Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
in a roll of brilliance flung it off—flung it so it fell close to the
man. And he, hearing the sound of the fall so near by, looked up, and
lo! a Woman—the First Woman—was stooping to help him! She reached a
hand to him; he caught it and arose; and nevermore was miserable, but
evermore happy.”
“Such, O son of Hur! is the genesis of the beautiful, as they tell it
on the Nile.”
She paused.
“A pretty invention, and cunning,” he said, directly; “but it is
imperfect. What did Osiris afterwards?”
“Oh yes,” she replied. “He called the Divine Wife back to the sun, and
they went on all pleasantly together, each helping the other.”
“And shall I not do as the first man?”
He carried the hand resting upon his neck to his lips. “In love—in
love!” he said.
His head dropped softly into her lap.
“You will find the King,” she said, placing her other hand caressingly
upon his head. “You will go on and find the King and serve him. With
your sword you will earn his richest gifts; and his best soldier will
be my hero.”
He turned his face, and saw hers close above. In all the sky there was
that moment nothing so bright to him as her eyes, enshadowed though
they were. Presently he sat up, and put his arms about her, and kissed
her passionately, saying, “O Egypt, Egypt! If the King has crowns in
gift, one shall be mine; and I will bring it and put it here over the
place my lips have marked. You shall be a queen—my queen—no one more
beautiful! And we will be ever, ever so happy!”
“And you will tell me everything, and let me help you in all?” she
said, kissing him in return.
The question chilled his fervor.
“Is it not enough that I love you?” he asked.
“Perfect love means perfect faith,” she replied. “But never mind—you
will know me better.”
She took her hand from him and arose.
“You are cruel,” he said.
Moving away, she stopped by the camel, and touched its front face with
her lips.
“O thou noblest of thy kind!—that, because there is no suspicion in thy
love.”
An instant, and she was gone.
CHAPTER V
The third day of the journey the party nooned by the river Jabbok,
where there were a hundred or more men, mostly of Peraea, resting
themselves and their beasts. Hardly had they dismounted, before a man
came to them with a pitcher of water and a bowl, and offered them
drink; as they received the attention with much courtesy, he said,
looking at the camel, “I am returning from the Jordan, where just now
there are many people from distant parts, travelling as you are,
illustrious friend; but they had none of them the equal of your servant
here. A very noble animal. May I ask of what breed he is sprung?”
Balthasar answered, and sought his rest; but Ben-Hur, more curious,
took up the remark.
“At what place on the river are the people?” he asked.
“At Bethabara.”
“It used to be a lonesome ford,” said Ben-Hur. “I cannot understand how
it can have become of such interest.”
“I see,” the stranger replied; “you, too, are from abroad, and have not
heard the good tidings.”
“What tidings?”
“Well, a man has appeared out of the wilderness—a very holy man—with
his mouth full of strange words, which take hold of all who hear them.
He calls himself John the Nazarite, son of Zacharias, and says he is
the messenger sent before the Messiah.”
Even Iras listened closely while the man continued:
“They say of this John that he has spent his life from childhood in a
cave down by En-Gedi, praying and living more strictly than the
Essenes. Crowds go to hear him preach. I went to hear him with the
rest.”
“Have all these, your friends, been there?”
“Most of them are going; a few are coming away.”
“What does he preach?”
“A new doctrine—one never before taught in Israel, as all say. He calls
it repentance and baptism. The rabbis do not know what to make of him;
nor do we. Some have asked him if he is the Christ, others if he is
Elias; but to them all he has the answer, ‘I am the voice of one crying
in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord!’”
At this point the man was called away by his friends; as he was going,
Balthasar spoke.
“Good stranger!” he said, tremulously, “tell us if we shall find the
preacher at the place you left him.”
“Yes, at Bethabara.”
“Who should this Nazarite be?” said Ben-Hur to Iras, “if not the herald
of our King?”
In so short a time he had come to regard the daughter as more
interested in the mysterious personage he was looking for than the aged
father! Nevertheless, the latter with a positive glow in his sunken
eyes half arose, and said,
“Let us make haste. I am not tired.”
They turned away to help the slave.
There was little conversation between the three at the stopping-place
for the night west of Ramoth-Gilead.
“Let us arise early, son of Hur,” said the old man. “The Saviour may
come, and we not there.”
“The King cannot be far behind his herald,” Iras whispered, as she
prepared to take her place on the camel.
“To-morrow we will see!” Ben-Hur replied, kissing her hand.
Next day about the third hour, out of the pass through which, skirting
the base of Mount Gilead, they had journeyed since leaving Ramoth, the
party came upon the barren steppe east of the sacred river. Opposite
them they saw the upper limit of the old palm lands of Jericho,
stretching off to the hill-country of Judea. Ben-Hur’s blood ran
quickly, for he knew the ford was close at hand.
“Content you, good Balthasar,” he said; “we are almost there.”
The driver quickened the camel’s pace. Soon they caught sight of booths
and tents and tethered animals; and then of the river, and a multitude
collected down close by the bank, and yet another multitude on the
western shore. Knowing that the preacher was preaching, they made
greater haste; yet, as they were drawing near, suddenly there was a
commotion in the mass, and it began to break up and disperse.
They were too late!
“Let us stay here,” said Ben-Hur to Balthasar, who was wringing his
hands. “The Nazarite may come this way.”
The people were too intent upon what they had heard, and too busy in
discussion, to notice the new-comers. When some hundreds were gone by,
and it seemed the opportunity to so much as see the Nazarite was lost
to the latter, up the river not far away they beheld a person coming
towards them of such singular appearance they forgot all else.
Outwardly the man was rude and uncouth, even savage. Over a thin, gaunt
visage of the hue of brown parchment, over his shoulders and down his
back below the middle, in witch-like locks, fell a covering of
sun-scorched hair. His eyes were burning-bright. All his right side was
naked, and of the color of his face, and quite as meagre; a shirt of
the coarsest camel’s-hair—coarse as Bedouin tent-cloth—clothed the rest
of his person to the knees, being gathered at the waist by a broad
girdle of untanned leather. His feet were bare. A scrip, also of
untanned leather, was fastened to the girdle. He used a knotted staff
to help him forward. His movement was quick, decided, and strangely
watchful. Every little while he tossed the unruly hair from his eyes,
and peered round as if searching for somebody.
The fair Egyptian surveyed the son of the Desert with surprise, not to
say disgust. Presently, raising the curtain of the houdah, she spoke to
Ben-Hur, who sat his horse near by.
“Is that the herald of thy King?”
“It is the Nazarite,” he replied, without looking up.
In truth, he was himself more than disappointed. Despite his
familiarity with the ascetic colonists in En-Gedi—their dress, their
indifference to all worldly opinion, their constancy to vows which gave
them over to every imaginable suffering of body, and separated them
from others of their kind as absolutely as if they had not been born
like them—and notwithstanding he had been notified on the way to look
for a Nazarite whose simple description of himself was a Voice from the
Wilderness—still Ben-Hur’s dream of the King who was to be so great and
do so much had colored all his thought of him, so that he never doubted
to find in the forerunner some sign or token of the goodliness and
royalty he was announcing. Gazing at the savage figure before him, the
long trains of courtiers whom he had been used to see in the thermae
and imperial corridors at Rome arose before him, forcing a comparison.
Shocked, shamed, bewildered, he could only answer,
“It is the Nazarite.”
With Balthasar it was very different. The ways of God, he knew, were
not as men would have them. He had seen the Saviour a child in a
manger, and was prepared by his faith for the rude and simple in
connection with the Divine reappearance. So he kept his seat, his hands
crossed upon his breast, his lips moving in prayer. He was not
expecting a king.
In this time of such interest to the new-comers, and in which they were
so differently moved, another man had been sitting by himself on a
stone at the edge of the river, thinking yet, probably, of the sermon
he had been hearing. Now, however, he arose, and walked slowly up from
the shore, in a course to take him across the line the Nazarite was
pursuing and bring him near the camel.
And the two—the preacher and the stranger—kept on until they came, the
former within twenty yards of the animal, the latter within ten feet.
Then the preacher stopped, and flung the hair from his eyes, looked at
the stranger, threw his hands up as a signal to all the people in
sight; and they also stopped, each in the pose of a listener; and when
the hush was perfect, slowly the staff in the Nazarite’s right hand
came down and pointed to the stranger.
All those who before were but listeners became watchers also.
At the same instant, under the same impulse, Balthasar and Ben-Hur
fixed their gaze upon the man pointed out, and both took the same
impression, only in different degree. He was moving slowly towards them
in a clear space a little to their front, a form slightly above the
average in stature, and slender, even delicate. His action was calm and
deliberate, like that habitual to men much given to serious thought
upon grave subjects; and it well became his costume, which was an
undergarment full-sleeved and reaching to the ankles, and an outer robe
called the talith; on his left arm he carried the usual handkerchief
for the head, the red fillet swinging loose down his side. Except the
fillet and a narrow border of blue at the lower edge of the talith, his
attire was of linen yellowed with dust and road stains. Possibly the
exception should be extended to the tassels, which were blue and white,
as prescribed by law for rabbis. His sandals were of the simplest kind.
He was without scrip or girdle or staff.
These points of appearance, however, the three beholders observed
briefly, and rather as accessories to the head and face of the man,
which—especially the latter—were the real sources of the spell they
caught in common with all who stood looking at him.
The head was open to the cloudless light, except as it was draped with
hair long and slightly waved, and parted in the middle, and auburn in
tint, with a tendency to reddish golden where most strongly touched by
the sun. Under a broad, low forehead, under black well arched brows,
beamed eyes dark-blue and large, and softened to exceeding tenderness
by lashes of the great length sometimes seen on children, but seldom,
if ever, on men. As to the other features, it would have been difficult
to decide whether they were Greek or Jewish. The delicacy of the
nostrils and mouth was unusual to the latter type; and when it was
taken into account with the gentleness of the eyes, the pallor of the
complexion, the fine texture of the hair, and the softness of the
beard, which fell in waves over his throat to his breast, never a