Ben Hur (72 page)

The first ecstasy over, the mother said, "In this happiness, O my
children, let us not be ungrateful. Let us begin life anew by
acknowledgment of him to whom we are all so indebted."

They fell upon their knees, Amrah with the rest; and the prayer
of the elder outspoken was as a psalm.

Tirzah repeated it word for word; so did Ben-Hur, but not with the
same clear mind and questionless faith; for when they were risen,
he asked,

"In Nazareth, where the man was born, mother, they call him the
son of a carpenter. What is he?"

Her eyes rested upon him with all their old tenderness, and she
answered as she had answered the Nazarene himself—

"He is the Messiah."

"And whence has he his power?"

"We may know by the use he makes of it. Can you tell me any ill
he has done?"

"No."

"By that sign then I answer, He has his power from God."

It is not an easy thing to shake off in a moment the expectations
nurtured through years until they have become essentially a part
of us; and though Ben-Hur asked himself what the vanities of the
world were to such a one, his ambition was obdurate and would not
down. He persisted as men do yet every day in measuring the Christ
by himself. How much better if we measured ourselves by the Christ!

Naturally, the mother was the first to think of the cares of life.

"What shall we do now, my son? Where shall we go?"

Then Ben-Hur, recalled to duty, observed how completely every trace
of the scourge had disappeared from his restored people; that each
had back her perfection of person; that, as with Naaman when he
came up out of the water, their flesh had come again like unto
the flesh of a little child; and he took off his cloak, and threw
it over Tirzah.

"Take it," he said, smiling; "the eye of the stranger would have
shunned you before, now it shall not offend you."

The act exposed a sword belted to his side.

"Is it a time of war?" asked the mother, anxiously.

"No."

"Why, then, are you armed?"

"It may be necessary to defend the Nazarene."

Thus Ben-Hur evaded the whole truth.

"Has he enemies? Who are they?"

"Alas, mother, they are not all Romans!"

"Is he not of Israel, and a man of peace?"

"There was never one more so; but in the opinion of the rabbis
and teachers he is guilty of a great crime."

"What crime?"

"In his eyes the uncircumcised Gentile is as worthy favor as a Jew of
the strictest habit. He preaches a new dispensation."

The mother was silent, and they moved to the shade of the tree by
the rock. Calming his impatience to have them home again and hear
their story, he showed them the necessity of obedience to the law
governing in cases like theirs, and in conclusion called the Arab,
bidding him take the horses to the gate by Bethesda and await him
there; whereupon they set out by the way of the Mount of Offence.
The return was very different from the coming; they walked rapidly
and with ease, and in good time reached a tomb newly made near that
of Absalom, overlooking the depths of Cedron. Finding it unoccupied,
the women took possession, while he went on hastily to make the
preparations required for their new condition.

Ben-Hur pitched two tents out on the Upper Cedron east a short space
of the Tombs of the Kings, and furnished them with every comfort
at his command; and thither, without loss of time, he conducted
his mother and sister, to remain until the examining priest could
certify their perfect cleansing.

In course of the duty, the young man had subjected himself to
such serious defilement as to debar him from participation in
the ceremonies of the great feast, then near at hand. He could not
enter the least sacred of the courts of the Temple. Of necessity,
not less than choice, therefore, he stayed at the tents with his
beloved people. There was a great deal to hear from them, and a
great deal to tell them of himself.

Stories such as theirs—sad experiences extending through a lapse
of years, sufferings of body, acuter sufferings of mind—are usually
long in the telling, the incidents seldom following each other in
threaded connection. He listened to the narrative and all they
told him, with outward patience masking inward feeling. In fact,
his hatred of Rome and Romans reached a higher mark than ever; his
desire for vengeance became a thirst which attempts at reflection
only intensified. In the almost savage bitterness of his humor many
mad impulses took hold of him. The opportunities of the highways
presented themselves with singular force of temptation; he thought
seriously of insurrection in Galilee; even the sea, ordinarily a
retrospective horror to him, stretched itself map-like before his
fancy, laced and interlaced with lines of passage crowded with
imperial plunder and imperial travellers; but the better judgment
matured in calmer hours was happily too firmly fixed to be supplanted
by present passion however strong. Each mental venture in reach of new
expedients brought him back to the old conclusion—that there could be
no sound success except in a war involving all Israel in solid union;
and all musing upon the subject, all inquiry, all hope, ended where
they began—in the Nazarene and his purposes.

At odd moments the excited schemer found a pleasure in fashioning
a speech for that person:

"Hear, O Israel! I am he, the promised of God, born King of the
Jews—come to you with the dominion spoken of by the prophets.
Rise now, and lay hold on the world!"

Would the Nazarene but speak these few words, what a tumult would
follow! How many mouths performing the office of trumpets would
take them up and blow them abroad for the massing of armies!

Would he speak them?

And eager to begin the work, and answering in the worldly way,
Ben-Hur lost sight of the double nature of the man, and of the
other possibility, that the divine in him might transcend the human.
In the miracle of which Tirzah and his mother were the witnesses
even more nearly than himself, he saw and set apart and dwelt upon
a power ample enough to raise and support a Jewish crown over the
wrecks of the Italian, and more than ample to remodel society, and
convert mankind into one purified happy family; and when that work
was done, could any one say the peace which might then be ordered
without hindrance was not a mission worthy a son of God? Could any
one then deny the Redeemership of the Christ? And discarding all
consideration of political consequences, what unspeakable personal
glory there would then be to him as a man? It was not in the nature
of any mere mortal to refuse such a career.

Meantime down the Cedron, and in towards Bezetha, especially on
the roadsides quite up to the Damascus Gate, the country filled
rapidly with all kinds of temporary shelters for pilgrims to the
Passover. Ben-Hur visited the strangers, and talked with them; and
returning to his tents, he was each time more and more astonished
at the vastness of their numbers. And when he further discovered
that every part of the world was represented among them—cities
upon both shores of the Mediterranean far off as the Pillars of
the West, river-towns in distant India, provinces in northernmost
Europe; and that, though they frequently saluted him with tongues
unacquainted with a syllable of the old Hebrew of the fathers,
these representatives had all the same object—celebration of
the notable feast—an idea tinged mistily with superstitious fancy
forced itself upon him. Might he not after all have misunderstood
the Nazarene? Might not that person by patient waiting be covering
silent preparation, and proving his fitness for the glorious
task before him? How much better this time for the movement than
that other when, by Gennesaret, the Galileans would have forced
assumption of the crown? Then the support would have been limited
to a few thousands; now his proclamation would be responded to
by millions—who could say how many? Pursuing this theory to its
conclusions, Ben-Hur moved amidst brilliant promises, and glowed
with the thought that the melancholy man, under gentle seeming
and wondrous self-denial, was in fact carrying in disguise the
subtlety of a politician and the genius of a soldier.

Several times also, in the meanwhile, low-set, brawny men,
bareheaded and black-bearded, came and asked for Ben-Hur at
the tent; his interviews with them were always apart; and to
his mother's question who they were he answered,

"Some good friends of mine from Galilee."

Through them he kept informed of the movements of the Nazarene,
and of the schemes of the Nazarene's enemies, Rabbinical and Roman.
That the good man's life was in danger, he knew; but that there
were any bold enough to attempt to take it at that time, he could
not believe. It seemed too securely intrenched in a great fame
and an assured popularity. The very vastness of the attendance in
and about the city brought with it a seeming guaranty of safety.
And yet, to say truth, Ben-Hur's confidence rested most certainly
upon the miraculous power of the Christ. Pondering the subject in
the purely human view, that the master of such authority over life
and death, used so frequently for the good of others, would not
exert it in care of himself was simply as much past belief as it
was past understanding.

Nor should it be forgotten that all these were incidents of
occurrence between the twenty-first day of March—counting
by the modern calendar—and the twenty-fifth. The evening of
the latter day Ben-Hur yielded to his impatience, and rode to
the city, leaving behind him a promise to return in the night.

The horse was fresh, and choosing his own gait, sped swiftly.
The eyes of the clambering vines winked at the rider from the
garden fences on the way; there was nothing else to see him,
nor child nor woman nor man. Through the rocky float in the
hollows of the road the agate hoofs drummed, ringing like cups
of steel; but without notice from any stranger. In the houses
passed there were no tenants; the fires by the tent-doors were
out; the road was deserted; for this was the first Passover eve,
and the hour "between the evenings" when the visiting millions
crowded the city, and the slaughter of lambs in offering reeked
the fore-courts of the Temple, and the priests in ordered lines
caught the flowing blood and carried it swiftly to the dripping
altars—when all was haste and hurry, racing with the stars fast
coming with the signal after which the roasting and the eating and
the singing might go on, but not the preparation more.

Through the great northern gate the rider rode, and lo! Jerusalem
before the fall, in ripeness of glory, illuminated for the Lord.

Ben-Hur alighted at the gate of the khan from which the three
Wise Men more than thirty years before departed, going down
to Bethlehem. There, in keeping of his Arab followers, he left
the horse, and shortly after was at the wicket of his father's
house, and in a yet briefer space in the great chamber. He called
for Malluch first; that worthy being out, he sent a salutation to
his friends the merchant and the Egyptian. They were being carried
abroad to see the celebration. The latter, he was informed, was very
feeble, and in a state of deep dejection.

Young people of that time who were supposed hardly to know their
own hearts indulged the habit of politic indirection quite as much
as young people in the same condition indulge it in this time;
so when Ben-Hur inquired for the good Balthasar, and with grave
courtesy desired to know if he would be pleased to see him, he really
addressed the daughter a notice of his arrival. While the servant was
answering for the elder, the curtain of the doorway was drawn aside,
and the younger Egyptian came in, and walked—or floated, upborne in
a white cloud of the gauzy raiment she so loved and lived in—to
the centre of the chamber, where the light cast by lamps from the
seven-armed brazen stick planted upon the floor was the strongest.
With her there was no fear of light.

The servant left the two alone.

In the excitement occasioned by the events of the few days past
Ben-Hur had scarcely given a thought to the fair Egyptian. If she
came to his mind at all, it was merely as a briefest pleasure, a
suggestion of a delight which could wait for him, and was waiting.

But now the influence of the woman revived with all its force the
instant Ben-Hur beheld her. He advanced to her eagerly, but stopped
and gazed. Such a change he had never seen!

Theretofore she had been a lover studious to win him—in manner
all warmth, each glance an admission, each action an avowal. She
had showered him with incense of flattery. While he was present,
she had impressed him with her admiration; going away, he carried
the impression with him to remain a delicious expectancy hastening
his return. It was for him the painted eyelids drooped lowest over
the lustrous almond eyes; for him the love-stories caught from the
professionals abounding in the streets of Alexandria were repeated
with emphasis and lavishment of poetry; for him endless exclamations
of sympathy, and smiles, and little privileges with hand and hair
and cheek and lips, and songs of the Nile, and displays of jewelry,
and subtleties of lace in veils and scarfs, and other subtleties
not less exquisite in flosses of Indian silk. The idea, old as the
oldest of peoples, that beauty is the reward of the hero had never
such realism as she contrived for his pleasure; insomuch that he
could not doubt he was her hero; she avouched it in a thousand
artful ways as natural with her as her beauty—winsome ways
reserved, it would seem, by the passionate genius of old Egypt
for its daughters.

Such the Egyptian had been to Ben-Hur from the night of the boat-ride
on the lake in the Orchard of Palms. But now!