Ben Hur (18 page)

"That is he!"

Judah looked, and saw—Messala.

"What, the assassin—that?" said a tall man, in legionary armor
of beautiful finish. "Why, he is but a boy."

"Gods!" replied Messala, not forgetting his drawl. "A new philosophy!
What would Seneca say to the proposition that a man must be old before
he can hate enough to kill? You have him; and that is his mother;
yonder his sister. You have the whole family."

For love of them, Judah forgot his quarrel.

"Help them, O my Messala! Remember our childhood and help them.
I—Judah—pray you."

Messala affected not to hear.

"I cannot be of further use to you," he said to the officer.
"There is richer entertainment in the street. Down Eros, up Mars!"

With the last words he disappeared. Judah understood him, and,
in the bitterness of his soul, prayed to Heaven.

"In the hour of thy vengeance, O Lord," he said, "be mine the hand
to put it upon him!"

By great exertion, he drew nearer the officer.

"O sir, the woman you hear is my mother. Spare her, spare my
sister yonder. God is just, he will give you mercy for mercy."

The man appeared to be moved.

"To the Tower with the women!" he shouted, "but do them no harm.
I will demand them of you." Then to those holding Judah, he said,
"Get cords, and bind his hands, and take him to the street.
His punishment is reserved."

The mother was carried away. The little Tirzah, in her home attire,
stupefied with fear, went passively with her keepers. Judah gave
each of them a last look, and covered his face with his hands,
as if to possess himself of the scene fadelessly. He may have
shed tears, though no one saw them.

There took place in him then what may be justly called the wonder
of life. The thoughtful reader of these pages has ere this discerned
enough to know that the young Jew in disposition was gentle even
to womanliness—a result that seldom fails the habit of loving and
being loved. The circumstances through which he had come had made
no call upon the harsher elements of his nature, if such he had.
At times he had felt the stir and impulses of ambition, but they
had been like the formless dreams of a child walking by the sea
and gazing at the coming and going of stately ships. But now, if we
can imagine an idol, sensible of the worship it was accustomed to,
dashed suddenly from its altar, and lying amidst the wreck of its
little world of love, an idea may be had of what had befallen the
young Ben-Hur, and of its effect upon his being. Yet there was no
sign, nothing to indicate that he had undergone a change, except
that when he raised his head, and held his arms out to be bound,
the bend of the Cupid's bow had vanished from his lips. In that
instant he had put off childhood and become a man.

A trumpet sounded in the court-yard. With the cessation of the
call, the gallery was cleared of the soldiery; many of whom,
as they dared not appear in the ranks with visible plunder in
their hands, flung what they had upon the floor, until it was
strewn with articles of richest virtu. When Judah descended,
the formation was complete, and the officer waiting to see his
last order executed.

The mother, daughter, and entire household were led out of the
north gate, the ruins of which choked the passageway. The cries
of the domestics, some of whom had been born in the house, were most
pitiable. When, finally, the horses and all the dumb tenantry of the
place were driven past him, Judah began to comprehend the scope of
the procurator's vengeance. The very structure was devoted. Far as
the order was possible of execution, nothing living was to be left
within its walls. If in Judea there were others desperate enough to
think of assassinating a Roman governor, the story of what befell
the princely family of Hur would be a warning to them, while the
ruin of the habitation would keep the story alive.

The officer waited outside while a detail of men temporarily
restored the gate.

In the street the fighting had almost ceased. Upon the houses
here and there clouds of dust told where the struggle was yet
prolonged. The cohort was, for the most part, standing at rest,
its splendor, like its ranks, in nowise diminished. Borne past
the point of care for himself, Judah had heart for nothing in
view but the prisoners, among whom he looked in vain for his
mother and Tirzah.

Suddenly, from the earth where she had been lying, a woman arose
and started swiftly back to the gate. Some of the guards reached
out to seize her, and a great shout followed their failure. She ran
to Judah, and, dropping down, clasped his knees, the coarse black
hair powdered with dust veiling her eyes.

"O Amrah, good Amrah," he said to her, "God help you; I cannot."

She could not speak.

He bent down, and whispered, "Live, Amrah, for Tirzah and my mother.
They will come back, and—"

A soldier drew her away; whereupon she sprang up and rushed through
the gateway and passage into the vacant court-yard.

"Let her go," the officer shouted. "We will seal the house, and she
will starve."

The men resumed their work, and, when it was finished there,
passed round to the west side. That gate was also secured,
after which the palace of the Hurs was lost to use.

The cohort at length marched back to the Tower, where the procurator
stayed to recover from his hurts and dispose of his prisoners. On the
tenth day following, he visited the Market-place.

Next day a detachment of legionaries went to the desolated palace,
and, closing the gates permanently, plastered the corners with wax,
and at the sides nailed a notice in Latin:

"THIS IS THE PROPERTY OF THE EMPEROR."

In the haughty Roman idea, the sententious announcement was thought
sufficient for the purpose—and it was.

The day after that again, about noon, a decurion with his command of
ten horsemen approached Nazareth from the south—that is, from the
direction of Jerusalem. The place was then a straggling village,
perched on a hill-side, and so insignificant that its one street
was little more than a path well beaten by the coming and going of
flocks and herds. The great plain of Esdraelon crept close to it
on the south, and from the height on the west a view could be had
of the shores of the Mediterranean, the region beyond the Jordan,
and Hermon. The valley below, and the country on every side, were
given to gardens, vineyards, orchards, and pasturage. Groves of
palm-trees Orientalized the landscape. The houses, in irregular
assemblage, were of the humbler class—square, one-story, flat-roofed,
and covered with bright-green vines. The drought that had burned
the hills of Judea to a crisp, brown and lifeless, stopped at the
boundary-line of Galilee.

A trumpet, sounded when the cavalcade drew near the village, had
a magical effect upon the inhabitants. The gates and front doors
cast forth groups eager to be the first to catch the meaning of
a visitation so unusual.

Nazareth, it must be remembered, was not only aside from any great
highway, but within the sway of Judas of Gamala; wherefore it should
not be hard to imagine the feelings with which the legionaries were
received. But when they were up and traversing the street, the duty
that occupied them became apparent, and then fear and hatred were lost
in curiosity, under the impulse of which the people, knowing there must
be a halt at the well in the northeastern part of the town, quit their
gates and doors, and closed in after the procession.

A prisoner whom the horsemen were guarding was the object of curiosity.
He was afoot, bareheaded, half naked, his hands bound behind him. A thong
fixed to his wrists was looped over the neck of a horse. The dust
went with the party when in movement, wrapping him in yellow fog,
sometimes in a dense cloud. He drooped forward, footsore and faint.
The villagers could see he was young.

At the well the decurion halted, and, with most of the men,
dismounted. The prisoner sank down in the dust of the road,
stupefied, and asking nothing: apparently he was in the last
stage of exhaustion. Seeing, when they came near, that he was
but a boy, the villagers would have helped him had they dared.

In the midst of their perplexity, and while the pitchers were
passing among the soldiers, a man was descried coming down the road
from Sepphoris. At sight of him a woman cried out, "Look! Yonder
comes the carpenter. Now we will hear something."

The person spoken of was quite venerable in appearance. Thin white
locks fell below the edge of his full turban, and a mass of still
whiter beard flowed down the front of his coarse gray gown. He came
slowly, for, in addition to his age, he carried some tools—an axe,
a saw, and a drawing-knife, all very rude and heavy—and had evidently
travelled some distance without rest.

He stopped close by to survey the assemblage.

"O Rabbi, good Rabbi Joseph!" cried a woman, running to him.
"Here is a prisoner; come ask the soldiers about him, that we may
know who he is, and what he has done, and what they are going to
do with him."

The rabbi's face remained stolid; he glanced at the prisoner,
however, and presently went to the officer.

"The peace of the Lord be with you!" he said, with unbending gravity.

"And that of the gods with you," the decurion replied.

"Are you from Jerusalem?"

"Yes."

"Your prisoner is young."

"In years, yes."

"May I ask what he has done?"

"He is an assassin."

The people repeated the word in astonishment, but Rabbi Joseph
pursued his inquest.

"Is he a son of Israel?"

"He is a Jew," said the Roman, dryly.

The wavering pity of the bystanders came back.

"I know nothing of your tribes, but can speak of his family," the
speaker continued. "You may have heard of a prince of Jerusalem
named Hur—Ben-Hur, they called him. He lived in Herod's day."

"I have seen him," Joseph said.

"Well, this is his son."

Exclamations became general, and the decurion hastened to stop them.

"In the streets of Jerusalem, day before yesterday, he nearly
killed the noble Gratus by flinging a tile upon his head from
the roof of a palace—his father's, I believe."

There was a pause in the conversation during which the Nazarenes
gazed at the young Ben-Hur as at a wild beast.

"Did he kill him?" asked the rabbi.

"No."

"He is under sentence."

"Yes—the galleys for life."

"The Lord help him!" said Joseph, for once moved out of his stolidity.

Thereupon a youth who came up with Joseph, but had stood behind
him unobserved, laid down an axe he had been carrying, and,
going to the great stone standing by the well, took from it a
pitcher of water. The action was so quiet that before the guard
could interfere, had they been disposed to do so, he was stooping
over the prisoner, and offering him drink.

The hand laid kindly upon his shoulder awoke the unfortunate
Judah, and, looking up, he saw a face he never forgot—the face
of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright
chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so
soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they
had all the power of command and will. The spirit of the Jew,
hardened though it was by days and nights of suffering, and so
embittered by wrong that its dreams of revenge took in all the
world, melted under the stranger's look, and became as a child's.
He put his lips to the pitcher, and drank long and deep. Not a word
was said to him, nor did he say a word.

When the draught was finished, the hand that had been resting upon
the sufferer's shoulder was placed upon his head, and stayed there
in the dusty locks time enough to say a blessing; the stranger then
returned the pitcher to its place on the stone, and, taking his
axe again, went back to Rabbi Joseph. All eyes went with him,
the decurion's as well as those of the villagers.

This was the end of the scene at the well. When the men had drunk,
and the horses, the march was resumed. But the temper of the decurion
was not as it had been; he himself raised the prisoner from the dust,
and helped him on a horse behind a soldier. The Nazarenes went to their
houses—among them Rabbi Joseph and his apprentice.

And so, for the first time, Judah and the son of Mary met and parted.

"Cleopatra. . . . Our size of sorrow,
Proportion'd to our cause, must be as great
As that which makes it.—
Enter, below, DIOMEDES.
How now? is he dead?

Diomedes. His death's upon him, but not dead."

Antony and Cleopatra (act iv., sc. xiii.).

The city of Misenum gave name to the promontory which it crowned,
a few miles southwest of Naples. An account of ruins is all that
remains of it now; yet in the year of our Lord 24—to which it is
desirable to advance the reader—the place was one of the most
important on the western coast of Italy.
^[1]

In the year mentioned, a traveller coming to the promontory to
regale himself with the view there offered, would have mounted
a wall, and, with the city at his back, looked over the bay of
Neapolis, as charming then as now; and then, as now, he would
have seen the matchless shore, the smoking cone, the sky and
waves so softly, deeply blue, Ischia here and Capri yonder;
from one to the other and back again, through the purpled air,
his gaze would have sported; at last—for the eyes do weary of the
beautiful as the palate with sweets—at last it would have dropped
upon a spectacle which the modern tourist cannot see— half the
reserve navy of Rome astir or at anchor below him. Thus regarded,
Misenum was a very proper place for three masters to meet, and at
leisure parcel the world among them.