Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
There were many doors on the right and left of the atrium, leading,
doubtless, to sleeping-chambers; he tried them, but they were all
firmly fastened. Knocking might bring response. Ashamed to make outcry,
he betook himself to a couch, and, lying down, tried to reflect.
All too plainly he was a prisoner; but for what purpose? and by whom?
If the work were Messala’s! He sat up, looked about, and smiled
defiantly. There were weapons in every table. But birds had been
starved in golden cages; not so would he—the couches would serve him as
battering-rams; and he was strong, and there was such increase of might
in rage and despair!
Messala himself could not come. He would never walk again; he was a
cripple like Simonides; still he could move others. And where were
there not others to be moved by him? Ben-Hur arose, and tried the doors
again. Once he called out; the room echoed so that he was startled.
With such calmness as he could assume, he made up his mind to wait a
time before attempting to break a way out.
In such a situation the mind has its ebb and flow of disquiet, with
intervals of peace between. At length—how long, though, he could not
have said—he came to the conclusion that the affair was an accident or
mistake. The palace certainly belonged to somebody; it must have care
and keeping: and the keeper would come; the evening or the night would
bring him. Patience!
So concluding, he waited.
Half an hour passed—a much longer period to Ben-Hur—when the door which
had admitted him opened and closed noiselessly as before, and without
attracting his attention.
The moment of the occurrence he was sitting at the farther end of the
room. A footstep startled him.
“At last she has come!” he thought, with a throb of relief and
pleasure, and arose.
The step was heavy, and accompanied with the gride and clang of coarse
sandals. The gilded pillars were between him and the door; he advanced
quietly, and leaned against one of them. Presently he heard voices—the
voices of men—one of them rough and guttural. What was said he could
not understand, as the language was not of the East or South of Europe.
After a general survey of the room, the strangers crossed to their
left, and were brought into Ben-Hur’s view—two men, one very stout,
both tall, and both in short tunics. They had not the air of masters of
the house or domestics. Everything they saw appeared wonderful to them;
everything they stopped to examine they touched. They were vulgarians.
The atrium seemed profaned by their presence. At the same time, their
leisurely manner and the assurance with which they proceeded pointed to
some right or business; if business, with whom?
With much jargon they sauntered this way and that, all the time
gradually approaching the pillar by which Ben-Hur was standing. Off a
little way, where a slanted gleam of the sun fell with a glare upon the
mosaic of the floor, there was a statue which attracted their notice.
In examining it, they stopped in the light.
The mystery surrounding his own presence in the palace tended, as we
have seen, to make Ben-Hur nervous; so now, when in the tall stout
stranger he recognized the Northman whom he had known in Rome, and seen
crowned only the day before in the Circus as the winning pugilist; when
he saw the man’s face, scarred with the wounds of many battles, and
imbruted by ferocious passions; when he surveyed the fellow’s naked
limbs, very marvels of exercise and training, and his shoulders of
Herculean breadth, a thought of personal danger started a chill along
every vein. A sure instinct warned him that the opportunity for murder
was too perfect to have come by chance; and here now were the
myrmidons, and their business was with him. He turned an anxious eye
upon the Northman’s comrade—young, black-eyed, black-haired, and
altogether Jewish in appearance; he observed, also, that both the men
were in costume exactly such as professionals of their class were in
the habit of wearing in the arena. Putting the several circumstances
together, Ben-Hur could not be longer in doubt: he had been lured into
the palace with design. Out of reach of aid, in this splendid privacy,
he was to die!
At a loss what to do, he gazed from man to man, while there was enacted
within him that miracle of mind by which life is passed before us in
awful detail, to be looked at by ourselves as if it were another’s; and
from the evolvement, from a hidden depth, cast up, as it were, by a
hidden hand, he was given to see that he had entered upon a new life,
different from the old one in this: whereas, in that, he had been the
victim of violences done to him, henceforth he was to be the aggressor.
Only yesterday he had found his first victim! To the purely Christian
nature the presentation would have brought the weakness of remorse. Not
so with Ben-Hur; his spirit had its emotions from the teachings of the
first lawgiver, not the last and greatest one. He had dealt punishment,
not wrong, to Messala. By permission of the Lord, he had triumphed; and
he derived faith from the circumstance—faith the source of all rational
strength, especially strength in peril.
Nor did the influence stop there. The new life was made appear to him a
mission just begun, and holy as the King to come was holy, and certain
as the coming of the King was certain—a mission in which force was
lawful if only because it was unavoidable. Should he, on the very
threshold of such an errand, be afraid?
He undid the sash around his waist, and, baring his head and casting
off his white Jewish gown, stood forth in an undertunic not unlike
those of the enemy, and was ready, body and mind. Folding his arms, he
placed his back against the pillar, and calmly waited.
The examination of the statue was brief. Directly the Northman turned,
and said something in the unknown tongue; then both looked at Ben-Hur.
A few more words, and they advanced towards him.
“Who are you?” he asked, in Latin.
The Northman fetched a smile which did not relieve his face of its
brutalism, and answered,
“Barbarians.”
“This is the palace of Idernee. Whom seek you? Stand and answer.”
The words were spoken with earnestness. The strangers stopped; and in
his turn the Northman asked, “Who are you?”
“A Roman.”
The giant laid his head back upon his shoulders.
“Ha, ha, ha! I have heard how a god once came from a cow licking a
salted stone; but not even a god can make a Roman of a Jew.”
The laugh over, he spoke to his companion again, and they moved nearer.
“Hold!” said Ben-Hur, quitting the pillar. “One word.”
They stopped again.
“A word!” replied the Saxon, folding his immense arms across his
breast, and relaxing the menace beginning to blacken his face. “A word!
Speak.”
“You are Thord the Northman.”
The giant opened his blue eyes.
“You were lanista in Rome.”
Thord nodded.
“I was your scholar.”
“No,” said Thord, shaking his head. “By the beard of Irmin, I had never
a Jew to make a fighting-man of.”
“But I will prove my saying.”
“How?”
“You came here to kill me.”
“That is true.”
“Then let this man fight me singly, and I will make the proof on his
body.”
A gleam of humor shone in the Northman’s face. He spoke to his
companion, who made answer; then he replied with the naivete of a
diverted child,
“Wait till I say begin.”
By repeated touches of his foot, he pushed a couch out on the floor,
and proceeded leisurely to stretch his burly form upon it; when
perfectly at ease, he said, simply, “Now begin.”
Without ado, Ben-Hur walked to his antagonist.
“Defend thyself,” he said.
The man, nothing loath, put up his hands.
As the two thus confronted each other in approved position, there was
no discernible inequality between them; on the contrary, they were as
like as brothers. To the stranger’s confident smile, Ben-Hur opposed an
earnestness which, had his skill been known, would have been accepted
fair warning of danger. Both knew the combat was to be mortal.
Ben-Hur feinted with his right hand. The stranger warded, slightly
advancing his left arm. Ere he could return to guard, Ben-Hur caught
him by the wrist in a grip which years at the oar had made terrible as
a vise. The surprise was complete, and no time given. To throw himself
forward; to push the arm across the man’s throat and over his right
shoulder, and turn him left side front; to strike surely with the ready
left hand; to strike the bare neck under the ear—were but petty
divisions of the same act. No need of a second blow. The myrmidon fell
heavily, and without a cry, and lay still.
Ben-Hur turned to Thord.
“Ha! What! By the beard of Irmin!” the latter cried, in astonishment,
rising to a sitting posture. Then he laughed.
“Ha, ha, ha! I could not have done it better myself.”
He viewed Ben-Hur coolly from head to foot, and, rising, faced him with
undisguised admiration.
“It was my trick—the trick I have practised for ten years in the
schools of Rome. You are not a Jew. Who are you?”
“You knew Arrius the duumvir.”
“Quintus Arrius? Yes, he was my patron.”
“He had a son.”
“Yes,” said Thord, his battered features lighting dully, “I knew the
boy; he would have made a king gladiator. Cæsar offered him his
patronage. I taught him the very trick you played on this one here—a
trick impossible except to a hand and arm like mine. It has won me many
a crown.”
“I am that son of Arrius.”
Thord drew nearer, and viewed him carefully; then his eyes brightened
with genuine pleasure, and, laughing, he held out his hand.
“Ha, ha, ha! He told me I would find a Jew here—a Jew—a dog of a
Jew—killing whom was serving the gods.”
“Who told you so?” asked Ben-Hur, taking the hand.
“He—Messala—ha, ha, ha!”
“When, Thord?”
“Last night.”
“I thought he was hurt.”
“He will never walk again. On his bed he told me between groans.”
A very vivid portrayal of hate in a few words; and Ben-Hur saw that the
Roman, if he lived, would still be capable and dangerous, and follow
him unrelentingly. Revenge remained to sweeten the ruined life;
therefore the clinging to fortune lost in the wager with Sanballat.
Ben-Hur ran the ground over, with a distinct foresight of the many ways
in which it would be possible for his enemy to interfere with him in
the work he had undertaken for the King who was coming. Why not he
resort to the Roman’s methods? The man hired to kill him could be hired
to strike back. It was in his power to offer higher wages. The
temptation was strong; and, half yielding, he chanced to look down at
his late antagonist lying still, with white upturned face, so like
himself. A light came to him, and he asked, “Thord, what was Messala to
give you for killing me?”
“A thousand sestertii.”
“You shall have them yet; and so you do now what I tell you, I will add
three thousand more to the sum.”
The giant reflected aloud,
“I won five thousand yesterday; from the Roman one—six. Give me four,
good Arrius—four more—and I will stand firm for you, though old Thor,
my namesake, strike me with his hammer. Make it four, and I will kill
the lying patrician, if you say so. I have only to cover his mouth with
my hand—thus.”
He illustrated the process by clapping his hand over his own mouth.
“I see,” said Ben-Hur; “ten thousand sestertii is a fortune. It will
enable you to return to Rome, and open a wine-shop near the Great
Circus, and live as becomes the first of the lanistae.”
The very scars on the giant’s face glowed afresh with the pleasure the
picture gave him.
“I will make it four thousand,” Ben-Hur continued; “and in what you
shall do for the money there will be no blood on your hands, Thord.
Hear me now. Did not your friend here look like me?”
“I would have said he was an apple from the same tree.”