Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
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.
BOOK THIRD
“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.).
CHAPTER I
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]
[1] The Roman government, it will be remembered, had two harbors in
which great fleets were constantly kept—Ravenna and Misenum.
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.
In the old time, moreover, there was a gateway in the wall at a certain
point fronting the sea—an empty gateway forming the outlet of a street
which, after the exit, stretched itself, in the form of a broad mole,
out many stadia into the waves.
The watchman on the wall above the gateway was disturbed, one cool
September morning, by a party coming down the street in noisy
conversation. He gave one look, then settled into his drowse again.
There were twenty or thirty persons in the party, of whom the greater
number were slaves with torches, which flamed little and smoked much,
leaving on the air the perfume of the Indian nard. The masters walked
in advance arm-in-arm. One of them, apparently fifty years old,
slightly bald, and wearing over his scant locks a crown of laurel,
seemed, from the attentions paid him, the central object of some
affectionate ceremony. They all sported ample togas of white wool
broadly bordered with purple. A glance had sufficed the watchman. He
knew, without question, they were of high rank, and escorting a friend
to ship after a night of festivity. Further explanation will be found
in the conversation they carried on.
“No, my Quintus,” said one, speaking to him with the crown, “it is ill
of Fortune to take thee from us so soon. Only yesterday thou didst
return from the seas beyond the Pillars. Why, thou hast not even got
back thy land legs.”
“By Castor! if a man may swear a woman’s oath,” said another, somewhat
worse of wine, “let us not lament. Our Quintus is but going to find
what he lost last night. Dice on a rolling ship is not dice on
shore—eh, Quintus?”
“Abuse not Fortune!” exclaimed a third. “She is not blind or fickle. At
Antium, where our Arrius questions her, she answers him with nods, and
at sea she abides with him holding the rudder. She takes him from us,
but does she not always give him back with a new victory?”
“The Greeks are taking him away,” another broke in. “Let us abuse them,
not the gods. In learning to trade they forgot how to fight.”
With these words, the party passed the gateway, and came upon the mole,
with the bay before them beautiful in the morning light. To the veteran
sailor the plash of the waves was like a greeting. He drew a long
breath, as if the perfume of the water were sweeter than that of the
nard, and held his hand aloft.
“My gifts were at Praeneste, not Antium—and see! Wind from the west.
Thanks, O Fortune, my mother!” he said, earnestly.
The friends all repeated the exclamation, and the slaves waved their
torches.
“She comes—yonder!” he continued, pointing to a galley outside the
mole. “What need has a sailor for other mistress? Is your Lucrece more
graceful, my Caius?”
He gazed at the coming ship, and justified his pride. A white sail was
bent to the low mast, and the oars dipped, arose, poised a moment, then
dipped again, with wing-like action, and in perfect time.
“Yes, spare the gods,” he said, soberly, his eyes fixed upon the
vessel. “They send us opportunities. Ours the fault if we fail. And as
for the Greeks, you forget, O my Lentulus, the pirates I am going to
punish are Greeks. One victory over them is of more account than a
hundred over the Africans.”
“Then thy way is to the Aegean?”
The sailor’s eyes were full of his ship.
“What grace, what freedom! A bird hath not less care for the fretting
of the waves. See!” he said, but almost immediately added, “Thy pardon,
my Lentulus. I am going to the Aegean; and as my departure is so near,
I will tell the occasion—only keep it under the rose. I would not that
you abuse the duumvir when next you meet him. He is my friend. The
trade between Greece and Alexandria, as ye may have heard, is hardly
inferior to that between Alexandria and Rome. The people in that part
of the world forgot to celebrate the Cerealia, and Triptolemus paid
them with a harvest not worth the gathering. At all events, the trade
is so grown that it will not brook interruption a day. Ye may also have
heard of the Chersonesan pirates, nested up in the Euxine; none bolder,
by the Bacchae! Yesterday word came to Rome that, with a fleet, they
had rowed down the Bosphorus, sunk the galleys off Byzantium and
Chalcedon, swept the Propontis, and, still unsated, burst through into
the Aegean. The corn-merchants who have ships in the East Mediterranean
are frightened. They had audience with the Emperor himself, and from
Ravenna there go to-day a hundred galleys, and from Misenum”—he paused
as if to pique the curiosity of his friends, and ended with an
emphatic—“one.”
“Happy Quintus! We congratulate thee!”
“The preferment forerunneth promotion. We salute thee duumvir; nothing
less.”
“Quintus Arrius, the duumvir, hath a better sound than Quintus Arrius,
the tribune.”
In such manner they showered him with congratulations.
“I am glad with the rest,” said the bibulous friend, “very glad; but I
must be practical, O my duumvir; and not until I know if promotion will
help thee to knowledge of the tesserae will I have an opinion as to
whether the gods mean thee ill or good in this—this business.”
“Thanks, many thanks!” Arrius replied, speaking to them collectively.
“Had ye but lanterns, I would say ye were augurs. Perpol! I will go
further, and show what master diviners ye are! See—and read.”
From the folds of his toga he drew a roll of paper, and passed it to
them, saying, “Received while at table last night from—Sejanus.”
The name was already a great one in the Roman world; great, and not so
infamous as it afterwards became.
“Sejanus!” they exclaimed, with one voice, closing in to read what the
minister had written.
“Sejanus to C. Caecilius Rufus, Duumvir.
“ROME, XIX. Kal. Sept.
“Cæsar hath good report of Quintus Arrius, the tribune. In particular
he hath heard of his valor, manifested in the western seas, insomuch
that it is his will that the said Quintus be transferred instantly to
the East.
“It is our Cæsar’s will, further, that you cause a hundred triremes,
of the first class, and full appointment, to be despatched without
delay against the pirates who have appeared in the Aegean, and that
Quintus be sent to command the fleet so despatched.
“Details are thine, my Caecilius.
“The necessity is urgent, as thou will be advised by the reports
enclosed for thy perusal and the information of the said Quintus.
“SEJANUS.”
Arrius gave little heed to the reading. As the ship drew more plainly
out of the perspective, she became more and more an attraction to him.