“Mâlkâ dî Jehudâje!” 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.
In the tone, in the gesture that preceded it, and in its impertinence Caiaphas read Pilate’s one yet supreme revenge, the expression of his absolute contempt for the whole Sanhedrim and the nation that it ruled.
From the rear the mob jumped at the title as at a catchword. To them the irony of the procurator presumably was lost.
“King of the Jews!” they shouted. “Mâlkâ dî Jehudâje, come down from your cross!”
It was a great festival, and as they jeered at Jesus they enjoyed themselves hugely.
In their vast delight the voice of Stegas was drowned.
“I am a Roman citizen,” he kept repeating, his head swaying, and indicating with his eyes the wounds in his hands, the torture he endured. “Kill me,” he implored. And finding entreaty idle, he reviled the centurion, cursed the soldiery, and would have spat at them, but to his burning throat no spittle came.
The tongue of Dysmas lolled from his mouth. He had not the ability to speak, even if in speech relief could come. Flame licked at his flesh, his joints were severing, each artery was a nerve exposed, and something was crunching his brain. He could no longer groan; he could suffer merely, such suffering as hell perhaps has failed to contrive, that apogee of agony which it was left for man to devise.
Stegas, catching the refrain the mob repeated, turned his eyes from the soldiery to the adjacent cross.