In a cobra"s coils is death, its eyes transfix. Neither Mary nor Simon had spoken, and now, as the soldiery was upon them, they leaned yet nearer the wall. For a moment Mary hid her face. At her feet the Christ had fallen, and from her came one wail, choked down at once. She stooped to aid him, but he stood up una.s.sisted and reached to the wall for support.
The bars of the lattice shook; the old man peered out.
"Don"t touch my house, you vagabond! Move on!" he cried.
Calcol had turned to Simon, who was raising the cross. "Carry it for him,"
he commanded.
Baba Barbulah still shook at the lattice. "Move on!" he repeated. "Seducer of the people, remitter of sins, upholder of adultery, move on; don"t touch my house, it will fall down on you! Move on, I say!"
Calcol"s command Simon had antic.i.p.ated. He shouldered the cross. It was heavier to him than to the Christ, not in weight, perhaps, but in purpose.
In the narrowness of the sook the crowd was impeded, but from the rear they pushed, surprised at the halt.
Mary sprang at the lattice. "It is you that shall move on," she cried; "yes, you; and forever. The desert will call to you, "March;" and the sea will snarl, "Further yet." The gates of cities will deny you, and the doors of hamlets be closed. The eagles may return to their eyrie, the panthers retreat to their lair, but you will have no home, no rest, and, till time dies, no tomb."
The old man gnashed back at her an insult more b.e.s.t.i.a.l than he used before, and spat at her through the bars. But Mary had turned to the Christ. He was surrounded now by some women who had filtered through the alley above. Johanna, Mary Clopas, the wife of Zebdia, and Bernice, a fragile girl newly enrolled. The latter was wiping from his face the stains of blood and dust. The others were beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, crying aloud.
Of the disciples there was no trace, nor yet of any of those who had greeted him as the Messiah. It may be that the admiring throngs that had gathered about him had faded before a superior force. It may be they had lost heart, belief perhaps as well. Invective never propitiates. Recently he had omitted to prophesy, he argued. The exquisite parables with which he had been wont to charm even the recalcitrant seemed to have been put aside, and with them those wonders which rumor held him to have worked.
But now that pathos and grace which endeared, that perfection of sentiment and expression which exalted the heart, returned to him, accentuated perhaps by the agonies he had endured.
"Weep for me no more," he entreated. "But weep for yourselves and for your children. The days are coming," he added, with a gesture at the impatient mob-"the days are coming in which they shall say to the mountains, Fall on us; to the hills, Cover us. For if these things are done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?"
And in this entreaty, in which he exhorted them to view disaster otherwise than from the external and evanescent aspect, the voice of the prophet rang once more.
Mary as yet had not realized the full portent of the soldiery and the mob.
When it was approaching it had occurred to her that it might be another triumphal escort, such as she had once seen surround him on his way to a feast. As it advanced, the roar bewildered, and she had ceased to conjecture; then the Master had fallen, and the old Jew had vomited his slime. At the moment it was that, and that only, which had impressed her, and she had answered with the force of that new strength which suddenly she had found. But now at the sight of the women beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the blood-stained face of the Master, an inkling came to her; she stared open-mouthed at the cross, at Calcol, and at the executioners that were there.
Then immediately that horrible longing to know the worst beset her, and she darted to where the centurion stood.
"What is it?" she gasped. "What are you to do with him?"
By way of answer Calcol extended his arms straight out from either side, his head thrown back. He was a good-natured ruffian, with clear and pleasant eyes.
"Not crucify?" she cried. "Tell me, it is not that?"
Calcol nodded. To him one Jew more, one Jew less, was immaterial, provided he had his pay, and the prospect of a return to Rome was not too long delayed. Yet none the less in some misty way he wondered why this woman, with her splendid hair and scorching eyes, should have upbraided the tetrarch and abused the procurator because of the friendless Galilean whom he was leading to the cross. Woman to him, however, was, as she has been to others wiser than he, an enigma he failed to solve. And so he nodded merely, not unkindly, and smiled in Mary"s face.
The horrible longing now was stilled. She knew the worst; yet as the knowledge of it penetrated her being, it seemed to her as though it could not be true, that she was the plaything of some hallucination, her mind inhabited by a nightmare from which she must presently awake. The howl of the impatient mob undeceived her. It was real; it was actual; it was life.
She stared at Calcol, her fair mouth agape. There were many things she wanted to say; her thoughts teemed with arguments, her mind with persuasions; but she could utter nothing; she was as one struck dumb; and it was not until the centurion smiled that the spell dissolved and the power of speech returned.
"Ah, _that_ never; you shall kill me first!" she cried. And already she saw herself circ.u.mventing the centurion, blinding the soldiery, defying the mob, and leading the Master through byways and underground pa.s.sages out of the accursed city into the fresh glades of Gethsemane, over the hill, down the hollows to the Jordan, and into the desert beyond. There was one spot she knew very well; one that only a bird could find; one that she would mention to no one, but to which she could take him and keep him hidden there in the brakes till night came, and the fording of the river was safe.
"That never!" she cried. And brushing Bernice off, she caught the Master by the cloak. "Come with me," she murmured. "I know a way--"
And she would have dragged him perhaps, regardless of the others, but the centurion had her by the arm.
"See here, my pretty friend, your place is not here."
With a twist he sent her spinning back to Baba Barbulah"s wall.
"March!" he ordered.
The soldiery, disarranged, fell in line. The two robbers picked up their burden. The Master turned to Mary, to the others as well, with that expression which he alone possessed, that look which both promised and a.s.suaged, and, it may be, would have said some word of encouragement, but Mary was at his side again, her hand upon his cloak.
"It shall never be," she repeated. "They must kill me first."
Calcol wheeled. His short sword glistened, reversed, and her cheek was laid open by the hilt. She staggered back. The soldiery moved on. The women surrounded her and stanched the wound. To her the blow held the difference between a cut and a cancer; she knew that it could never heal; and, as the blood poured down her face, for the first time she divined the uselessness of revolt.
Presently a wave of the mob caught her, separating her from the other women, and carrying her in its eddy through the gate, into the valley and on to the hillock beyond. On one side were the glimmer of fires, the smell of smoke, of offal too. On the infrequent trees vultures perched. To the right was a nest of gardens and of tombs.
In the eddies Mary lost foothold and lagged a little to the rear. When she reached Gulgolta the soldiery had formed three sides of a square. In it were the executioners, the prisoners, and the centurion. At the place where a fourth side might have been a steep decline began.
Within the square three crosses lay; before them the prisoners stood, stripped of their clothing now, and naked.
The Sanhedrim was grouped about that side of the square which leaned to the south, the horned bonnet of Caiaphas towering its lacework above the others. To the wide and cruel corners of his mouth had come the calm of a cheetah devouring its prey. At the outer angle, to the right, the standard of the empire swayed; and from an oak two vultures soared with a scream into the air, their eyes fixed on the vision of bare white flesh.
Through the ranks an elder pa.s.sed. In his hand was a gourd, which he offered to one of the thieves.
"Drink of it, Dysmas," he invited. "In it grains of frankincense have been dissolved."
To the rear Annas nodded his approval. His lean, lank jaws parted. "Give strong drink," he announced, authoritatively; "give strong and heady drink to those about to die, and wine to those that sorrow."
Dysmas drank abundantly of the soporific, and held the gourd to his comrade.
"Take it, Stegas."
As the second thief raised it to his lips, with a motion of arm and knee an executioner caught Dysmas beneath the chin, behind the leg, and the thief lay on a cross. In a second his wrists were bound, his feet as well.
There was the blow of a hammer on a nail, a spurt of blood from the open hand; another blow, another spurt; and the cross, upraised, settled in a cavity already prepared, a beam behind it for support.
Stegas, his thirst slaked, fell as Dysmas had, and the elder caught the gourd and offered it to the Christ. If he had been tempted in the desert, as rumor alleged, the temptation could have been as nothing in comparison to the enticements of that cup. It held relief from thought, from the acutest pain that flesh can know, from life, from death.
He waved it aside. The executioner started with surprise; but he had his duty to perform, and, recovering himself, he caught the Christ, and in a moment he too was down, his hands transfixed, the cross upraised. The blood dripped leisurely on the sand beneath. Across his features a shadow pa.s.sed and vanished. His lips moved.
"Father," he murmured, "forgive them; they know not what they do."
Calcol gave an order. Over the heads of Dysmas and of Stegas the sanis were affixed, wooden tablets smeared with gypsum, bearing the name of the crucified and with it the offence. They were simple and terse; but above the Christ appeared a legend in three tongues, in Aramaic, in Greek, and in Latin:
[Aramaic: Malka di Jehudaje]
_? as??e?? t?? ???da???._
Rex Judaeorum.
Caiaphas sprang back as from the point of a sword.
"Malka di Jehudaje!" he bellowed. "King of the Jews! It is a blasphemy, an iniquity, and an outrage. Centurion, tear it down."
Calcol shrugged his shoulders, and pointed to the palace. "What the procurator has written he has written," he answered.