The two women are grouped close by the aperture; one is seated, the other is half reclining against her; there is nothing between them and the bare rock. The light, slanting upwards, strikes them with ghastly effect, and we cannot avoid seeing they are without vesture or covering. At the same time we are helped to the knowledge that love is there yet, for the two are in each other"s arms.
Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is G.o.d.
Where the two are thus grouped the stony floor is polished shining smooth. Who shall say how much of the eight years they have spent in that s.p.a.ce there in front of the aperture, nursing their hope of rescue by that timid yet friendly ray of light? When the brightness came creeping in, they knew it was dawn; when it began to fade, they knew the world was hushing for the night, which could not be anywhere so long and utterly dark as with them.
The world! Through that crevice, as if it were broad and high as a king"s gate, they went to the world in thought, and pa.s.sed the weary time going up and down as spirits go, looking and asking, the one for her son, the other for her brother. On the seas they sought him, and on the islands of the seas; to-day he was in this city, to-morrow in that other; and everywhere, and at all times, he was a flitting sojourner; for, as they lived waiting for him, he lived looking for them. How often their thoughts pa.s.sed each other in the endless search, his coming, theirs going! It was such sweet flattery for them to say to each other, "While he lives, we shall not be forgotten; as long as he remembers us, there is hope!" The strength one can eke from little, who knows till he has been subjected to the trial?
Our recollections of them in former days enjoin us to be respectful; their sorrows clothe them with sanct.i.ty. Without going too near, across the dungeon, we see they have undergone a change of appearance not to be accounted for by time or long confinement.
The mother was beautiful as a woman, the daughter beautiful as a child; not even love could say so much now. Their hair is long, unkempt, and strangely white; they make us shrink and shudder with an indefinable repulsion, though the effect may be from an illusory glozing of the light glimmering dismally through the unhealthy murk; or they may be enduring the tortures of hunger and thirst, not having had to eat or drink since their servant, the convict, was taken away--that is, since yesterday.
Tirzah, reclining against her mother in half embrace, moans piteously.
"Be quiet, Tirzah. They will come. G.o.d is good. We have been mindful of him, and forgotten not to pray at every sounding of the trumpets over in the Temple. The light, you see, is still bright; the sun is standing in the south sky yet, and it is hardly more than the seventh hour. Somebody will come to us. Let us have faith. G.o.d is good."
Thus the mother. The words were simple and effective, although, eight years being now to be added to the thirteen she had attained when last we saw her, Tirzah was no longer a child.
"I will try and be strong, mother," she said. "Your suffering must be as great as mine; and I do so want to live for you and my brother! But my tongue burns, my lips scorch. I wonder where he is, and if he will ever, ever find us!"
There is something in the voices that strikes us singularly--an unexpected tone, sharp, dry, metallic, unnatural.
The mother draws the daughter closer to her breast, and says, "I dreamed about him last night, and saw him as plainly, Tirzah, as I see you. We must believe in dreams, you know, because our fathers did. The Lord spoke to them so often in that way. I thought we were in the Women"s Court just before the Gate Beautiful; there were many women with us; and he came and stood in the shade of the Gate, and looked here and there, at this one and that. My heart beat strong. I knew he was looking for us, and stretched my arms to him, and ran, calling him. He heard me and saw me, but he did not know me. In a moment he was gone."
"Would it not be so, mother, if we were to meet him in fact? We are so changed."
"It might be so; but--" The mother"s head droops, and her face knits as with a wrench of pain; recovering, however, she goes on--"but we could make ourselves known to him."
Tirzah tossed her arms, and moaned again.
"Water, mother, water, though but a drop."
The mother stares around in blank helplessness. She has named G.o.d so often, and so often promised in his name, the repet.i.tion is beginning to have a mocking effect upon herself. A shadow pa.s.ses before her dimming the dim light, and she is brought down to think of death as very near, waiting to come in as her faith goes out.
Hardly knowing what she does, speaking aimlessly, because speak she must, she says again,
"Patience, Tirzah; they are coming--they are almost here."
She thought she heard a sound over by the little trap in the part.i.tion-wall through which they held all their actual communication with the world. And she was not mistaken. A moment, and the cry of the convict rang through the cell. Tirzah heard it also; and they both arose, still keeping hold of each other.
"Praised be the Lord forever!" exclaimed the mother, with the fervor of restored faith and hope.
"Ho, there!" they heard next; and then, "Who are you?"
The voice was strange. What matter? Except from Tirzah, they were the first and only words the mother had heard in eight years.
The revulsion was mighty--from death to life--and so instantly!
"A woman of Israel, entombed here with her daughter. Help us quickly, or we die."
"Be of cheer. I will return."
The women sobbed aloud. They were found; help was coming. From wish to wish hope flew as the twittering swallows fly. They were found; they would be released. And restoration would follow--restoration to all they had lost--home, society, property, son and brother! The scanty light glozed them with the glory of day, and, forgetful of pain and thirst and hunger, and of the menace of death, they sank upon the floor and cried, keeping fast hold of each other the while.
And this time they had not long to wait. Gesius, the keeper, told his tale methodically, but finished it at last. The tribune was prompt.
"Within there!" he shouted through the trap.
"Here!" said the mother, rising.
Directly she heard another sound in another place, as of blows on the wall--blows quick, ringing, and delivered with iron tools.
She did not speak, nor did Tirzah, but they listened, well knowing the meaning of it all--that a way to liberty was being made for them. So men a long time buried in deep mines hear the coming of rescuers, heralded by thrust of bar and beat of pick, and answer gratefully with heart-throbs, their eyes fixed upon the spot whence the sounds proceed; and they cannot look away, lest the work should cease, and they be returned to despair.
The arms outside were strong, the hands skillful, the will good.
Each instant the blows sounded more plainly; now and then a piece fell with a crash; and liberty came nearer and nearer. Presently the workmen could be heard speaking. Then--O happiness!--through a crevice flashed a red ray of torches. Into the darkness it cut incisive as diamond brilliance, beautiful as if from a spear of the morning.
"It is he, mother, it is he! He has found us at last!" cried Tirzah, with the quickened fancy of youth.
But the mother answered meekly, "G.o.d is good!"
A block fell inside, and another--then a great ma.s.s, and the door was open. A man grimed with mortar and stone-dust stepped in, and stopped, holding a torch over his head. Two or three others followed with torches, and stood aside for the tribune to enter.
Respect for women is not all a conventionality, for it is the best proof of their proper nature. The tribune stopped, because they fled from him--not with fear, be it said, but shame; nor yet, O reader, from shame alone! From the obscurity of their partial hiding he heard these words, the saddest, most dreadful, most utterly despairing of the human tongue:
"Come not near us--unclean, unclean!"
The men flared their torches while they stared at each other.
"Unclean, unclean!" came from the corner again, a slow tremulous wail exceedingly sorrowful. With such a cry we can imagine a spirit vanishing from the gates of Paradise, looking back the while.
So the widow and mother performed her duty, and in the moment realized that the freedom she had prayed for and dreamed of, fruit of scarlet and gold seen afar, was but an apple of Sodom in the hand.
SHE AND TIRZAH WERE--LEPERS!
Possibly the reader does not know all the word means. Let him be told it with reference to the Law of that time, only a little modified in this.
"These four are accounted as dead--the blind, the leper, the poor, and the childless." Thus the Talmud.
That is, to be a leper was to be treated as dead--to be excluded from the city as a corpse; to be spoken to by the best beloved and most loving only at a distance; to dwell with none but lepers; to be utterly unprivileged; to be denied the rites of the Temple and the synagogue; to go about in rent garments and with covered mouth, except when crying, "Unclean, unclean!" to find home in the wilderness or in abandoned tombs; to become a materialized specter of Hinnom and Gehenna; to be at all times less a living offence to others than a breathing torment to self; afraid to die, yet without hope except in death.
Once--she might not tell the day or the year, for down in the haunted h.e.l.l even time was lost--once the mother felt a dry scurf in the palm of her right hand, a trifle which she tried to wash away. It clung to the member pertinaciously; yet she thought but little of the sign till Tirzah complained that she, too, was attacked in the same way. The supply of water was scant, and they denied themselves drink that they might use it as a curative. At length the whole hand was attacked; the skin cracked open, the fingernails loosened from the flesh. There was not much pain withal, chiefly a steadily increasing discomfort. Later their lips began to parch and seam. One day the mother, who was cleanly to G.o.dliness, and struggled against the impurities of the dungeon with all ingenuity, thinking the enemy was taking hold on Tirzah"s face, led her to the light, and, looking with the inspiration of a terrible dread, lo! the young girl"s eyebrows were white as snow.
Oh, the anguish of that a.s.surance!
The mother sat awhile speechless, motionless, paralyzed of soul, and capable of but one thought--leprosy, leprosy!
When she began to think, mother-like, it was not of herself, but her child, and, mother-like, her natural tenderness turned to courage, and she made ready for the last sacrifice of perfect heroism. She buried 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 G.o.d 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.