That night it was decided that Jesus and Judaism could not live together; a price was placed upon his head, and to the blare of four hundred trumpets excommunication was pronounced.
Of all of these incidents save the last Mary had been necessarily aware. In company with Johanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Salomè, mother of Zebedee’s children, she had heard him reiterate the burning words of Jeremiah, and seen him purge the Temple of its traffickers; she had heard, too, the esoteric proclamation, “Before Abraham was, I am;” and she had seen him lash the Sadducees with invective. She had been present when a [pg 159]letter was brought from Abgar Uchomo, King of Edessa, to Jesus, “the good Redeemer,” in which the potentate prayed the prophet to come and heal him of a sickness which he had, offering him a refuge from the Jews, and quaintly setting forth the writer’s belief that Jesus was God or else His Son. She had been present, also, when the charge was made against Ahulah, and had comforted that unfortunate in womanly ways. “Surely,” she had said, “if the Master who does not love you can forgive, how much more readily must your husband who does!” Whereupon Ahulah had become her slave, tending her thereafter with almost bestial devotion.
These episodes, one after another, she related to Martha; to Eleazer, her brother; to Simon, Martha’s husband; to anyone that chanced that way. For it was then that the Master had bade her go to Bethany. For a little space he too had forsaken Jerusalem. Now and then with some of his followers he would venture in the neighborhood, yet only to [pg 160]be off again through the scorched hollows of the Ghôr before the sun was up.
These things it was that paraded before her as she lay on the floor of the little room, felled by the hideousness of a threat that had sprung upon her, abruptly, like a cheetah in the dark. To Martha and to the others on one subject alone had she been silent, and now at the moment it dominated all else.
From the day on which she joined the little band to whom the future was to give half of this world and all of the next, Judas had been ever at her ear. As a door that opens and shuts at the will of a hand, his presence and absence had barred the vistas or left them clear. At first he had affected her as a scarabæus affects the rose. She knew of him, and that was all. When he spoke, she thought of other things. And as the blind remain unawakened by the day, he never saw that where the wanton had been the saint had come. To him she was a book of ivory bound in gold, whose contents he longed to possess; she was a [pg 161]book, but one from which whole chapters had been torn, the preface destroyed; and when his increasing insistence forced itself upon her, demanding, obviously, countenance or rebuke, she walked serenely on her way, disdaining either, occupied with higher things. It was of the Master only that she appeared to think. When he spoke, it was to her as though God really lived on earth; her eyes lighted ineffably, and visibly all else was instantly forgot. At that time her life was a dream into whose charmed precincts a bat had flown.
These things, gradually, Judas must have understood. In Mary’s eyes he may have caught the intimation that to her now only the ideal was real; or the idea may have visited him that in the infinite of her faith he disappeared and ceased to be. In any event he must have taken counsel with himself, for one day he approached her with a newer theme.
“I have knocked on the tombs; they are dumb.”
Mary, with that grace with which a [pg 162]woman gathers a flower when thinking of him whom she loves, bent a little and turned away.
“Have you heard of the Buddha?” he asked. “Babylon is peopled with his disciples. One of them met Jesus in the desert, and taught him his belief. It is that he preaches now, only the Buddha did not know of a heaven, for there is none.”
And he added, after a pause: “I tell you I have knocked on the tombs; there is no answer there.”