CHAPTER XXVI.
One still and sultry evening, the decline of a brooding day in spring, two persons were sitting on the flat roof of a house in Jerusalem. They were the Athenian Lady Aglais and her son, the comparatively youthful Roman General Paulus—he who has so largely figured, even from his gallant boyhood, in the events and affairs we have been recording.
It was the 30th of March, and a Wednesday—the first of all Easter-Wednesdays—the first in that new and perpetual calendar by which, throughout the fairest regions of earth, among all enlightened nations and civilized races, till the crash of doom, time was for evermore to be measured.
A servant, carrying a skin-cask slung over his shoulders, was watering the flowers, faint with thirst; and these, arranged in fanciful vases, which made an artificial garden of the housetop, shook their drooping heads under the fresh and grateful shower, and seemed to answer it with smiles of a thousand blooms and rays. As the man stole softly to and fro about the roof, now approaching the lady and her son, now receding, he seemed, in spite of the foreign language in which they spoke, and in spite of the low and hushed tone they observed, to follow, with intense and breathless though stealthy excitement, the tenor of their conversation; while his figure, in the last evening rays, cast a long, shifting shadow that streaked with black the yellow flood to its farthest limit, climbed the parapet, broke upon its grail-work of balusters, and then was beheaded, for it flung off its head out of sight into empty space, leaving the calm bright air unblotted above the stone guard-wall.
An occurrence took place of which (that Wednesday evening) Paulus and his mother were witnesses—an occurrence in dumb show, the significance of which they were destined, only after several years, to learn; yet the incident was so singular, so strange, so impressive—it was such a picture in such a quarter—that when, long subsequently, the explanation came, they seemed to be still actually assisting in person at the scene which, while they beheld it, they had no means of understanding. We are going, in one moment, to relate that occurrence; and we must here request the reader to grant us his full belief and his confidence when we remark that, in comparison of his amusement, his profit, and that mental gallery of pictures to be his henceforth (which we try to give to all who honor these pages with a perusal), we feel the sincerest contempt for any mere display of scholarship or learning. For this reason, and this reason alone, and certainly from no scantiness, and still less from any lack of authorities, we shall almost disencumber our narrative of references to the ancient writers and recondite documents (such as the Astronomic Formula of Philip Aridæus) which establish as positive historical facts the more striking of the occurrences still to be mentioned. In one instance the intelligent reader will discern that the most sacred of all evidence supports what we have to record. But if we were to show with what nicety of precision much profane, yet respectable and even venerable, testimony accords with the passage here meant in the Acts of the Apostles, and how abundantly such testimony corroborates and supplements the inspired account, this book would cease to be what it aims at being, and would become a historical treatise of the German criticism school.[3]
Satisfied, therefore, with the footnotes below (at which the reader will oblige us by just glancing, and which are appended, in perfect good faith and simple honesty, as implying no more than we could make good), we will avoid boring those who have a right to, and who expect, the conclusion of a straightforward story at our hands.[4]
Paulus and his mother were conversing, as has been described, in Greek, while the serving-man, despite his ignorance of that language, had the air of half-following the drift of what they said, and of catching the main purport of it with wonder and awe. There was, indeed, at that moment, only one topic in all Jerusalem. He who, less than a week ago, had been crucified, and with the time of whose coming (as much as with all the particulars of his life, teaching, works, and death) the old prophecies were found more and more startlingly, circumstantially, unmistakably, the more they were studied, questioned, and canvassed, to agree, point by point, down to what would seem even trivial details (indicated as if merely to emphasize the incommunicable identity of the Messiah)—he had himself stated, distinctly and publicly, that, by his own power, he would rise from the dead in three days; that, in three days after, he should be "lifted up" and be made "a spectacle for men and angels;" in three days after they should have destroyed it, he would rebuild the holy temple of his body. And now these rumors—these minute, these positive accounts—had he, then, really reappeared, according to his word and promise? Was it possible? Was it the fact?
Many had, on the previous Friday night, stated that, of a verity, they had seen their deceased parents and relatives. Again, on the Saturday, many declared, amid awe-stricken groups of listeners, that the unknown land had sent them its visitants, in various places, under various aspects, to startle the guilty city; which, after killing the King's messenger-servants, had just killed the King's Son, who had come, as had been a thousand times announced, in the very fulness, the exact maturity of days, to deliver the final embassy to men.
On that Wednesday evening, there was, in truth, but one theme of conversation, one subject of thought, all through Jerusalem, and already far beyond Jerusalem; among poor and rich, high and low, natives and strangers, the robbers of the Syrian hills and Arabian deserts, the dwellers in the city, the travellers on the roads and at the inns, among Sadducees, Pharisees, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and barbarians.
No wonder, then, if the humble serving-man, as he watered the flowers, penetrated the drift of the mother's and the son's discussion. For him and such as he was the message. The poor Syrian had once, for a while, rendered occasional out-door service to the family of Lazarus; and he had known Lazarus in three states—had known him living, dead, again alive. After days of death in that fierce climate, where inanimate flesh putrefies fast, he had beheld Lazarus, at the call of one upon whose lineaments he gazed, at the time, with unconscious adoration, come forth, not merely from death, but from incipient decomposition, back into balmy life—back to the "vita serena."
Now, was he who, in that instance, had allowed it to be perceived and felt that he was really the Lord of life, whom death and rottenness were manifestly unable to disobey—was he himself, as his disciples declared he was, living again among them, since the morning of the last Sunday (the feria prima), according to his own public prediction and distinct promise? Was he not? Was he?
Aglais and Paulus had heard more than one circumstantial account of this, his reappearance, according to that, his promise. By this one and by the other he had been met. They had gazed upon him, spoken to him, heard him in reply, touched him, in such a place, on that bridge, that road, in such a garden. He had walked conversing with them, had sat with them at meat, had broken bread with them, as was his wont, had then vanished.
Where was his body, over which the Pharisees had set their guard of soldiers? Not in the grave. No; but where? Had the Pharisees accounted for it? Could they tell what had become of it? Could the soldiers? The disciples could, and they did.
"Mother," said Paulus, "do you know what those soldiers say? One of them once served in a legion which I commanded. Do you know what they say?"
"You mean," replied Aglais, "about their inability to hinder the abstraction. What?"
"That an act to which they are the only witnesses could not be stopped by them, because of it they were not witnesses, being buried in sleep."
"Consistent," said the Greek lady. "Yes; but a much weightier fact is that expectation of the disciples, to prevent the realization of which the Pharisees set their guard."
"What expectation? And why weightier? What can be weightier?" asked the general.
"That their Master would keep his word, and fulfil his prediction of rising from the tomb on the third day. If they saw him again alive within the promised time, they and the people would worship him as God; but, if the Pharisees could show the body on the third day, or could even account for it, that belief would die."
"Clearly," answered Paulus, "the disciples expected to see him again on and after the third day, waiting for his word to be fulfilled."
"Now, Paulus," pursued Aglais, "suppose this expectation of theirs not fulfilled; suppose that not one of those waiting for his word was conscious of any reason for believing it to have been realized—"
Paulus interrupted his mother.
"There is only one possible way in which they could be induced to believe it realized—namely, that he should be seen again alive."
"Quite so," she resumed. "But suppose that he has not been seen; suppose that not one of those who expected to see him again has thus seen him. How would they then feel on this Wednesday morning?"
"They would feel that the expectation which he had solemnly and publicly authorized them to depend upon was idle and vain; they would not and could not by any possibility feel that they had, in this great particular, reason to consider his word to have been kept. They would be discouraged to the very last degree. They would, of course, hide themselves. I would do so myself, and I believe I am no coward. In short, they would feel no reason to hope in his protection, or to expect that his other and still mightier promises concerning their own future eternal life would by him be realized. They would not incur any inconvenience, or brave any danger, or take any trouble, or risk any loss—"
It was Aglais's turn to interrupt.
"Now, is this their attitude?" she inquired.
"The reverse, the opposite, the contradictory of their attitude."
The lady continued in a low tone: "If, expecting, upon his own assurance, that some among them should see him," she asked, "not one of them had seen him, would they, at this moment, have any motive for bringing upon themselves the tortures, insults, shame, and death which he underwent, and all this in order to induce others to believe apparitions and a resurrection which in their own hearts they did not themselves believe, and for believing which they were, moreover, conscious that they possessed no ground, no reason, no pretext?"
A sweet, ringing, vibrant voice at their side here said:
"And in order by deliberate circumstantial lying, of an awful and blasphemous kind, to please the God of truth; and to compensate themselves by his protection above, in a future life, for the present and immediate destruction which they are incurring among the Pharisees and the men of power here below!"
Looking round, they beheld Esther of the Maccabees.
Never had she seemed to Paulus so beautiful; but there was a marked change; for, however intellectual had always been the translucent purity of that oval brow, through which, as through a lamp of alabaster, shone the vivid mind within, there was now the mysterious effluence of "that Essence increate" who had come to abide in, and had strangely transfigured the appearance of, the faithful-souled Hebrew maiden. And when Paulus, after she had embraced his mother, abstractedly took her hand, his heart was lifted upward with a species of wonder; and, without adverting to it, he was asking himself to what marvellous kingdom she had become heiress, in what supernal court of everlasting joy and unassailable prerogatives was this beautiful creature destined to live, loving and beloved, adorning almost the glories which she reflected, dispensed, and multiplied, as if from some holy, mysterious, and spiritual mirror.
"O dear Lady Aglais! and O legatus!" she said, with a gesture amazing in its expressiveness and pathetic fervor (she had brought the finger-tips of both hands together under the chin, and then lowered them with the palms outward toward her hearers, and so she stood in an attitude of the utmost grace and dignity combined, like one appealing to the candor and good faith of others)—"O dear friends! I was just now passing through my own garden on my way hither, when, under the fig-tree (where he used to sit poring over the holy books of our people), I beheld my dead father, but standing, and not in his old accustomed wicker-chair; and he gazed upon me with large, earnest eyes; and as he stood, his head almost touched the leaves of that hollow, embowering fig-tree; and he was pale, so extremely pale as he was never during life; and he called me: 'Esther,' he said, and his voice sounded far away. Ah! my God, from what a huge distance it seemed to come! And lo! lady, and thou, legatus, he said these words to me: 'I have been in the vast, dim house, and have seen our Father Abraham; and I have seen our great Lawgiver, and all our prophets, excepting only two, Elias and Enoch; and I asked, Where were they? And in all the dim, vast house none answered me, but the forefinger was pressed to the silent lips of those who there waited. And, suddenly, there was the noise of innumerable armies coming swiftly from afar—but your ears are mortal and your eyes veiled, and were I even permitted to tell you that which shook, beyond this little world, the large world and its eternal thrones, your mind would not at present understand my words. Enough, Esther, that I have been allowed to renew to you, in my own behalf, and that of others among our people who have been called before you to the vast, dim, silent city, the exhortation which our ancestor Judas Maccabeus sent with offerings to the high-priest; namely, that you will pray for our spirits. Our innumerable company has just been thinned; the glorious Judas Maccabeus, our ancestor, and that holy mother of the Maccabees, and almost all who were waiting with me in the dim, vast kingdom of expectation, have gone for ever; and I, and a few, have been commanded to expect yet a little time; until the incense of holy prayer shall have further gone up in the presence of the Great White Throne.'"
Esther paused, her eyes dilated, and stood a moment with the hands again brought together; and so perfect a figure of truthfulness, and such an impersonation of sincerity, she looked, that the Jewish servant, who understood not a word of the tongue in which she addressed the Greek lady and her son, gazed at her; his work suspended, his cask held high in air, with all the marks of one who heard and accepted some sacred and unquestionable revelation.
"Go on, dear child," said Aglais. "What passed further?"
"I asked the pale image what this meant, that he should term the condition in which he is waiting and has yet to wait a little time—that vast, dim condition—'a house,' 'a city,' and 'a kingdom.' 'The dwellers,' he replied, 'are watched in that kingdom by silent protectors, mighty and beautiful, whose faces, full of a severe, sad love, are the torches and the only light those dwellers ever see; and the vast, dim city has a sunless and a starless sky for its roof, under which they wait; and that sky is the ceiling which echoes the sighs of their pain; and thus to them it has been a kingdom, and a city, and a house; and, until the ninth hour of last Friday, they were numerous as the nations of men!' 'And at the ninth hour of that day, I asked, 'O my father! what occurred when so many departed, and you and a small number were left still to wait?' And he gazed at me for an instant with a wan and wistful look; then, lo! I saw nothing where he had been standing under the fig-tree.
"But it was at the ninth hour of the last Friday the Master had expired by the side of the penitent who was that very day to be with him in paradise!" cried Aglais.
At Esther's arrival, Paulus and Aglais had both risen from a kind of semicircular wicker settle which occupied one of the corners of the roof; and they now, all three, when Esther had finished her strange, brief narrative, leaned silent and musing against the parapet; where, under the shade of a clustering rhododendron, they had a view westward (drawn, as people are who ponder, toward whatever object is most luminous) of the towers and palaces and pinnacles of the Holy City, then reddening in the sunset. One word respecting the spot where the little group was thus collected, and (among modern, and especially western, nations) concerning its peculiar scenic effects.
The roof was an irregular parallelogram, protected on all sides by a low, thick parapet, at two opposite corners of which, in the diagonals, were two doors of masonry, bolted with massive round bars of iron, or left open; thus excluding or admitting communication with the contiguous houses. The writer, many years ago, saw such parapet doors on the house-tops of modern Algiers; nor was the arrangement unknown in the more famous Eastern cities of antiquity, where the roofs glowed with plants in vases. When, on some public occasion, the passages were opened, the richer inhabitants, far above the noise, dust, squalor, sultriness, and comparative darkness of the narrow and noisome streets, could stroll and lounge for miles, in mid-air, among flowers; could cross even flying and embowered bridges (of which a privileged number possessed the keys, like those who have keys to the gardens of our squares); and so Dives, unseen of Lazarus, but seeing far down all things little and supine, could wander through parterres of bloom, and perfumed alleys, and shrubberies of enchantment, with effects of sunlight sprinkled, so to speak, with coolness and with shadows, soothed out of the noonday fierceness into tints various and tender; unsoiled of the stains and pains that stained and pained the poor sordid world below; until the hearts of those who thus promenaded amid circumstances of such delicious refinement and luxury, bearing and hearing news, and exchanging civilities, were "lifted up," and became even like to the heart of Nabuchodonosor the king. Sometimes the pecten-beaten dulcimer, or the fingered lyre of six strings, made long-forgotten airs of music beguile the declining day, and linger for hours longer, ravishing the night under the stars of the Syrian sky. Such the scene.
But none of the roof-doors were open that Wednesday evening. Something ailed the Holy City. Out of the hushed heavens, mysteries and a stern doom were brooding over Jerusalem. Already the fermenting germ of those dreadful factions which were to tear to pieces, with intestine rage, the whole Jewish body, while the city was writhing in the vain death-struggle against Titus, a few years later, had begun to make itself sensible to the observant. A fierce hatred of the Romans and an insane eagerness to re-establish the old Jewish independence had taken possession of certain youthful fanatics; and "possessed" indeed they seemed. On the one side, the Roman officers of the garrison, from Pilate down, had received anonymous warnings, in the wildest style, requiring them to withdraw from Jerusalem within a given time, or they should be all executed in the streets, as opportunity might occur; on the other, the prefect of Syria had been earnestly requested by Pilate to strengthen the garrison; while in the city itself the soldiers were strictly admonished to keep to their quarters, to avoid late hours, and to hold no intercourse when off duty with the inhabitants. Leaves of absence were stopped. A few legionaries had been already murdered in the neighborhood of wine-shops, in the small winding alleys, and in places of evil repute, and no efforts succeeded in identifying the perpetrators.
But these were only the feeble and evanescent symptoms, destined to disappear and reappear, of a political and social phase which was not to become the predominant situation until another situation should have exhausted its first fury. This, the first, was to be the war of the Synagogue against the disciples of the Messiah, whom those disciples went about declaring to have risen from the tomb, according to his distinct promise; whom they went about declaring to have been already seen, and heard, and touched by themselves, again and again.
No wonder, then, if Aglais and Paulus and Esther had discussed in hushed tones and in Greek the wonders and various portents attendant upon the supreme and central fact—that Resurrection of the Master which absorbed their whole hearts and minds, leaving no room for any other interest therein at this tremendous epoch—the grand turning-point of human destinies and of our whole planet's history.
From the parapet against which they were leaning, they now gazed in silence upon the splendid scenes below and opposite. Across a maze of narrow streets they saw the mansions, the pinnacles, the towers, and that great supernal "Temple of God," all so soon to perish violently, in a general, a complete, and an irreversible destruction. They saw the play of light and shadow upon one long tree-lined side of Herod's proud palace; they saw the ripple of quivering leaves reflected upon the white colonnades (and their tessellated, shady floors) of Pilate's fatal house; and, while revolving thoughts and questions of unspeakable importance and solemnity, they all three suddenly beheld an acted picture, a passing scene, voiceless to them, yet impressive, which blent itself into their recollection of other scenes, never to be effaced from the memory of mankind, which, not a week before, had been under those very colonnades enacted.
A woman in the attire of a Roman matron came quickly forth upon the first-story balcony in the house of Pontius Pilate, and, leaning over the rail, waved her hand with an imperative gesture to some one below.
She was followed into the balcony more slowly by a man wearing the grand costume of an ancient Roman military governor, who held in his hand a sealed and folded letter, tied with the usual silk string. The man was evidently Pilate himself. He looked long and gloomily at the letter, and seemed to be plunged in thought. He even let what he carried fall at his feet, and did not appear to be aware of this for some moments. It was the woman who picked up the letter, and gave it back into his hand. Then Pilate leaned over the balustrade, in his turn, and spoke to a man below in military costume, who was mounted on a powerful horse, and seemed to be equipped for travel. The soldier saluted, looking up, when he was addressed, and saluted again when his superior had ceased speaking; whereupon Pilate dropped the letter (a large and heavy dispatch), which the soldier caught and secured under his belt, inside the tunic, or "sagum," immediately afterward riding away at a canter. Our three friends saw Pilate, his head bent and his eyes on the ground, slowly and ponderingly re-enter the house by a screen-door, the same through which he had come out upon the balcony; but the lady, clasping her hands a little in front of her forehead, gazed into the heavens with a face ashy pale, and with eyes from which tears were streaming.
It is a well-known and for centuries universally received tradition, besides being a fact recorded by one most respectable and trustworthy author (who, besides, was not a Christian, but a Jew)—a fact without which the allusions to it in various ancient authorities, together with Phlegon the Chronologer's subsequent recital of Tiberius's extraordinary conduct, would be unintelligible and unaccountable—that Pontius Pilate, harassed by the unappeasable reproaches of his wife, and stung by something within his own bosom which allowed him peace no more, until (sleepless, and unable again, unable for ever, to sleep) he bequeathed, some years afterward, by an awful death, whether intentional or not, his name to a great Alpine hill, a hill not thenceforth named, or to be named, while time and mountains last, by any name but "Pilate's" among distant and then barbarous nations—it is well known, I say, that Pilate sent to Tiberius Cæsar a long and minute relation concerning the life, the death, and the disappearance from the tomb of him whom he had scourged, and whom the Jews had crucified, together with a notice of the supernatural wonders wrought by him; his previous notorious announcement of his own intended resurrection; the directly consequent and equally notorious precautions taken to hinder it; the disappearance, in spite of this, of the body; the testimony of the soldiers that they were witnesses to the abstraction, which they were unable to stop, because they alleged that they were not witnesses of it (being buried in sleep); that, in fact, their testimony proved nothing save the body's disappearance from the massively-sealed tomb (which would have stood a small siege); the failure of the Synagogue to account for the body; the account of it by the disciples; and, finally, the admissions of the Pharisees that all their prophets had become unexplainable if this was not their Messiah, yet that such a conclusion was to them impossible, because he was to have been their king, and a conquering king, and to have founded an empire extending through all nations and tongues; their stern and ever-growing disaffection to the Roman rule; the universal amazement, excitement, and anxiety arising from the circumstance that, while neither the Synagogue nor the soldiers could throw any light upon what had become of the body, the disciples of him who had predicted his own resurrection explained the event openly and fearlessly by stating that they had again and again met him since the previous feria prima; that they cared for no protection except his alone; that the dead was once more among them—living, and henceforth immortal—their Master and God; the ultimate Judge of this world, and the foretold Founder of an everlasting kingdom! Pilate added several strange and astounding particulars.
This, in a general way, is known; and it is likewise known that Tiberius Cæsar was so deeply impressed by the dispatch of the Jerusalem governor, arriving in his hands about the same moment, as we shall find in the next chapter, when a strange incident (narrated by Plutarch) took place, that he suddenly convened the senate in a formal indiction, and proposed to them to raise a temple to Christ, and to rank him solemnly among the gods of the empire! But not such nor of such acknowledgments was to be the kingdom of the "jealous" and the only God.
Aglais, Paulus, and Esther had assisted at a memorable pantomime. They had beheld the mounted soldier who rode with a memorable letter to the sea-coast; they had seen the vain effort of him who had offered the people a choice between Barabbas and "the desired of nations," to call the great of the earth into his perplexities, to quiet his awakened conscience, to turn aside from the dread warnings whispered to his soul, to lull—by futile means—an all too late remorse.