How the child lived through the days and weeks that followed only Baladan knew. The dog warmed his master’s pinched body at night, keeping at bay other prowling beasts of the pariah race which ranged the deserted streets, as lawless and almost as fierce as wolves.
He even fed him, more than once bringing fragments of bread and fish, stolen from a vender’s stall at the imminent peril of his life. Occasionally the friendly water-carrier visited the suffering boy, and the little wild children of the street, swarming like sparrows in the streets of Jerusalem, shared their infrequent crusts with him.
By slow degrees the anguish of his wounds grew less poignant. The cruelly disfigured eyes were indeed wholly darkened, but they ceased to send burning shafts of fire to the tortured brain. The [pg 39]child slept fitfully, ate what he could get, and one day even smiled. This when Baladan brought him a meatless bone, laying it down at his feet with extravagant expressions of satisfaction. “Nay, good Baladan,” murmured Tor, patting his friend’s shaggy coat; “indeed I am not hungry to-day. Eat, dear beast,” and he thrust the bone into the dog’s mouth, and closed his sharp teeth upon it. Baladan understood, and the two rested together in the sunshine with something like real content.
The charitable water-carrier had bestowed one of his brazen cups upon the blind boy, and this with his ruined eyes became his stock in trade. Little by little he learned to send forth the dolorous plaint of the blind mendicant. After a time he could find his way from place to place with the aid of the dog. And so [pg 40]it came to pass that there was one more blind beggar in Jerusalem.
Once during these evil days of his darkness Tor fell in with his old master. It was on this wise: the child, grown bolder, had made his way farther than his wont into the more crowded thoroughfares of the city, and there his shrill cry for alms sounded loud and clear above the tumult of the market-place. He rattled his cup bravely as was the custom of the professional beggar, sending forth into the unfriendly world the old familiar plaint of the beggar, Chelluh. “Have mercy, kind lords of Jerusalem; have mercy on the sorrows of one born blind! Kind lord, kind lady, only a denarius, I beseech thee, and may Jehovah and all lesser gods be gracious unto thee!”
Now it chanced that Chelluh himself had also come to the market-place to beg [pg 41]alms, and, hearing the child’s voice afar off, recognized it with the unerring ear of the blind. “Fetch me now to the voice that crieth my cry,” he commanded the one that led him. And when presently he was come to the place where Tor stood in the safe angle of two windowless walls, he stopped short with a malevolent smile.
“Art thou of a surety blind, my son—that thou stealest my cry for alms as thou didst once steal my money?” he demanded.
Tor trembled like a leaf in the wind at sound of the cruel voice. “Alas, I am indeed blind, good master,” he said beseechingly. “Have mercy upon me, for I—”
The prayer ended in a muffled shriek for help as the blind man hurled himself upon the blind child, griping him in a [pg 42]very fury of malicious hatred. No one interfered. What, indeed, was the quarrel of two beggars in an angle of the wall?
Trade pressed hard in Jerusalem as elsewhere, and a man must mind naught save his own business if he would prosper. So no one glanced that way when the blind man, having satisfied his lust for revenge, departed, leaving the child’s limp body upon the ground.