Fritha went to Alaran crouched by the hearth. “The babe is born!”
“Will she live?”
“Yes, yes!”
Victorinus took his staff and with two brethren behind him went to Alaran Oak.
At the edge of the forest Alaran met him. “She lives! She lives! She and the babe live!”
Victorinus lifted his staff. The morning light struck upon the cross atop. “Christ gave the boon! Pay, O barbarian, the debt thou owest!”
Alleda came out of the hut of Death and lay breathing the air of every day, the babe beside her, in the hollow of her arm. Alaran sat by the couch spread with coarse linen of the women’s spinning. Her eyes sought his. He put his yellow head down beside her. “Yes, yes. We are going to be Christians together!”
CHAPTER XIV
THE HERMITS
“Salvation is within you. The Kingdom of God is within you.” Dorotheus, hermit in the desert, kneeling in his cave mouth from two hours past midnight to sunrise, said that five thousand times, said it at last with an even sound like the clacking of a mill, the droning of bees or the voice of locusts. The east grew rosy, the sand ridges translucent, marvellously hued; up rushed the fiery sun. Dorotheus rose from his knees, took the scourge and plied it. Having done that, he next soberly got breakfast—a handful of dates, a small piece of bread broken from a long, twisted loaf, gift of the last pilgrim making round of the anchorites scattered in the desert, a measure of water from the jar in the corner. As he ate he looked across the intervening sand to the very small oasis where he cultivated a garden. The palms moved in the morning wind, tufts of green feathers cutting the absolute blue. It seemed the only motion in the world, unless it were the moving, too, of scant tufts of desert grass immediately about this cave that was no true cave but one of many ancient excavations, made, God knew how long ago, by idolatrous Pharaohs, building tombs to their own reproach!
The oasis was uninhabited save by a few birds and some small and wary four-footed and creeping life. There now came from it, having done his own foraging through the night, the jackal that Dorotheus had found, wounded and separated from the pack, and had tamed, naming it Arla after his birthplace on the Danube. Arla trotted across the sand, rubbed himself like a dog against his master, wagged his tail, was talked with, and at last went off to the depth of the cave, to lie there out of heat and light and sleep until the pleasant dusk came again. Dorotheus uncovered with reverence, took from its shelf with clean hands the Book of the Gospels which was the cave’s precious possession, took, and kneeling read the parable of the wheat and the tares. When it was done, he prayed, stretched flat before a great wooden cross fastened to the cave wall. That also done, he rose, took up the palm mat that he was weaving, and with a heap of palm fronds beside him, sat again in the opening of the cave.