Part 9 (1/2)

When he looked again the crowd had slunk away. Only Ahulah remained, her head bowed on her bare white arm. From the lateral chamber the priest still peered, the carbuncle glistening on his lip.

”Did none condemn you?” the Master asked.

And as she sobbed merely, he added: ”Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

To the elders this was very discomforting. They had failed to unmask him as a traitor to G.o.d, to Rome even, or yet as a demagogue defying the Law.

They did not care to question again. He had worsted them three times. Nor could they without due cause arrest him, for there were the Pharisees.

Besides, a religious trial was full of risk, and the cooperation of the procurator not readily to be relied on. It was that cooperation they needed most, for with it such feeling as might be aroused would fall on Rome and not on them. As for Pilate, he could put a sword in front of what he said.

In their enforced inaction they got behind that wall of prejudice where they and their kin feel most secure, and there waited, prepared at the first opportunity to invoke the laws of their ancestors, laws so c.u.mbersome and complex that the Romans, accustomed to the clearest pandects, had laughed and left them, erasing only the right to kill.

At last chance smiled. Into Jerusalem a rumor filtered that the Nazarene they hated so had raised the dead, that the suburbs hailed him as the Messiah, and that he proclaimed himself the Son of G.o.d. At once the Sanhedrim rea.s.sembled. A political deliverer they might have welcomed, but in a Messiah they had little faith. The very fact of his Messiahs.h.i.+p const.i.tuted him a claimant to the Jewish throne, and as such a pretender with whom Pilate could deal. Moreover-and here was the point-to claim divinity was to attack the unity of G.o.d. Of impious blasphemy there was no higher form.

It were better, Annas suggested, that a man should die than that a nation should perish-a truism, surely, not to be gainsaid.

That night it was decided that Jesus and Judaism could not live together; a price was placed upon his head, and to the blare of four hundred trumpets excommunication was p.r.o.nounced.

Of all of these incidents save the last Mary had been necessarily aware.

In company with Johanna, the wife of Herod's steward, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Salome, mother of Zebedee's children, she had heard him reiterate the burning words of Jeremiah, and seen him purge the Temple of its traffickers; she had heard, too, the esoteric proclamation, ”Before Abraham was, I am;” and she had seen him lash the Sadducees with invective. She had been present when a letter was brought from Abgar Uch.o.m.o, King of Edessa, to Jesus, ”the good Redeemer,” in which the potentate prayed the prophet to come and heal him of a sickness which he had, offering him a refuge from the Jews, and quaintly setting forth the writer's belief that Jesus was G.o.d or else His Son. She had been present, also, when the charge was made against Ahulah, and had comforted that unfortunate in womanly ways. ”Surely,” she had said, ”if the Master who does not love you can forgive, how much more readily must your husband who does!” Whereupon Ahulah had become her slave, tending her thereafter with almost b.e.s.t.i.a.l devotion.

These episodes, one after another, she related to Martha; to Eleazer, her brother; to Simon, Martha's husband; to anyone that chanced that way. For it was then that the Master had bade her go to Bethany. For a little s.p.a.ce he too had forsaken Jerusalem. Now and then with some of his followers he would venture in the neighborhood, yet only to be off again through the scorched hollows of the Ghor before the sun was up.

These things it was that paraded before her as she lay on the floor of the little room, felled by the hideousness of a threat that had sprung upon her, abruptly, like a cheetah in the dark. To Martha and to the others on one subject alone had she been silent, and now at the moment it dominated all else.

From the day on which she joined the little band to whom the future was to give half of this world and all of the next, Judas had been ever at her ear. As a door that opens and shuts at the will of a hand, his presence and absence had barred the vistas or left them clear. At first he had affected her as a scarabaeus affects the rose. She knew of him, and that was all. When he spoke, she thought of other things. And as the blind remain unawakened by the day, he never saw that where the wanton had been the saint had come. To him she was a book of ivory bound in gold, whose contents he longed to possess; she was a book, but one from which whole chapters had been torn, the preface destroyed; and when his increasing insistence forced itself upon her, demanding, obviously, countenance or rebuke, she walked serenely on her way, disdaining either, occupied with higher things. It was of the Master only that she appeared to think. When he spoke, it was to her as though G.o.d really lived on earth; her eyes lighted ineffably, and visibly all else was instantly forgot. At that time her life was a dream into whose charmed precincts a bat had flown.

These things, gradually, Judas must have understood. In Mary's eyes he may have caught the intimation that to her now only the ideal was real; or the idea may have visited him that in the infinite of her faith he disappeared and ceased to be. In any event he must have taken counsel with himself, for one day he approached her with a newer theme.

”I have knocked on the tombs; they are dumb.”

Mary, with that grace with which a woman gathers a flower when thinking of him whom she loves, bent a little and turned away.

”Have you heard of the Buddha?” he asked. ”Babylon is peopled with his disciples. One of them met Jesus in the desert, and taught him his belief.

It is that he preaches now, only the Buddha did not know of a heaven, for there is none.”

And he added, after a pause: ”I tell you I have knocked on the tombs; there is no answer there.”

With that, as a panther falls asleep, his claw blood-red, Judas nodded and left her to her thoughts.

”In Eternity there is room for everything,” she said, when he came to her again.

”Eternity is an abyss which the tomb uses for a sewer,” he answered. ”Its flood is corruption. The day only exists, but in it is that freedom which waves possess. Mary, if you would but taste it with me! Oh, to mix with you as light with day, as stream with sea, I would suck the flame that flickers on the walls of sepulchres.”

She shuddered, and he saw it.

”You have taught me to love,” he hissed; ”do not teach me now to hate.”

Mary mastered her revolt. ”Judas, the day will come when you will cease to speak as you do.”

”You believe, then, still?”