CHAPTER XII.
A pleasing light shone through the darkness of that nether world into which Hiram had been so suddenly precipitated. The light was broken by soft shadows, as of gently fluttering leaves. The brightness made his eyeballs ache; the shadows soothed them, so that he could endure to look. Great protecting arms were stretched above him. These assumed the shapes of limbs of a terebinth-tree. Had he passed through the gloom of Sheol into some brighter realm of life? Perhaps the Greeks were right in their hope of the Isles of the Blessed, carpeted with perpetual verdure, gemmed with flowers, and canopied with softest skies. To one of these isles had his spirit floated? This could not be, for over him he clearly saw a dead branch of the terebinth, and there could be no decay in that happy world.
His illusions chased one another away, and were all gone when, attempting to move, sharp pains tortured him, and inflicted him with full consciousness that he was indeed in the body. He was lying upon a couch, soft with feathery balsam tips, and covered with a wolf's skin. This he could feel beneath his hands. He glanced about him. A low, but long and rambling, black tent of goat's-hair cloth stood by, its nearest end just at the edge of the shadow of the terebinth. The tent poles and cross ropes were so arranged as to form a roof of three gables, answering to the interior division into three compartments. Several rude but substantially built huts were evidently used for storing provisions. A stone enclosure served as a fold for sheep. Without these evidences of more permanent occupation, the tent would have indicated a settlement of those nomads who, with hereditary roving habits, have always lodged in the lands east of the Great Sea; or of those inhabitants of towns who adopt this mode of life during a portion of the year, that they may live among their flocks and herds on the mountain slopes, or cultivate a tract of rich meadow-land far away from their ordinary abodes.
Hiram had scarcely taken in so much of his surroundings, when he was aware that a light form moved suddenly and silently away from his side. He caught a glimpse of a white garment—the common dress of both sexes alike among the simple peasants. Had his observation been more alert, he would have detected a pair of most gracefully modelled feet, and limbs bare almost to the knees; a head uncovered, except for the rich mass of jet-black hair that was gathered loosely into a node at the back; a face of exquisite contour, swarthy from exposure, but radiant with health and kindliness.
"Father, he has waked!" rang out a sweet child-voice. And Hiram heard it add, subdued by distance and anxious emotion:
"Father! He will live again, will he not?"
A voice, strong and deep, but kindly even to tenderness, responded:
"Jehovah be praised! I will come."
A heavily built man approached the couch under the terebinth. He was slightly bowed with the years that had chronicled themselves by the gray lines in the long beard which fell far down upon his bare breast. His legs and arms were uncovered, and showed that strength had not deserted the slightly shrunken muscles. His face, though weather-beaten and wrinkled with cares as with years, was a beautiful one, beaming with intelligence and soulfulness; one of those rare faces that fascinate children, but can command men—such is the combination of affection and dignity they reflect from the abiding disposition behind them. His eyes were deep-set beneath heavy brows, and seemed the home of lofty and generous sentiments, suggesting those crystal springs in shady dells which good spirits have always been traditioned to inhabit.
"The Lord be with you, my son!" was the old man's hearty salutation, as he came and looked down upon the stranger.
"Are you not able to talk?" he kindly inquired, noticing that Hiram made no response, and unwilling to think his silence discourtesy, as it would have been regarded had the one addressed been fully himself.
Hiram stared at the face of the old man, in painful effort at recollection both of the questioner and of himself.
"Where am I?" he inquired, endeavoring to raise himself upon his elbow.
"Nay, be quiet, my son!" replied the other, laying him gently back upon the couch. "It is enough for this day that you know you are safe, and under the roof-tree of Ben Yusef."
"Ben Yusef? I do not know you." Hiram gazed intently at him, as if to replenish from the intelligent face his own vanished power of thought.
"Ay, Ben Yusef, of the tribe of Judah. You are, indeed, a stranger, not to know the tent of Ben Yusef, of Giscala."
"Giscala? In the Jews' land?"
"Ay, and in Galilee. You must have been badly hurt for so shapely a head as yours to have been knocked out of its whereabouts. I had thought Ben Yusef's tent as well known as yonder rocky pinnacle of Safed, which guides travellers from afar. But who are you, my son?"
Hiram glanced at his own herdsman's clothes. He felt the coarse texture. A tremor shook him, as if from the passing of some horrid dream. He replied:
"I am what you see me."
"Nay, my son, thou shalt not bear false witness, even of thyself," replied Ben Yusef. "A shepherd's feet are not so easily torn as yours have been. Your hair has the odor of ointments that are not of the cattle-pens, and your hands are not hard in the spots where the sling-strings cut. Besides, no sheep would have been so silly as to venture into the crater of Giscala for you to seek them there. The dumb beasts have fled from it for weeks past. The volcano is getting ready to break out again, and the lightest-headed bird will not even fly over it. Only a man driven by some demon to seek death would have plunged into it as you did. Besides, your speech is not that of the herdsmen; nor, for that matter, of any dwellers in the country about. It is that of the men of the coast. Though we use the same tongue, there is as much difference between our accents as there is difference between the grass that grows on these spring-fed meadows and that of the salt marshes by the sea."
Hiram showed evident alarm at these suspicions, and made an effort to rise, that he might venture another flight. The old man gently, yet strongly, restrained him, and placed his head again upon the bolster as he added, kindly:
"Nay, then, do not speak if the truth is not for my ears. Ben Yusef's tree is broad enough to shadow both you and your secret."
"But I must not burden your hospitality," said Hiram.
Ben Yusef knit his brows in evident displeasure, but quickly rejoined, with a smile:
"You shall not burden, but bless me, my son. Our patriarch Job said, 'The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me.' And never saw I man that was nearer perishing than you."
The old man raised his eyes reverently to heaven as he added:
"The Lord deal with me and mine as I deal with this stranger!"
It was the merriest of voices that interrupted this conversation:
"Abba!"
The syllables flowed with all the sweetness of bird notes, charged with the tenderness and fulness of human love.
"Abba! Abba!"
"Yes, my child."
"Shall I bring the drink?"
"Bring it."
The girl balanced a large jar upon her left hand, supporting it by the graceful shaft of her forearm, which in turn rested upon her right hand. The weight of the jar brought the muscles of her arms into graceful prominence, and her easy motion betokened that agile strength which is seldom displayed except by those whose freedom of life, as among peasants of mountain regions, makes work easy and exhilarating.
"The leben is all of the big goat's milk, and, with the leaven in it since yesternight, should be strong and quickening. Shall I give the drink?"
"No, my child. Haste with the supper. Elnathan will soon be in from the fields, and as hungry as Esau. Haste, and the memory of thy mother bless thee!"
As Ben Yusef watched his daughter retiring to the tent, a lusty halloo rang through the air, and a form appeared upon the hill-top. It seemed gigantic, so large a portion did it cut from the glowing western sky beyond; and, though it diminished as it approached, it still showed a strong, thick-set, over-tall fellow, in the first flush of manhood, the down on his chin hardly consistent with the gnarled muscles upon his legs and arms. He came at once to where Hiram lay, and accosted him with a good-natured familiarity which, though rough, did not conceal the essence of gentility that lay beneath it. He took Hiram's hand into his own, and pressed it as if feeling for the fitful pulse.
"I knew you would come to life rapidly when once you started. Judging from your running last night, you have wind enough to outstrip the death angel. I was yonder, watching the crater, when you dashed by me. You made a streak of light through the darkness as a flitting ghost does. I thought you must be Elijah, showing the other prophets how he ran when Jezebel and the priests of Baal were after him; and I believe you would not have stopped short of Beersheba if you had not tumbled into the crater. Couldn't you see it, or smell it, or feel it? Perhaps you had drunk too much leben among the sheep-boys in the mountains. They make it there strong enough to whirl a man's head off; but I never knew it to make one's legs fly as yours did."
"Hush, Elnathan!" interrupted the old man. "Your tongue runs faster than our guest's legs ever did, and makes as great blunders. What news from the mouth of Sheol, for the brimstone on your garments tells you have been there?"
"The volcano has been less active to-day, father; but neighbors Isaac and Hosea both think it will break out anew. They remember how it was years ago. The big mound is like the whale with Jonah in his belly. It only wants a little more tickling with the fire to vomit forth."
"Have you watched it all day?"
"No. As this poor fellow could not tell us what he was running from, I have been searching back on the path he came; but I can find nothing to harm one." He lowered his voice. "The fellow must have been crazed. No sane man would put that dirty shirt over so trim a body, or wear his hair, which is curled like that of a gallant from Tyre, under the filthy cap I found by him. I think he is from Tyre. They were to have had a great sacrifice—some say of the king himself. This man looks like some courtier who has gone daft with excitement. He surely thought the volcano fire was under some sacrifice to Moloch, for I heard him cry, as he fell, 'Moloch! Mercy!'"
"Do not breathe that thought, Elnathan," said Ben Yusef. "He is to us only what he seems. The Lord has been merciful to him. In Israel's land his secret belongs only to himself and our God. I charge you, Elnathan, by the Lord God of Abraham, who spared Isaac on Moriah, that you speak not your thought."
The night grew chill. Ben Yusef and his son carried the couch and the sick man under the shelter of the tent. Hiram was exhausted by his excited wakefulness, and soon fell into a slumber, during which the little household partook of their evening meal.
When he awoke he was conscious of the presence of the young girl alone, who sat under the lamp that hung at the doorway of the tent, and who answered his every movement with a look towards him. Ben Yusef and Elnathan sat without. A neighbor joined them. As he was approaching the tent, Hiram heard the father enjoin his son to make no mention of their stranger guest.
"He does not come to us as the angels came to Father Abraham at his tent door," said Elnathan.
"Who knows what form angels take?" replied the elder. "The angels came to Abraham's tent hungry and thirsty; why should not one come to us as a sick and wounded man?"
"From the way the volcano is acting," said Elnathan, pausing to listen to the rumbling earth, "I think he has come as the angels came to Lot in Sodom before the Lord destroyed that place with fire and brimstone. Maybe our guest will startle us before morning with the cry, 'Flee to the mountain!'"
They rose and welcomed their neighbor, with whom they conversed until late in the night, for the imminence of danger from the volcano suggested watchfulness.