“True, true, Mary! But what think you, are thirty pieces of silver a large sum? Is it not rather a small one?”
“I should say a small one.”
“Certainly, certainly. How much did you get when you were a harlot, five pieces of silver or ten? You were an expensive one, were you not?”
Mary Magdalene blushed, and dropped her head till her luxuriant, golden hair completely covered her face, so that nothing but her round white chin was visible.
“How bad you are, Judas; I want to forget about that, and you remind me of it!”
“No, Mary, you must not forget that. Why should you? Let others forget that you were a harlot, but you must remember. It is the others who should forget as soon as possible, but you should not. Why should you?”
“But it was a sin!”
“He fears who never committed a sin, but he who has committed it, what has he to fear? Do the dead fear death; is it not rather the living? No, the dead laugh at the living and their fears.”
Thus by the hour would they sit and talk in friendly guise, he—already old, dried-up and misshapen, with his bulbous head and monstrous double-sided face; she—young, modest, tender, and charmed with life as with a story or a dream.
But time rolled by unconcernedly, while the thirty pieces of silver lay under the stone, and the terrible day of the Betrayal drew inevitably near. Already Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on the ass’s back, and the people, strewing their garments in the way, had greeted Him with enthusiastic cries of “Hosanna! Hosanna! He that cometh in the name of the Lord!”