Ben Hur (77 page)

That instant a party of Galileans caught his eye. He rushed through
the press and overtook them.

"Follow me," he said. "I would have speech with you."

The men obeyed him, and when they were under shelter of the house,
he spoke again:

"You are of those who took my swords, and agreed with me to strike
for freedom and the King who was coming. You have the swords now,
and now is the time to strike with them. Go, look everywhere,
and find our brethren, and tell them to meet me at the tree of
the cross making ready for the Nazarene. Haste all of you! Nay,
stand not so! The Nazarene is the King, and freedom dies with him."

They looked at him respectfully, but did not move.

"Hear you?" he asked.

Then one of them replied,

"Son of Judah"—by that name they knew him—"son of Judah, it is
you who are deceived, not we or our brethren who have your
swords. The Nazarene is not the King; neither has he the spirit
of a king. We were with him when he came into Jerusalem; we saw
him in the Temple; he failed himself, and us, and Israel; at the
Gate Beautiful he turned his back upon God and refused the throne
of David. He is not King, and Galilee is not with him. He shall
die the death. But hear you, son of Judah. We have your swords,
and we are ready now to draw them and strike for freedom; and so
is Galilee. Be it for freedom, O son of Judah, for freedom! and
we will meet you at the tree of the cross."

The sovereign moment of his life was upon Ben-Hur. Could he have
taken the offer and said the word, history might have been other
than it is; but then it would have been history ordered by men,
not God—something that never was, and never will be. A confusion
fell upon him; he knew not how, though afterwards he attributed
it to the Nazarene; for when the Nazarene was risen, he understood
the death was necessary to faith in the resurrection, without which
Christianity would be an empty husk. The confusion, as has been said,
left him without the faculty of decision; he stood helpless—wordless
even. Covering his face with his hand, he shook with the conflict
between his wish, which was what he would have ordered, and the
power that was upon him.

"Come; we are waiting for you," said Simonides, the fourth time.

Thereupon he walked mechanically after the chair and the litter.
Esther walked with him. Like Balthasar and his friends, the Wise
Men, the day they went to the meeting in the desert, he was being
led along the way.

When the party—Balthasar, Simonides, Ben-Hur, Esther, and the two
faithful Galileans—reached the place of crucifixion, Ben-Hur was
in advance leading them. How they had been able to make way through
the great press of excited people, he never knew; no more did he know
the road by which they came or the time it took them to come. He had
walked in total unconsciousness, neither hearing nor seeing anybody
or anything, and without a thought of where he was going, or the
ghostliest semblance of a purpose in his mind. In such condition
a little child could have done as much as he to prevent the awful
crime he was about to witness. The intentions of God are always
strange to us; but not more so than the means by which they are
wrought out, and at last made plain to our belief.

Ben-Hur came to a stop; those following him also stopped. As a
curtain rises before an audience, the spell holding him in
its sleep-awake rose, and he saw with a clear understanding.

There was a space upon the top of a low knoll rounded like a skull,
and dry, dusty, and without vegetation, except some scrubby hyssop.
The boundary of the space was a living wall of men, with men
behind struggling, some to look over, others to look through
it. An inner wall of Roman soldiery held the dense outer wall
rigidly to its place. A centurion kept eye upon the soldiers.
Up to the very line so vigilantly guarded Ben-Hur had been led;
at the line he now stood, his face to the northwest. The knoll
was the old Aramaic Golgotha—in Latin, Calvaria; anglicized,
Calvary; translated, The Skull.

On its slopes, in the low places, on the swells and higher hills,
the earth sparkled with a strange enamelling. Look where he would
outside the walled space, he saw no patch of brown soil, no rock,
no green thing; he saw only thousands of eyes in ruddy faces; off a
little way in the perspective only ruddy faces without eyes; off a
little farther only a broad, broad circle, which the nearer view
instructed him was also of faces. And this was the ensemble of
three millions of people; under it three millions of hearts
throbbing with passionate interest in what was taking place
upon the knoll; indifferent as to the thieves, caring only for
the Nazarene, and for him only as he was an object of hate or
fear or curiosity—he who loved them all, and was about to die
for them.

In the spectacle of a great assemblage of people there are always
the bewilderment and fascination one feels while looking over a
stretch of sea in agitation, and never had this one been exceeded;
yet Ben-Hur gave it but a passing glance, for that which was going
on in the space described would permit no division of his interest.

Up on the knoll so high as to be above the living wall, and visible over
the heads of an attending company of notables, conspicuous because of his
mitre and vestments and his haughty air, stood the high priest. Up the
knoll still higher, up quite to the round summit, so as to be seen
far and near, was the Nazarene, stooped and suffering, but silent.
The wit among the guard had complemented the crown upon his head
by putting a reed in his hand for a sceptre. Clamors blew upon
him like blasts—laughter—execrations—sometimes both together
indistinguishably. A man—ONLY a man, O reader, would have charged
the blasts with the remainder of his love for the race, and let it
go forever.

All the eyes then looking were fixed upon the Nazarene. It may have
been pity with which he was moved; whatever the cause, Ben-Hur was
conscious of a change in his feelings. A conception of something
better than the best of this life—something so much better that it
could serve a weak man with strength to endure agonies of spirit as
well as of body; something to make death welcome—perhaps another
life purer than this one—perhaps the spirit-life which Balthasar
held to so fast, began to dawn upon his mind clearer and clearer,
bringing to him a certain sense that, after all, the mission of
the Nazarene was that of guide across the boundary for such as
loved him; across the boundary to where his kingdom was set up
and waiting for him. Then, as something borne through the air
out of the almost forgotten, he heard again, or seemed to hear,
the saying of the Nazarene,

"I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE."

And the words repeated themselves over and over, and took form,
and the dawn touched them with its light, and filled them with
a new meaning. And as men repeat a question to grasp and fix the
meaning, he asked, gazing at the figure on the hill fainting under
its crown, Who the Resurrection? and who the Life?

"I AM,"

the figure seemed to say—and say it for him; for instantly he was
sensible of a peace such as he had never known—the peace which is
the end of doubt and mystery, and the beginning of faith and love
and clear understanding.

From this dreamy state Ben-Hur was aroused by the sound of hammering.
On the summit of the knoll he observed then what had escaped him
before—some soldiers and workmen preparing the crosses. The holes
for planting the trees were ready, and now the transverse beams
were being fitted to their places.

"Bid the men make haste," said the high-priest to the centurion.
"These"—and he pointed to the Nazarene—"must be dead by the
going-down of the sun, and buried that the land may not be defiled.
Such is the Law."

With a better mind, a soldier went to the Nazarene and offered
him something to drink, but he refused the cup. Then another went
to him and took from his neck the board with the inscription upon
it, which he nailed to the tree of the cross—and the preparation
was complete.

"The crosses are ready," said the centurion to the pontiff,
who received the report with a wave of the hand and the reply,

"Let the blasphemer go first. The Son of God should be able to
save himself. We will see."

The people to whom the preparation in its several stages was visible,
and who to this time had assailed the hill with incessant cries of
impatience, permitted a lull which directly became a universal hush.
The part of the infliction most shocking, at least to the thought,
was reached—the men were to be nailed to their crosses. When for
that purpose the soldiers laid their hands upon the Nazarene first,
a shudder passed through the great concourse; the most brutalized
shrank with dread. Afterwards there were those who said the air
suddenly chilled and made them shiver.

"How very still it is!" Esther said, as she put her arm about her
father's neck.

And remembering the torture he himself had suffered, he drew her
face down upon his breast, and sat trembling.

"Avoid it, Esther, avoid it!" he said. "I know not but all who
stand and see it—the innocent as well as the guilty—may be
cursed from this hour."

Balthasar sank upon his knees.

"Son of Hur," said Simonides, with increasing excitement—"son of
Hur, if Jehovah stretch not forth his hand, and quickly, Israel is
lost—and we are lost."

Ben-Hur answered, calmly, "I have been in a dream, Simonides,
and heard in it why all this should be, and why it should go on.
It is the will of the Nazarene—it is God's will. Let us do as
the Egyptian here—let us hold our peace and pray."

As he looked up on the knoll again, the words were wafted to him
through the awful stillness—

"I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE."

He bowed reverently as to a person speaking.

Up on the summit meantime the work went on. The guard took
the Nazarene's clothes from him; so that he stood before the
millions naked. The stripes of the scourging he had received in
the early morning were still bloody upon his back; yet he was laid
pitilessly down, and stretched upon the cross—first, the arms upon
the transverse beam; the spikes were sharp—a few blows, and they
were driven through the tender palms; next, they drew his knees up
until the soles of the feet rested flat upon the tree; then they
placed one foot upon the other, and one spike fixed both of them
fast. The dulled sound of the hammering was heard outside the
guarded space; and such as could not hear, yet saw the hammer
as it fell, shivered with fear. And withal not a groan, or cry,
or word of remonstrance from the sufferer: nothing at which an
enemy could laugh; nothing a lover could regret.

"Which way wilt thou have him faced?" asked a soldier, bluntly.

"Towards the Temple," the pontiff replied. "In dying I would have
him see the holy house hath not suffered by him."

The workmen put their hands to the cross, and carried it, burden
and all, to the place of planting. At a word, they dropped the tree
into the hole; and the body of the Nazarene also dropped heavily,
and hung by the bleeding hands. Still no cry of pain—only the
exclamation divinest of all recorded exclamations,

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

The cross, reared now above all other objects, and standing singly
out against the sky, was greeted with a burst of delight; and all
who could see and read the writing upon the board over the Nazarene's
head made haste to decipher it. Soon as read, the legend was adopted
by them and communicated, and presently the whole mighty concourse
was ringing the salutation from side to side, and repeating it with
laughter and groans,

"King of the Jews! Hail, King of the Jews!"

The pontiff, with a clearer idea of the import of the inscription,
protested against it, but in vain; so the titled King, looking from
the knoll with dying eyes, must have had the city of his fathers
at rest below him—she who had so ignominiously cast him out.

The sun was rising rapidly to noon; the hills bared their brown
breasts lovingly to it; the more distant mountains rejoiced in
the purple with which it so regally dressed them. In the city,
the temples, palaces, towers, pinnacles, and all points of beauty
and prominence seemed to lift themselves into the unrivalled
brilliance, as if they knew the pride they were giving the many
who from time to time turned to look at them. Suddenly a dimness
began to fill the sky and cover the earth—at first no more than
a scarce perceptible fading of the day; a twilight out of time;
an evening gliding in upon the splendors of noon. But it deepened,
and directly drew attention; whereat the noise of the shouting and
laughter fell off, and men, doubting their senses, gazed at each
other curiously: then they looked to the sun again; then at the
mountains, getting farther away; at the sky and the near landscape,
sinking in shadow; at the hill upon which the tragedy was enacting;
and from all these they gazed at each other again, and turned pale,
and held their peace.

"It is only a mist or passing cloud," Simonides said soothingly to
Esther, who was alarmed. "It will brighten presently."

Ben-Hur did not think so.

"It is not a mist or a cloud," he said. "The spirits who live in
the air—the prophets and saints—are at work in mercy to themselves
and nature. I say to you, O Simonides, truly as God lives, he who
hangs yonder is the Son of God."

And leaving Simonides lost in wonder at such a speech from him,
he went where Balthasar was kneeling near by, and laid his hand
upon the good man's shoulder.

"O wise Egyptian, hearken! Thou alone wert right—the Nazarene is
indeed the Son of God."

Balthasar drew him down to him, and replied, feebly, "I saw him
a child in the manger where he was first laid; it is not strange
that I knew him sooner than thou; but oh that I should live to see
this day! Would I had died with my brethren! Happy Melchior! Happy,
happy Gaspar!"