Mary Magdalen Part 11

"One of them, the book unrolled in his hand, advanced and read:

" 'Ye shall keep the Sabbath holy. Whoso does any work thereon shall be cut off from his people.'

" 'And what of blasphemy?'

"The Scribe glanced at the roll and repeated from memory: 'He that blasphemeth the name of the Lord shall be put to death. The congregation shall stone him, as well the stranger as he that was born in the land.'

"Caiaphas closed the fingers on the palm of his left hand, and, raising it, turned again to the elders. '_Ish maveth_,' they repeated, closing their fingers as he had done.

"I knew then that he was condemned. After all"-and Eleazer looked wearily to the ground-"it was legal enough. Each moment I expected him to give some sign, but, save to affirm the charge of blasphemy, during the entire time he kept silent. Yes, it was legal enough. From where I stood I heard the Scribes say that he would be sentenced at sunrise, and then Pilate would have a word with him. I could do nothing. Caiaphas still fumed. I went out in the court again. In the corridor was Judas. Peter was wrangling with the servants. I did not wait for more. I got away and into the valley and up again on the hill. A c.o.c.k was crowing, and I saw the dawn. O Mary, the pity of it!"

He looked at his sister. There was no weakness now in her face, nor beauty either. Age must have pa.s.sed her in the night.

"And I will have a word with Pilate too," she said.

As a somnambulist might, she drew her mantle closer, and, moving to the wayside, ascended the hill. The silver and green of the olives closed around her, and with them the branching dates. Above, a star left by the morning glimmered feebly. In a myrtle a bird began to sing, and a lizard that had come out to intercept the sun scurried as she pa.s.sed. Upward and onward still she went, and, the summit reached, for a moment she stopped and rested.

To the east the Dead Sea lay, a stretch of silk. At its edge was the flutter of ospreys feasting on the barbels and breams of the Jordan, which as they enter, die. Beyond was a glitter of white and gold, the scarp of Moriah and its breast of stone, the Tyrian bevel of Solomon, the porphyry of Nehemiah, the marble that Herod gave; ascending terraces, engulfing porticoes, the splendor of Jerusalem at dawn. Between the houses nearest was the dimness that shadows cast; those further away had a scatter of pink; about it all was a wall surmounted by turrets; beneath was a ravine in which was a brook, and a city of booths and tents, grazing camels and fat-tailed sheep.

Through the pines and cypresses Mary pa.s.sed down to where the olives were.

The brook sent a message to her; the blood that had flowed from the sacrifices was in it, and in the fresh morning it reeked a little, as such brooks do. It was here, she thought, the Master had been taken, and for a second she stopped again. The sun now was rising behind her; the color of the sky shifted. Beyond Jerusalem a mountain was melting in excesses of vermilion, and the ravine that had been gray was a.s.suming the tenderest green. The star had disappeared, but from each tree broke the greeting of a bird.

A rustle of the leaves near by startled her, and she looked about, fearful, as women are, of some beast of prey. A white robe was there, a white turban, and beneath it the swart face of one whom she had known.

To her eyes came ma.s.sacres. "Judas!" she exclaimed, and looked up in that roof of her world where day puts its blue and night puts its black.

"Judas!" she repeated. Her small hands clenched, and the rhymes of her mouth grew venomous.

Then the woman spoke in her. "Why did you not kill me first?"

Judas swayed like an ox hit on the forehead. The motion distracted and irritated her. "Can't you speak," she cried, "or does h.e.l.l hold you, tongue and all?"

He raised a hand as though he feared another blow. The gesture was so human and yet so humble that Mary looked into his face. Time, which turns the sweet-eyed girl into a withered spectre, must have touched him with its thumb. His eyes were ringed and cavernous, his cheeks empty.

"You have heard, then?" he said; but he evinced no curiosity. He spoke with the apathy of one who takes everything for granted, one with whom fate is to have its will. "I have just come from there," he added, with a backward gesture. "I never thought that such a thing could be. No, I swear it, I never did." Then, in answer perhaps to some inner twinge, perhaps also because of the expression of Mary's lips, he continued: "If there is a new oath, one that has never been used before, prompt me, and I will swear again, I never did. I thought--"

Mary interrupted him savagely: "There are ten kinds of hypocrisy. You have nine of them; you will develop the tenth and invent a new one besides."

At this Judas made a pa.s.s with his hands and stared absently at the ground. "Mary," he said, "life is a book which man reads when he dies.

During the last hour I have been unrolling it. In its scroll I found existence a wine-shop where the guest fares so badly that he would go at once were it not that he fears to call for the reckoning. The reckoning, Mary, is death. I have called for it. I am about to pay. Let me tell you.

I have no excuse to offer, no forgiveness now to await. My heart was a meadow: you made it stone. There were well-springs in it: you dried them, Mary. When I first saw you, you were a dream fulfilled. Others had brought echoes of life; you brought its song. It was then that I heard the Master speak. I followed him, and tried to forget. It must be that I failed, for when I saw you in Capharnahum my blood danced, and when you spoke I trembled. It was love, Mary; and love, when it is not death, is life. It was that I sought at your side. You would not listen. Innocence is a garment. You seemed to have wrapped it about you. I tried to tear it away.

There was my fault, and this my punishment. Your right was inflexible as a prison-door, and yet always behind it was the murmur of a mysterious Perhaps. The others turned to me; I turned to you. I forgot again, but this time it was my duty, my allegiance, and my faith. Mary, I loved the Master more wholly even than I loved you. He was the Spirit; you were the flesh. In him was the future; in you the tomb. I thought to conquer both.

While I mixed my darkness with his light, I pursued you as night pursues the day. On the light I have cast a shadow, and to you I have brought a blight. But, Mary, both will disappear. The one consolation I cling to now is that belief. When I delivered him up, it was myself I betrayed, not him. I am forever dead, and he forever living. While I bargained with the priests and pretended that my aim was coin, when I led the levites and the Temple-guard just here to where he stood, during all the hours since I left you, I tried to escape from that cage we call Fate. Mary, there is something about us higher than our will. The revenge I sought on you forsook me before I reached the city's gate. It is the intangible that has brought me where I am. I have sworn to you I never thought this thing could be. I swear it now again. In carrying out the threat I made, I thought to make you fear my hate and make him greater than he was. His enemies, I had seen, were many. Those that had believed in him grew daily less. In Jerusalem his miracles had ceased, and I thought that, when the levites and the Temple-guard approached, he would speak with Samuel's thunder, answer with Elijah's flame. I thought the stars would shake, the moon grow red; that he would produce the lost Urim, the vanished Ark, and so forever silence disbelief. I was wrong, and he was right. Belief is in the heart, not in the senses; the visible contradicts, but faith is not to be confuted. No, Mary, the tombs are not dumb. I said so once, I know, but they answer, and mine will speak. On it perhaps a caricature may be daubed, and about it prejudice will uncoil. I deserve it. Yet though you think me wholly base, remember no man is that. Since I met you my life has been a battle-field in which I have fought with conscience. It has conquered. I am its slave; it commands, and I obey."

He drew a breath as though he had more to add, and turned to where she stood. There was no one there. From an olive-branch a red-start piped to the morning; over the buds of a pomegranate a bee buzzed its delight; across the leaves of a myrtle a blue spider was busy with its web, but Mary was no longer there. He peered through the underbrush, and wandered to the grove beyond. There was no one. He looked to the hill-top: there was the advancing sun. He looked in the valley: there were the pilgrims'

booths, the grazing camels and fat-tailed sheep.

"She has gone," he told himself. "She would not even listen."

He bent his head. For the first time since boyhood the tears rolled down his face.

"She might at least have heard me," he thought, and brushed the tears away. Others came and replaced them. When they had fallen, there were more.

"Yes, she might at least have listened. If I had no excuse to offer, at least I had regret." For a moment he fancied her, cruel as only woman is, hurrying to some unknown goal. The tears he had tried to stanch ceased now abruptly. "She is right," he mused. "She has left me to conscience and to death."

He turned again and went back to where he had stood before. As he crossed the intervening s.p.a.ce he unloosed the long girdle which he wore, and from which still hung the treasury of the twelve. The bag that held it fell where the bee was buzzing. One end of the girdle he tossed over a branch; the red-start spread its wings and fled. He looked about. There was a stone near by; he got it and with a little labor rolled it beneath the branch. Then he made a noose, very carefully, that it might not come undone, and settling it well under the chin, he tied the other end of the girdle to it and swung himself from the stone.

CHAPTER IX.

IX.

In the apartment of Claudia Procula, Mary and the wife of the procurator stood face to face.

The apartment itself overlooked Jerusalem. Beneath was an open s.p.a.ce tiled with little oblong stones, red, yellow, and blue; the blue predominating.

On either side the colossal white wings of the palace stretched to a park, very green in the sunlight, cut by colonnades in which fountains were, and surrounded by a marble wall that was starred with turrets and fluttered with doves. The Temple, which, from its cressets, radiated to the hills beyond a glare of gold, was not as fair nor yet as vast as this. Within its gates an army could manuvre; in its banquet-hall a cohort could have supped. It was Herod's triumph, built subsequent to the Temple, to show the world, perhaps, that to surpa.s.s a masterpiece he had only to conceive another.

To it now and then, for a week or more, the procurator descended from his residence by the sea. He preferred the latter; the day was freer there, life less cramped. But during festival times, when the fanatic Jews were apt to be excited and need the chill of a curb, it was well for him and his soldiery to be on hand. And so on this occasion he had come, and with him his wife, Claudia Procula, and the tetrarch Antipas, who had joined them on the way.

Antipas and his retinue occupied the aegrippeum, the north wing of the palace, while in the Caesareum, the wing that leaned to the south, was Pilate, his wife and body-guard.

And now on this clear morning the sweet-faced patrician, Claudia Procula, with perfectly feminine curiosity was looking into the drawn features of the Magdalen, and wondering whence her rumored charm could come.

"I will do my best," she said, at last, in answer to an anterior request.

And calling a servant, she wrote on a tablet a word for Pilate's eye.

Mary moved to the portico. The variegated tiles of the quadrangle were nearly covered now. A flight of wide, low steps led to the main entrance of the palace, and there a high seat of enamelled ebony had been placed.

In it Pilate sat, in his hand the staff of office. Beside him were his a.s.sessors, members of his suite, and Calcol, a centurion. On one of the steps Caiaphas stood, near him the elders of the college. Below was the Christ, bound and guarded. Across the quadrangle was a line of soldiery, behind it a mob.

The helmets, glancing mail, short skirts, and bare legs of the Romans contrasted refreshingly with the blossoming garments, effeminate girdles, frontlets, and horned blue bonnets of the priesthood. And in the riot of color and glint of steel the Christ, bound as he was, looked, in the simplicity of his seamless robe, the descendant of a larger sphere. Above, to the left, Antipas, aroused by the clamor, leaned from a portico.

Opposite where the sunlight fell Mary held her cloak about her.

Caiaphas, a hand indicating Jesus, his head turned to Pilate, was formulating a complaint. Not indeed that the prisoner had declared himself a divinity. There were far too many G.o.ds in the menagerie of the Pantheon for a procurator to be the least disturbed at the rumor of a new one. It was the right to rule, that attribute of the Messiah, on which he intended the gravamen of the charge should rest. But he began circuitously, feeling the way, in Greek at that, with an accent which might have been improved.

"And so," he concluded, "in many ways he has transgressed the Law."

"Why don't you judge him by it, then?" asked Pilate, grimly.

A servant approached with a tablet. The procurator glanced at it, looked up at the man, and motioned him away.

"My lord governor, we have. The Sanhedrim, having found him guilty, has sentenced him to death. But the Sanhedrim, as you know, may not execute the sentence. The Senate has deprived us of that right. It is for you, as its legate, to order it done."

Pilate sneered. "I can't very well, until I know of what he is guilty.

What crime has he committed-written a letter on the Sabbath, or has he been caught without his phylacteries?"