Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
her knowledge in her heart; hopeless herself, she redoubled her
devotion to Tirzah, and with wonderful ingenuity—wonderful chiefly in
its very inexhaustibility—continued to keep the daughter ignorant of
what they were beset with, and even hopeful that it was nothing. She
repeated her little games, and retold her stories, and invented new
ones, and listened with ever so much pleasure to the songs she would
have from Tirzah, while on her own wasting lips the psalms of the
singing king and their race served to bring soothing of forgetfulness,
and keep alive in them both the recollection of the God who would seem
to have abandoned them—the world not more lightly or utterly.
Slowly, steadily, with horrible certainty, the disease spread, after a
while bleaching their heads white, eating holes in their lips and
eyelids, and covering their bodies with scales; then it fell to their
throats shrilling their voices, and to their joints, hardening the
tissues and cartilages—slowly, and, as the mother well knew, past
remedy, it was affecting their lungs and arteries and bones, at each
advance making the sufferers more and more loathsome; and so it would
continue till death, which might be years before them.
Another day of dread at length came—the day the mother, under impulsion
of duty, at last told Tirzah the name of their ailment; and the two, in
agony of despair, prayed that the end might come quickly.
Still, as is the force of habit, these so afflicted grew in time not
merely to speak composedly of their disease; they beheld the hideous
transformation of their persons as of course, and in despite clung to
existence. One tie to earth remained to them; unmindful of their own
loneliness, they kept up a certain spirit by talking and dreaming of
Ben-Hur. The mother promised reunion with him to the sister, and she to
the mother, not doubting, either of them, that he was equally faithful
to them, and would be equally happy of the meeting. And with the
spinning and respinning of this slender thread they found pleasure, and
excused their not dying. In such manner as we have seen, they were
solacing themselves the moment Gesius called them, at the end of twelve
hours’ fasting and thirst.
The torches flashed redly through the dungeon, and liberty was come.
“God is good,” the widow cried—not for what had been, O reader, but for
what was. In thankfulness for present mercy, nothing so becomes us as
losing sight of past ills.
The tribune came directly; then in the corner to which she had fled,
suddenly a sense of duty smote the elder of the women, and straightway
the awful warning—
“Unclean, unclean!”
Ah, the pang the effort to acquit herself of that duty cost the mother!
Not all the selfishness of joy over the prospect could keep her blind
to the consequences of release, now that it was at hand. The old happy
life could never be again. If she went near the house called home, it
would be to stop at the gate and cry, “Unclean, unclean!” She must go
about with the yearnings of love alive in her breast strong as ever,
and more sensitive even, because return in kind could not be. The boy
of whom she had so constantly thought, and with all sweet promises such
as mothers find their purest delight in, must, at meeting her, stand
afar off. If he held out his hands to her, and called “Mother, mother,”
for very love of him she must answer, “Unclean, unclean!” And this
other child, before whom, in want of other covering, she was spreading
her long tangled locks, bleached unnaturally white—ah! that she was she
must continue, sole partner of her blasted remainder of life. Yet, O
reader, the brave woman accepted the lot, and took up the cry which had
been its sign immemorially, and which thenceforward was to be her
salutation without change—“Unclean, unclean!”
The tribune heard it with a tremor, but kept his place.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Two women dying of hunger and thirst. Yet”—the mother did not
falter—“come not near us, nor touch the floor or the wall. Unclean,
unclean!”
“Give me thy story, woman—thy name, and when thou wert put here, and by
whom, and for what.”
“There was once in this city of Jerusalem a Prince Ben-Hur, the friend
of all generous Romans, and who had Cæsar for his friend. I am his
widow, and this one with me is his child. How may I tell you for what
we were sunk here, when I do not know, unless it was because we were
rich? Valerius Gratus can tell you who our enemy was, and when our
imprisonment began. I cannot. See to what we have been reduced—oh, see,
and have pity!”
The air was heavy with the pest and the smoke of the torches, yet the
Roman called one of the torch-bearers to his side, and wrote the answer
nearly word for word. It was terse, and comprehensive, containing at
once a history, an accusation, and a prayer. No common person could
have made it, and he could not but pity and believe.
“Thou shalt have relief, woman,” he said, closing the tablets. “I will
send thee food and drink.”
“And raiment, and purifying water, we pray you, O generous Roman!”
“As thou wilt,” he replied.
“God is good,” said the widow, sobbing. “May his peace abide with you!”
“And, further,” he added, “I cannot see thee again. Make preparation,
and to-night I will have thee taken to the gate of the Tower, and set
free. Thou knowest the law. Farewell.”
He spoke to the men, and went out the door.
Very shortly some slaves came to the cell with a large gurglet of
water, a basin and napkins, a platter with bread and meat, and some
garments of women’s wear; and, setting them down within reach of the
prisoners, they ran away.
About the middle of the first watch, the two were conducted to the
gate, and turned into the street. So the Roman quit himself of them,
and in the city of their fathers they were once more free.
Up to the stars, twinkling merrily as of old, they looked; then they
asked themselves,
“What next? and where to?”
CHAPTER III
About the hour Gesius, the keeper, made his appearance before the
tribune in the Tower of Antonia, a footman was climbing the eastern
face of Mount Olivet. The road was rough and dusty, and vegetation on
that side burned brown, for it was the dry season in Judea. Well for
the traveller that he had youth and strength, not to speak of the cool,
flowing garments with which he was clothed.
He proceeded slowly, looking often to his right and left; not with the
vexed, anxious expression which marks a man going forward uncertain of
the way, but rather the air with which one approaches as old
acquaintance after a long separation—half of pleasure, half of inquiry;
as if he were saying, “I am glad to be with you again; let me see in
what you are changed.”
As he arose higher, he sometimes paused to look behind him over the
gradually widening view terminating in the mountains of Moab; but when
at length he drew near the summit, he quickened his step, unmindful of
fatigue, and hurried on without pause or turning of the face. On the
summit—to reach which he bent his steps somewhat right of the beaten
path—he came to a dead stop, arrested as if by a strong hand. Then one
might have seen his eyes dilate, his cheeks flush, his breath quicken,
effects all of one bright sweeping glance at what lay before him.
The traveller, good reader, was no other than Ben-Hur; the spectacle,
Jerusalem.
Not the Holy City of to-day, but the Holy City as left by Herod—the
Holy City of the Christ. Beautiful yet, as seen from old Olivet, what
must it have been then?
Ben-Hur betook him to a stone and sat down, and, stripping his head of
the close white handkerchief which served it for covering, made the
survey at leisure.
The same has been done often since by a great variety of persons, under
circumstances surpassingly singular—by the son of Vespasian, by the
Islamite, by the Crusader, conquerors all of them; by many a pilgrim
from the great New World, which waited discovery nearly fifteen hundred
years after the time of our story; but of the multitude probably not
one has taken that view with sensations more keenly poignant, more
sadly sweet, more proudly bitter, than Ben-Hur. He was stirred by
recollections of his countrymen, their triumphs and vicissitudes, their
history the history of God. The city was of their building, at once a
lasting testimony of their crimes and devotion, their weakness and
genius, their religion and their irreligion. Though he had seen Rome to
familiarity, he was gratified. The sight filled a measure of pride
which would have made him drunk with vainglory but for the thought,
princely as the property was, it did not any longer belong to his
countrymen; the worship in the Temple was by permission of strangers;
the hill where David dwelt was a marbled cheat—an office in which the
chosen of the Lord were wrung and wrung for taxes, and scourged for
very deathlessness of faith. These, however, were pleasures and griefs
of patriotism common to every Jew of the period; in addition, Ben-Hur
brought with him a personal history which would not out of mind for
other consideration whatever, which the spectacle served only to
freshen and vivify.
A country of hills changes but little; where the hills are of rock, it
changes not at all. The scene Ben-Hur beheld is the same now, except as
respects the city. The failure is in the handiwork of man alone.
The sun dealt more kindly by the west side of Olivet than by the east,
and men were certainly more loving towards it. The vines with which it
was partially clad, and the sprinkling of trees, chiefly figs and old
wild olives, were comparatively green. Down to the dry bed of the
Cedron the verdure extended, a refreshment to the vision; there Olivet
ceased and Moriah began—a wall of bluff boldness, white as snow,
founded by Solomon, completed by Herod. Up, up the wall the eye climbed
course by course of the ponderous rocks composing it—up to Solomon’s
Porch, which was as the pedestal of the monument, the hill being the
plinth. Lingering there a moment, the eye resumed its climbing, going
next to the Gentiles’ Court, then to the Israelites’ Court, then to the
Women’s Court, then to the Court of the Priests, each a pillared tier
of white marble, one above the other in terraced retrocession; over
them all a crown of crowns infinitely sacred, infinitely beautiful,
majestic in proportions, effulgent with beaten gold—lo! the Tent, the
Tabernacle, the Holy of Holies. The Ark was not there, but Jehovah
was—in the faith of every child of Israel he was there a personal
Presence. As a temple, as a monument, there was nowhere anything of
man’s building to approach that superlative apparition. Now, not a
stone of it remains above another. Who shall rebuild that building?
When shall the rebuilding be begun? So asks every pilgrim who has stood
where Ben-Hur was—he asks, knowing the answer is in the bosom of God,
whose secrets are not least marvellous in their well-keeping. And then
the third question, What of him who foretold the ruin which has so
certainly befallen? God? Or man of God? Or—enough that the question is
for us to answer.
And still Ben-Hur’s eyes climbed on and up—up over the roof of the
Temple, to the hill Zion, consecrated to sacred memories, inseparable
from the anointed kings. He knew the Cheesemonger’s Valley dipped deep
down between Moriah and Zion; that it was spanned by the Xystus; that
there were gardens and palaces in its depths; but over them all his
thoughts soared with his vision to the great grouping on the royal
hill—the house of Caiaphas, the Central Synagogue, the Roman
Praetorium, Hippicus the eternal, and the sad but mighty cenotaphs
Phasaelus and Mariamne—all relieved against Gareb, purpling in the
distance. And when midst them he singled out the palace of Herod, what