Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
Upon the marble pavement there was a scurry of sandalled feet; the
crowd opened, and a party of girls rushed about the speaker and his
fair friend, and began singing and dancing to the tabrets they
themselves touched. The woman, scared, clung to the man, who put an arm
about her, and, with kindled face, kept time to the music with the
other hand overhead. The hair of the dancers floated free, and their
limbs blushed through the robes of gauze which scarcely draped them.
Words may not be used to tell of the voluptuousness of the dance. One
brief round, and they darted off through the yielding crowd lightly as
they had come.
“Now what think you?” cried the man to the woman.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“Devadasi—priestesses devoted to the Temple of Apollo. There is an army
of them. They make the chorus in celebrations. This is their home.
Sometimes they wander off to other cities, but all they make is brought
here to enrich the house of the divine musician. Shall we go now?”
Next minute the two were gone.
Ben-Hur took comfort in the assurance that no one was ever lost in
Daphne, and he, too, set out—where, he knew not.
A sculpture reared upon a beautiful pedestal in the garden attracted
him first. It proved to be the statue of a centaur. An inscription
informed the unlearned visitor that it exactly represented Chiron, the
beloved of Apollo and Diana, instructed by them in the mysteries of
hunting, medicine, music, and prophecy. The inscription also bade the
stranger look out at a certain part of the heavens, at a certain hour
of the clear night, and he would behold the dead alive among the stars,
whither Jupiter had transferred the good genius.
The wisest of the centaurs continued, nevertheless, in the service of
mankind. In his hand he held a scroll, on which, graven in Greek, were
paragraphs of a notice:
“O Traveller!
“Art thou a stranger?
“I. Hearken to the singing of the brooks, and fear not the rain of the
fountains; so will the Naiades learn to love thee.
“II. The invited breezes of Daphne are Zephyrus and Auster; gentle
ministers of life, they will gather sweets for thee; when Eurus blows,
Diana is elsewhere hunting; when Boreas blusters, go hide, for Apollo
is angry.
“III. The shades of the Grove are thine in the day; at night they
belong to Pan and his Dryades. Disturb them not.
“IV. Eat of the Lotus by the brooksides sparingly, unless thou wouldst
have surcease of memory, which is to become a child of Daphne.
“V. Walk thou round the weaving spider—’tis Arachne at work for
Minerva.
“VI. Wouldst thou behold the tears of Daphne, break but a bud from a
laurel bough—and die.
“Heed thou!
“And stay and be happy.”
Ben-Hur left the interpretation of the mystic notice to others fast
enclosing him, and turned away as the white bull was led by. The boy
sat in the basket, followed by a procession; after them again, the
woman with the goats; and behind her the flute and tabret players, and
another procession of gift-bringers.
“Whither go they?” asked a bystander.
Another made answer, “The bull to Father Jove; the goat—”
“Did not Apollo once keep the flocks of Admetus?”
“Ay, the goat to Apollo!”
The goodness of the reader is again besought in favor of an
explanation. A certain facility of accommodation in the matter of
religion comes to us after much intercourse with people of a different
faith; gradually we attain the truth that every creed is illustrated by
good men who are entitled to our respect, but whom we cannot respect
without courtesy to their creed. To this point Ben-Hur had arrived.
Neither the years in Rome nor those in the galley had made any
impression upon his religious faith; he was yet a Jew. In his view,
nevertheless, it was not an impiety to look for the beautiful in the
Grove of Daphne.
The remark does not interdict the further saying, if his scruples had
been ever so extreme, not improbably he would at this time have
smothered them. He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a
trifle; nor was his anger like the fool’s, pumped from the wells of
nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath
peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation
of a hope—dream, if you will—in which the choicest happinesses were
thought to be certainly in reach. In such case nothing intermediate
will carry off the passion—the quarrel is with Fate.
Let us follow the philosophy a little further, and say to ourselves, it
were well in such quarrels if Fate were something tangible, to be
despatched with a look or a blow, or a speaking personage with whom
high words were possible; then the unhappy mortal would not always end
the affair by punishing himself.
In ordinary mood, Ben-Hur would not have come to the Grove alone, or,
coming alone, he would have availed himself of his position in the
consul’s family, and made provision against wandering idly about,
unknowing and unknown; he would have had all the points of interest in
mind, and gone to them under guidance, as in the despatch of business;
or, wishing to squander days of leisure in the beautiful place, he
would have had in hand a letter to the master of it all, whoever he
might be. This would have made him a sightseer, like the shouting herd
he was accompanying; whereas he had no reverence for the deities of the
Grove, nor curiosity; a man in the blindness of bitter disappointment,
he was adrift, not waiting for Fate, but seeking it as a desperate
challenger.
Every one has known this condition of mind, though perhaps not all in
the same degree; every one will recognize it as the condition in which
he has done brave things with apparent serenity; and every one reading
will say, Fortunate for Ben-Hur if the folly which now catches him is
but a friendly harlequin with whistle and painted cap, and not some
Violence with a pointed sword pitiless.
CHAPTER VI
Ben-Hur entered the woods with the processions. He had not interest
enough at first to ask where they were going; yet, to relieve him from
absolute indifference, he had a vague impression that they were in
movement to the temples, which were the central objects of the Grove,
supreme in attractions.
Presently, as singers dreamfully play with a flitting chorus, he began
repeating to himself, “Better be a worm, and feed on the mulberries of
Daphne, than a king’s guest.” Then of the much repetition arose
questions importunate of answer. Was life in the Grove so very sweet?
Wherein was the charm? Did it lie in some tangled depth of philosophy?
Or was it something in fact, something on the surface, discernible to
every-day wakeful senses? Every year thousands, forswearing the world,
gave themselves to service here. Did they find the charm? And was it
sufficient, when found, to induce forgetfulness profound enough to shut
out of mind the infinitely diverse things of life? those that sweeten
and those that embitter? hopes hovering in the near future as well as
sorrows born of the past? If the Grove were so good for them, why
should it not be good for him? He was a Jew; could it be that the
excellences were for all the world but children of Abraham? Forthwith
he bent all his faculties to the task of discovery, unmindful of the
singing of the gift-bringers and the quips of his associates.
In the quest, the sky yielded him nothing; it was blue, very blue, and
full of twittering swallows—so was the sky over the city.
Further on, out of the woods at his right hand, a breeze poured across
the road, splashing him with a wave of sweet smells, blent of roses and
consuming spices. He stopped, as did others, looking the way the breeze
came.
“A garden over there?” he said, to a man at his elbow.
“Rather some priestly ceremony in performance—something to Diana, or
Pan, or a deity of the woods.”
The answer was in his mother tongue. Ben-Hur gave the speaker a
surprised look.
“A Hebrew?” he asked him.
The man replied with a deferential smile,
“I was born within a stone’s-throw of the market-place in Jerusalem.”
Ben-Hur was proceeding to further speech, when the crowd surged
forward, thrusting him out on the side of the walk next the woods, and
carrying the stranger away. The customary gown and staff, a brown cloth
on the head tied by a yellow rope, and a strong Judean face to avouch
the garments of honest right, remained in the young man’s mind, a kind
of summary of the man.
This took place at a point where a path into the woods began, offering
a happy escape from the noisy processions. Ben-Hur availed himself of
the offer.
He walked first into a thicket which, from the road, appeared in a
state of nature, close, impenetrable, a nesting-place for wild birds. A
few steps, however, gave him to see the master’s hand even there. The
shrubs were flowering or fruit-bearing; under the bending branches the
ground was pranked with brightest blooms; over them the jasmine
stretched its delicate bonds. From lilac and rose, and lily and tulip,
from oleander and strawberry-tree, all old friends in the gardens of
the valleys about the city of David, the air, lingering or in haste,
loaded itself with exhalations day and night; and that nothing might be
wanting to the happiness of the nymphs and naiads, down through the
flower-lighted shadows of the mass a brook went its course gently, and
by many winding ways.
Out of the thicket, as he proceeded, on his right and left, issued the
cry of the pigeon and the cooing of turtle-doves; blackbirds waited for
him, and bided his coming close; a nightingale kept its place fearless,
though he passed in arm’s-length; a quail ran before him at his feet,
whistling to the brood she was leading, and as he paused for them to
get out of his way, a figure crawled from a bed of honeyed musk
brilliant with balls of golden blossoms. Ben-Hur was startled. Had he,
indeed, been permitted to see a satyr at home? The creature looked up
at him, and showed in its teeth a hooked pruning-knife; he smiled at
his own scare, and, lo! the charm was evolved! Peace without fear—peace
a universal condition—that it was!
He sat upon the ground beneath a citron-tree, which spread its gray
roots sprawling to receive a branch of the brook. The nest of a
titmouse hung close to the bubbling water, and the tiny creature looked
out of the door of the nest into his eyes. “Verily, the bird is
interpreting to me,” he thought. “It says, ‘I am not afraid of you, for
the law of this happy place is Love.’”
The charm of the Grove seemed plain to him; he was glad, and determined
to render himself one of the lost in Daphne. In charge of the flowers
and shrubs, and watching the growth of all the dumb excellences
everywhere to be seen, could not he, like the man with the
pruning-knife in his mouth, forego the days of his troubled life—forego
them forgetting and forgotten?
But by-and-by his Jewish nature began to stir within him.
The charm might be sufficient for some people. Of what kind were they?
Love is delightful—ah! how pleasant as a successor to wretchedness like
his. But was it all there was of life? All?
There was an unlikeness between him and those who buried themselves
contentedly here. They had no duties—they could not have had; but he—
“God of Israel!” he cried aloud, springing to his feet, with burning
cheeks—“Mother! Tirzah! Cursed be the moment, cursed the place, in
which I yield myself happy in your loss!”
He hurried away through the thicket, and came to a stream flowing with
the volume of a river between banks of masonry, broken at intervals by
gated sluiceways. A bridge carried the path he was traversing across
the stream; and, standing upon it, he saw other bridges, no two of them
alike. Under him the water was lying in a deep pool, clear as a shadow;