame, like the vulture of Prometheus resuming its banquet. The Saviour of the world, Who had stretched forth His hand towards him, returned sorrowfully into heaven, and Raymond Lully found himself still on earth, with no hope of dying. He betook himself to prayer, and devoted his existence to good works; God granted him all graces save that of death, but of what profit are the others in the absence of that which should complete and crown them all? One day the Tree of Knowledge was shewn to him, laden with its luminous fruits; he understood being and its harmonies; he divined the Kabalah; he established the foundations and sketched the plan of an universal science, from which time he was saluted as the illuminated doctor. So did he obtain glory, that fatal recompense of toil which God, in His mercy, seldom confers upon great men till after their death, because it intoxicates and poisons the living. But Raymund Lully, who could not by death give place to the glory after, might have occasion to fear that it would perish before himself, and meanwhile it could seem to him only a derision of his immortal misfortune. He knew how to make gold, so that he might purchase the world and all its kingdoms, yet he could not assure to himself the humblest tomb. He was the pauper of immortality. Everywhere he went begging for death, and no one was able to give it him. The courtly nobleman had become an absorbed alchemist, the alchemist a monk; the monk became preacher, philosopher, ascetic, saint, and, last of all, missionary. He engaged hand to hand with the learned men of Arabia; he battled victoriously against Islamism, and had everything to fear from the fury of its professors. Everything to fear—this means that he had something to hope, and that which he hoped for was death.[239] He engaged a young Arab of the most fanatical class as his attendant, and posed before him as the scourge of the religion of Mohammed. The Arab assassinated his master, which was what he expected; but Raymond Lully did not die; it was the assassin that he would fain have forgiven who killed himself in despair at his failure, so that conscience had an added burden instead of deliverance and peace.