Ben Hur (70 page)

When the sun would gild the crest of Olivet and the Mount of
Offence with light sharper and more brilliant in that old land
than in the West, she knew Amrah would come, first to the well,
then to a stone midway the well and the foot of the hill on which
she had her abode, and that the good servant would there deposit
the food she carried in the basket, and fill the water-jar afresh
for the day. Of her former plentitude of happiness, that brief
visit was all that remained to the unfortunate. She could then ask
about her son, and be told of his welfare, with such bits of news
concerning him as the messenger could glean. Usually the information
was meagre enough, yet comforting; at times she heard he was at home;
then she would issue from her dreary cell at break of day, and sit
till noon, and from noon to set of sun, a motionless figure draped
in white, looking, statue-like, invariably to one point—over the
Temple to the spot under the rounded sky where the old house stood,
dear in memory, and dearer because he was there. Nothing else was
left her. Tirzah she counted of the dead; and as for herself,
she simply waited the end, knowing every hour of life was an
hour of dying—happily, of painless dying.

The things of nature about the hill to keep her sensitive to
the world's attractions were wretchedly scant; beasts and birds
avoided the place as if they knew its history and present use;
every green thing perished in its first season; the winds warred
upon the shrubs and venturous grasses, leaving to drought such as
they could not uproot. Look where she would, the view was made
depressingly suggestive by tombs—tombs above her, tombs below,
tombs opposite her own tomb—all now freshly whitened in warning
to visiting pilgrims. In the sky—clear, fair, inviting—one would
think she might have found some relief to her ache of mind; but,
alas! in making the beautiful elsewhere the sun served her never so
unfriendly—it did but disclose her growing hideousness. But for the
sun she would not have been the horror she was to herself, nor been
waked so cruelly from dreams of Tirzah as she used to be. The gift
of seeing can be sometimes a dreadful curse.

Does one ask why she did not make an end to her sufferings?

THE LAW FORBADE HER!

A Gentile may smile at the answer; but so will not a son of Israel.

While she sat there peopling the dusky solitude with thoughts even
more cheerless, suddenly a woman came up the hill staggering and
spent with exertion.

The widow arose hastily, and covering her head, cried, in a voice
unnaturally harsh, "Unclean, unclean!"

In a moment, heedless of the notice, Amrah was at her feet. All the
long-pent love of the simple creature burst forth: with tears and
passionate exclamations she kissed her mistress's garments, and for
a while the latter strove to escape from her; then, seeing she
could not, she waited till the violence of the paroxysm was over.

"What have you done, Amrah?" she said. "Is it by such disobedience
you prove your love for us? Wicked woman! You are lost; and he—your
master—you can never, never go back to him."

Amrah grovelled sobbing in the dust.

"The ban of the Law is upon you, too; you cannot return to Jerusalem.
What will become of us? Who will bring us bread? O wicked, wicked Amrah!
We are all, all undone alike!"

"Mercy, mercy!" Amrah answered from the ground.

"You should have been merciful to yourself, and by so doing been
most merciful to us. Now where can we fly? There is no one to
help us. O false servant! The wrath of the Lord was already too
heavy upon us."

Here Tirzah, awakened by the noise, appeared at the door of the
tomb. The pen shrinks from the picture she presented. In the
half-clad apparition, patched with scales, lividly seamed,
nearly blind, its limbs and extremities swollen to grotesque
largeness, familiar eyes however sharpened by love could not
have recognized the creature of childish grace and purity we
first beheld her.

"Is it Amrah, mother?"

The servant tried to crawl to her also.

"Stay, Amrah!" the widow cried, imperiously. "I forbid you touching
her. Rise, and get you gone before any at the well see you here.
Nay, I forgot—it is too late! You must remain now and share our
doom. Rise, I say!"

Amrah rose to her knees, and said, brokenly and with clasped hands,
"O good mistress! I am not false—I am not wicked. I bring you good
tidings."

"Of Judah?" and as she spoke, the widow half withdrew the cloth
from her head.

"There is a wonderful man," Amrah continued, "who has power to cure
you. He speaks a word, and the sick are made well, and even the dead
come to life. I have come to take you to him."

"Poor Amrah!" said Tirzah, compassionately.

"No," cried Amrah, detecting the doubt underlying the expression—"no,
as the Lord lives, even the Lord of Israel, my God as well as yours,
I speak the truth. Go with me, I pray, and lose no time. This morning
he will pass by on his way to the city. See! the day is at hand.
Take the food here—eat, and let us go."

The mother listened eagerly. Not unlikely she had heard of the
wonderful man, for by this time his fame had penetrated every
nook in the land.

"Who is he?" she asked.

"A Nazarene."

"Who told you about him?"

"Judah."

"Judah told you? Is he at home?"

"He came last night."

The widow, trying to still the beating of her heart, was silent
awhile.

"Did Judah send you to tell us this?" she next asked.

"No. He believes you dead."

"There was a prophet once who cured a leper," the mother said
thoughtfully to Tirzah; "but he had his power from God." Then
addressing Amrah, she asked, "How does my son know this man so
possessed?"

"He was travelling with him, and heard the lepers call, and saw
them go away well. First there was one man; then there were ten;
and they were all made whole."

The elder listener was silent again. The skeleton hand shook. We may
believe she was struggling to give the story the sanction of faith,
which is always an absolutist in demand, and that it was with her as
with the men of the day, eye-witnesses of what was done by the Christ,
as well as the myriads who have succeeded them. She did not question
the performance, for her own son was the witness testifying through
the servant; but she strove to comprehend the power by which work
so astonishing could be done by a man. Well enough to make inquiry
as to the fact; to comprehend the power, on the other hand, it is
first necessary to comprehend God; and he who waits for that will
die waiting. With her, however, the hesitation was brief. To Tirzah
she said,

"This must be the Messiah!"

She spoke not coldly, like one reasoning a doubt away, but as a
woman of Israel familiar with the promises of God to her race—a
woman of understanding, ready to be glad over the least sign of
the realization of the promises.

"There was a time when Jerusalem and all Judea were filled with a
story that he was born. I remember it. By this time he should be
a man. It must be—it is he. Yes," she said to Amrah, "we will go
with you. Bring the water which you will find in the tomb in a jar,
and set the food for us. We will eat and be gone."

The breakfast, partaken under excitement, was soon despatched, and the
three women set out on their extraordinary journey. As Tirzah had
caught the confident spirit of the others, there was but one fear
that troubled the party. Bethany, Amrah said, was the town the man
was coming from; now from that to Jerusalem there were three roads,
or rather paths—one over the first summit of Olivet, a second
at its base, a third between the second summit and the Mount
of Offence. The three were not far apart; far enough, however,
to make it possible for the unfortunates to miss the Nazarene if
they failed the one he chose to come by.

A little questioning satisfied the mother that Amrah knew nothing
of the country beyond the Cedron, and even less of the intentions
of the man they were going to see, if they could. She discerned,
also, that both Amrah and Tirzah—the one from confirmed habits
of servitude, the other from natural dependency—looked to her
for guidance; and she accepted the charge.

"We will go first to Bethphage," she said to them. "There, if the
Lord favor us, we may learn what else to do."

They descended the hill to Tophet and the King's Garden, and paused
in the deep trail furrowed through them by centuries of wayfaring.

"I am afraid of the road," the matron said. "Better that we keep
to the country among the rocks and trees. This is feast-day,
and on the hill-sides yonder I see signs of a great multitude
in attendance. By going across the Mount of Offence here we may
avoid them."

Tirzah had been walking with great difficulty; upon hearing this
her heart began to fail her.

"The mount is steep, mother; I cannot climb it."

"Remember, we are going to find health and life. See, my child,
how the day brightens around us! And yonder are women coming this
way to the well. They will stone us if we stay here. Come, be strong
this once."

Thus the mother, not less tortured herself, sought to inspire
the daughter; and Amrah came to her aid. To this time the latter
had not touched the persons of the afflicted, nor they her; now,
in disregard of consequences as well as of command, the faithful
creature went to Tirzah, and put her arm over her shoulder, and
whispered, "Lean on me. I am strong, though I am old; and it is
but a little way off. There—now we can go."

The face of the hill they essayed to cross was somewhat broken with
pits, and ruins of old structures; but when at last they stood upon
the top to rest, and looked at the spectacle presented them over
in the northwest—at the Temple and its courtly terraces, at Zion,
at the enduring towers white beetling into the sky beyond—the mother
was strengthened with a love of life for life's sake.

"Look, Tirzah," she said—"look at the plates of gold on the Gate
Beautiful. How they give back the flames of the sun, brightness for
brightness! Do you remember we used to go up there? Will it not be
pleasant to do so again? And think—home is but a little way off.
I can almost see it over the roof of the Holy of Holies; and Judah
will be there to receive us!"

From the side of the middle summit garnished green with myrtle and
olive trees, they saw, upon looking that way next, thin columns of
smoke rising lightly and straight up into the pulseless morning,
each a warning of restless pilgrims astir, and of the flight of
the pitiless hours, and the need of haste.

Though the good servant toiled faithfully to lighten the labor
in descending the hill-side, not sparing herself in the least,
the girl moaned at every step; sometimes in extremity of anguish
she cried out. Upon reaching the road—that is, the road between
the Mount of Offence and the middle or second summit of Olivet—she
fell down exhausted.

"Go on with Amrah, mother, and leave me here," she said, faintly.

"No, no, Tirzah. What would the gain be to me if I were healed
and you not? When Judah asks for you, as he will, what would I
have to say to him were I to leave you?"

"Tell him I loved him."

The elder leper arose from bending over the fainting sufferer,
and gazed about her with that sensation of hope perishing which
is more nearly like annihilation of the soul than anything else.
The supremest joy of the thought of cure was inseparable from Tirzah,
who was not too old to forget, in the happiness of healthful life to
come, the years of misery by which she had been so reduced in body
and broken in spirit. Even as the brave woman was about leaving the
venture they were engaged in to the determination of God, she saw a
man on foot coming rapidly up the road from the east.

"Courage, Tirzah! Be of cheer," she said. "Yonder I know is one
to tell us of the Nazarene."

Amrah helped the girl to a sitting posture, and supported her
while the man advanced.

"In your goodness, mother, you forget what we are. The stranger
will go around us; his best gift to us will be a curse, if not
a stone."

"We will see."

There was no other answer to be given, since the mother was too
well and sadly acquainted with the treatment outcasts of the
class to which she belonged were accustomed to at the hands of
her countrymen.

As has been said, the road at the edge of which the group was posted
was little more than a worn path or trail, winding crookedly through
tumuli of limestone. If the stranger kept it, he must meet them face
to face; and he did so, until near enough to hear the cry she was
bound to give. Then, uncovering her head, a further demand of the
law, she shouted shrilly,

"Unclean, unclean!"

To her surprise, the man came steadily on.

"What would you have?" he asked, stopping opposite them not four
yards off.

"Thou seest us. Have a care," the mother said, with dignity.

"Woman, I am the courier of him who speaketh but once to such as
thou and they are healed. I am not afraid."

"The Nazarene?"

"The Messiah," he said.

"Is it true that he cometh to the city to-day?"

"He is now at Bethphage."

"On what road, master?"

"This one."

She clasped her hands, and looked up thankfully.

"For whom takest thou him?" the man asked, with pity.

"The Son of God," she replied.

"Stay thou here then; or, as there is a multitude with him, take thy
stand by the rock yonder, the white one under the tree; and as he
goeth by fail not to call to him; call, and fear not. If thy faith
but equal thy knowledge, he will hear thee though all the heavens
thunder. I go to tell Israel, assembled in and about the city,
that he is at hand, and to make ready to receive him. Peace to
thee and thine, woman."