Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
vicinity, a bank of blue-blackness over in the west which they knew to
be mountains, and the sky, its shadowy depths brilliant with stars. The
city was still. Only the winds stirred.
“Amrah tells me something has happened to you,” she said, caressing his
cheek. “When my Judah was a child, I allowed small things to trouble
him, but he is now a man. He must not forget”—her voice became very
soft—“that one day he is to be my hero.”
She spoke in the language almost lost in the land, but which a few—and
they were always as rich in blood as in possessions—cherished in its
purity, that they might be more certainly distinguished from Gentile
peoples—the language in which the loved Rebekah and Rachel sang to
Benjamin.
The words appeared to set him thinking anew; after a while, however, he
caught the hand with which she fanned him, and said, “Today, O my
mother, I have been made to think of many things that never had place
in my mind before. Tell me, first, what am I to be?”
“Have I not told you? You are to be my hero.”
He could not see her face, yet he knew she was in play. He became more
serious.
“You are very good, very kind, O my mother. No one will ever love me as
you do.”
He kissed the hand over and over again.
“I think I understand why you would have me put off the question,” he
continued. “Thus far my life has belonged to you. How gentle, how sweet
your control has been! I wish it could last forever. But that may not
be. It is the Lord’s will that I shall one day become owner of myself—a
day of separation, and therefore a dreadful day to you. Let us be brave
and serious. I will be your hero, but you must put me in the way. You
know the law—every son of Israel must have some occupation. I am not
exempt, and ask now, shall I tend the herds? or till the soil? or drive
the saw? or be a clerk or lawyer? What shall I be? Dear, good mother,
help me to an answer.”
“Gamaliel has been lecturing today,” she said, thoughtfully.
“If so, I did not hear him.”
“Then you have been walking with Simeon, who, they tell me, inherits
the genius of his family.”
“No, I have not seen him. I have been up on the Market-place, not to
the Temple. I visited the young Messala.”
A certain change in his voice attracted the mother’s attention. A
presentiment quickened the beating of her heart; the fan became
motionless again.
“The Messala!” she said. “What could he say to so trouble you?”
“He is very much changed.”
“You mean he has come back a Roman.”
“Yes.”
“Roman!” she continued, half to herself. “To all the world the word
means master. How long has he been away?”
“Five years.”
She raised her head, and looked off into the night.
“The airs of the Via Sacra are well enough in the streets of the
Egyptian and in Babylon; but in Jerusalem—our Jerusalem—the covenant
abides.”
And, full of the thought, she settled back into her easy place. He was
first to speak.
“What Messala said, my mother, was sharp enough in itself; but, taken
with the manner, some of the sayings were intolerable.”
“I think I understand you. Rome, her poets, orators, senators,
courtiers, are mad with affectation of what they call satire.”
“I suppose all great peoples are proud,” he went on, scarcely noticing
the interruption; “but the pride of that people is unlike all others;
in these latter days it is so grown the gods barely escape it.”
“The gods escape!” said the mother, quickly. “More than one Roman has
accepted worship as his divine right.”
“Well, Messala always had his share of the disagreeable quality. When
he was a child, I have seen him mock strangers whom even Herod
condescended to receive with honors; yet he always spared Judea. For
the first time, in conversation with me to-day, he trifled with our
customs and God. As you would have had me do, I parted with him
finally. And now, O my dear mother, I would know with more certainty if
there be just ground for the Roman’s contempt. In what am I his
inferior? Is ours a lower order of people? Why should I, even in
Cæsar’s presence; feel the shrinking of a slave? Tell me especially
why, if I have the soul, and so choose, I may not hunt the honors of
the world in all its fields? Why may not I take sword and indulge the
passion of war? As a poet, why may not I sing of all themes? I can be a
worker in metals, a keeper of flocks, a merchant, why not an artist
like the Greek? Tell me, O my mother—and this is the sum of my
trouble—why may not a son of Israel do all a Roman may?”
The reader will refer these questions back to the conversation in the
Market-place; the mother, listening with all her faculties awake, from
something which would have been lost upon one less interested in
him—from the connections of the subject, the pointing of the questions,
possibly his accent and tone—was not less swift in making the same
reference. She sat up, and in a voice quick and sharp as his own,
replied, “I see, I see! From association Messala, in boyhood, was
almost a Jew; had he remained here, he might have become a proselyte,
so much do we all borrow from the influences that ripen our lives; but
the years in Rome have been too much for him. I do not wonder at the
change; yet”—her voice fell—“he might have dealt tenderly at least with
you. It is a hard, cruel nature which in youth can forget its first
loves.”
Her hand dropped lightly upon his forehead, and the fingers caught in
his hair and lingered there lovingly, while her eyes sought the highest
stars in view. Her pride responded to his, not merely in echo, but in
the unison of perfect sympathy. She would answer him; at the same time,
not for the world would she have had the answer unsatisfactory: an
admission of inferiority might weaken his spirit for life. She faltered
with misgivings of her own powers.
“What you propose, O my Judah, is not a subject for treatment by a
woman. Let me put its consideration off till to-morrow, and I will have
the wise Simeon—”
“Do not send me to the Rector,” he said, abruptly.
“I will have him come to us.”
“No, I seek more than information; while he might give me that better
than you, O my mother, you can do better by giving me what he
cannot—the resolution which is the soul of a man’s soul.”
She swept the heavens with a rapid glance, trying to compass all the
meaning of his questions.
“While craving justice for ourselves, it is never wise to be unjust to
others. To deny valor in the enemy we have conquered is to underrate
our victory; and if the enemy be strong enough to hold us at bay, much
more to conquer us”—she hesitated—“self-respect bids us seek some other
explanation of our misfortunes than accusing him of qualities inferior
to our own.”
Thus, speaking to herself rather than to him, she began:
“Take heart, O my son. The Messala is nobly descended; his family has
been illustrious through many generations. In the days of Republican
Rome—how far back I cannot tell—they were famous, some as soldiers,
some as civilians. I can recall but one consul of the name; their rank
was senatorial, and their patronage always sought because they were
always rich. Yet if to-day your friend boasted of his ancestry, you
might have shamed him by recounting yours. If he referred to the ages
through which the line is traceable, or to deeds, rank, or wealth—such
allusions, except when great occasion demands them, are tokens of small
minds—if he mentioned them in proof of his superiority, then without
dread, and standing on each particular, you might have challenged him
to a comparison of records.”
Taking a moment’s thought, the mother proceeded:
“One of the ideas of fast hold now is that time has much to do with the
nobility of races and families. A Roman boasting his superiority on
that account over a son of Israel will always fail when put to the
proof. The founding of Rome was his beginning; the very best of them
cannot trace their descent beyond that period; few of them pretend to
do so; and of such as do, I say not one could make good his claim
except by resort to tradition. Messala certainly could not. Let us look
now to ourselves. Could we better?”
A little more light would have enabled him to see the pride that
diffused itself over her face.
“Let us imagine the Roman putting us to the challenge. I would answer
him, neither doubting nor boastful.”
Her voice faltered; a tender thought changed the form of the argument.
“Your father, O my Judah, is at rest with his fathers; yet I remember,
as though it were this evening, the day he and I, with many rejoicing
friends, went up into the Temple to present you to the Lord. We
sacrificed the doves, and to the priest I gave your name, which he
wrote in my presence—‘Judah, son of Ithamar, of the House of Hur.’ The
name was then carried away, and written in a book of the division of
records devoted to the saintly family.
“I cannot tell you when the custom of registration in this mode began.
We know it prevailed before the flight from Egypt. I have heard Hillel
say Abraham caused the record to be first opened with his own name, and
the names of his sons, moved by the promises of the Lord which
separated him and them from all other races, and made them the highest
and noblest, the very chosen of the earth. The covenant with Jacob was
of like effect. ‘In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be
blessed’—so said the angel to Abraham in the place Jehovah-jireh. ‘And
the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy
seed’—so the Lord himself said to Jacob asleep at Bethel on the way to
Haran. Afterwards the wise men looked forward to a just division of the
land of promise; and, that it might be known in the day of partition
who were entitled to portions, the Book of Generations was begun. But
not for that alone. The promise of a blessing to all the earth through
the patriarch reached far into the future. One name was mentioned in
connection with the blessing—the benefactor might be the humblest of
the chosen family, for the Lord our God knows no distinctions of rank
or riches. So, to make the performance clear to men of the generation
who were to witness it, and that they might give the glory to whom it
belonged, the record was required to be kept with absolute certainty.
Has it been so kept?”
The fan played to and fro, until, becoming impatient, he repeated the
question, “Is the record absolutely true?”
“Hillel said it was, and of all who have lived no one was so
well-informed upon the subject. Our people have at times been heedless
of some parts of the law, but never of this part. The good rector
himself has followed the Books of Generations through three
periods—from the promises to the opening of the Temple; thence to the
Captivity; thence, again, to the present. Once only were the records
disturbed, and that was at the end of the second period; but when the
nation returned from the long exile, as a first duty to God, Zerubbabel
restored the Books, enabling us once more to carry the lines of Jewish
descent back unbroken fully two thousand years. And now—”
She paused as if to allow the hearer to measure the time comprehended
in the statement.
“And now,” she continued, “what becomes of the Roman boast of blood
enriched by ages? By that test, the sons of Israel watching the herds
on old Rephaim yonder are nobler than the noblest of the Marcii.”
“And I, mother—by the Books, who am I?”
“What I have said thus far, my son, had reference to your question. I
will answer you. If Messala were here, he might say, as others have
said, that the exact trace of your lineage stopped when the Assyrian
took Jerusalem, and razed the Temple, with all its precious stores; but
you might plead the pious action of Zerubbabel, and retort that all