Simon, too, sat motionless. There was rage in his expression, hate even—that hatred which the beautiful excites in the base. Time and again he had seen her; she was a byword with him; from the height of her residence she looked down on his mean gray walls; her luxury had been an insult to his abstinence; and with that zest which a small nature takes in [pg 123]the humiliation of its superior, he determined, in spite of her manifest abjection, to humiliate her still more.
“If this man,” he confided to his neighbor, “has in him anything of that which goes to the making of a prophet, he will divine what manner of woman she is. If he does not, I will denounce them both.” And nourishing his hate he waited yet a while.
The Master seemed depressed. The great secret which in all the world he alone possessed may have weighed with him. But he turned to Mary and looked at her. As he looked she bent yet lower. The marvel of her hair was unconfined; it fell about her in tangling streams of gold and flame, while on his feet there fell from her tears such as no woman ever shed before. In the era of primitive hospitality the daughters of kings had not disdained to unlatch the sandals of their fathers’ guests; but now, at the feet of Mercy, for the first time Repentance knelt. And still the tears continued, unstanched and unde[pg 124]tained. Grief, something keener still perhaps, had claimed her as its own. She bent lower. Then Misery looked up at Compassion.
The Master stretched his hand. For a moment it rested on her head. She quivered and clutched at her throat; and as he withdrew that hand, in which all panaceas were, from her gown she took a little box, opened it, and dropping the contents where the tears had fallen, with a sudden movement she caught her hair and poured its lava on his feet.
An aroma of beckoning oases filled the small room, passed into the recess, mounted to the roof, pervaded and penetrated it, and escaped to the sky above.
And still she wept. Judas no longer saw her tears, he heard them. They fell swiftly one after another, like the ripple of the rain. A sob broke from her, but in it was something which foretokened peace, the sob which comes to those who have conceived a despairing hope, and suddenly intercept its fulfilment. Her hands trembled; the little box fell from [pg 125]her and broke. The noise it made exorcised the silence.
The Master turned to his host. “I have a word to say to you.”
Simon stroked his beard and bowed.
“There was once a man who had two debtors. One owed him five hundred pence, the other fifty. Both were poor, and because of their poverty the debt of each he forgave.”
For an instant Jesus paused and seemed to muse; then, with that indulgence which was to illuminate the world, “Tell me, Simon,” he inquired, “which was the more grateful?”