Esther paused, her eyes dilated, and stood a moment with the hands again brought together; and so perfect a figure of truthfulness, and such an impersonation of sincerity, she looked, that the Jewish servant, who understood not a word of the tongue in which she addressed the Greek lady and her son, gazed at her; his work suspended, his cask held high in air, with all the marks of one who heard and accepted some sacred and unquestionable revelation.
"Go on, dear child," said Aglais. "What passed further?"
"I asked the pale image what this meant, that he should term the condition in which he is waiting and has yet to wait a little time—that vast, dim condition—'a house,' 'a city,' and 'a kingdom.' 'The dwellers,' he replied, 'are watched in that kingdom by silent protectors, mighty and beautiful, whose faces, full of a severe, sad love, are the torches and the only light those dwellers ever see; and the vast, dim city has a sunless and a starless sky for its roof, under which they wait; and that sky is the ceiling which echoes the sighs of their pain; and thus to them it has been a kingdom, and a city, and a house; and, until the ninth hour of last Friday, they were numerous as the nations of men!' 'And at the ninth hour of that day, I asked, 'O my father! what occurred when so many departed, and you and a small number were left still to wait?' And he gazed at me for an instant with a wan and wistful look; then, lo! I saw nothing where he had been standing under the fig-tree.
"But it was at the ninth hour of the last Friday the Master had expired by the side of the penitent who was that very day to be with him in paradise!" cried Aglais.
At Esther's arrival, Paulus and Aglais had both risen from a kind of semicircular wicker settle which occupied one of the corners of the roof; and they now, all three, when Esther had finished her strange, brief narrative, leaned silent and musing against the parapet; where, under the shade of a clustering rhododendron, they had a view westward (drawn, as people are who ponder, toward whatever object is most luminous) of the towers and palaces and pinnacles of the Holy City, then reddening in the sunset. One word respecting the spot where the little group was thus collected, and (among modern, and especially western, nations) concerning its peculiar scenic effects.
The roof was an irregular parallelogram, protected on all sides by a low, thick parapet, at two opposite corners of which, in the diagonals, were two doors of masonry, bolted with massive round bars of iron, or left open; thus excluding or admitting communication with the contiguous houses. The writer, many years ago, saw such parapet doors on the house-tops of modern Algiers; nor was the arrangement unknown in the more famous Eastern cities of antiquity, where the roofs glowed with plants in vases. When, on some public occasion, the passages were opened, the richer inhabitants, far above the noise, dust, squalor, sultriness, and comparative darkness of the narrow and noisome streets, could stroll and lounge for miles, in mid-air, among flowers; could cross even flying and embowered bridges (of which a privileged number possessed the keys, like those who have keys to the gardens of our squares); and so Dives, unseen of Lazarus, but seeing far down all things little and supine, could wander through parterres of bloom, and perfumed alleys, and shrubberies of enchantment, with effects of sunlight sprinkled, so to speak, with coolness and with shadows, soothed out of the noonday fierceness into tints various and tender; unsoiled of the stains and pains that stained and pained the poor sordid world below; until the hearts of those who thus promenaded amid circumstances of such delicious refinement and luxury, bearing and hearing news, and exchanging civilities, were "lifted up," and became even like to the heart of Nabuchodonosor the king. Sometimes the pecten-beaten dulcimer, or the fingered lyre of six strings, made long-forgotten airs of music beguile the declining day, and linger for hours longer, ravishing the night under the stars of the Syrian sky. Such the scene.
But none of the roof-doors were open that Wednesday evening. Something ailed the Holy City. Out of the hushed heavens, mysteries and a stern doom were brooding over Jerusalem. Already the fermenting germ of those dreadful factions which were to tear to pieces, with intestine rage, the whole Jewish body, while the city was writhing in the vain death-struggle against Titus, a few years later, had begun to make itself sensible to the observant. A fierce hatred of the Romans and an insane eagerness to re-establish the old Jewish independence had taken possession of certain youthful fanatics; and "possessed" indeed they seemed. On the one side, the Roman officers of the garrison, from Pilate down, had received anonymous warnings, in the wildest style, requiring them to withdraw from Jerusalem within a given time, or they should be all executed in the streets, as opportunity might occur; on the other, the prefect of Syria had been earnestly requested by Pilate to strengthen the garrison; while in the city itself the soldiers were strictly admonished to keep to their quarters, to avoid late hours, and to hold no intercourse when off duty with the inhabitants. Leaves of absence were stopped. A few legionaries had been already murdered in the neighborhood of wine-shops, in the small winding alleys, and in places of evil repute, and no efforts succeeded in identifying the perpetrators.
But these were only the feeble and evanescent symptoms, destined to disappear and reappear, of a political and social phase which was not to become the predominant situation until another situation should have exhausted its first fury. This, the first, was to be the war of the Synagogue against the disciples of the Messiah, whom those disciples went about declaring to have risen from the tomb, according to his distinct promise; whom they went about declaring to have been already seen, and heard, and touched by themselves, again and again.
No wonder, then, if Aglais and Paulus and Esther had discussed in hushed tones and in Greek the wonders and various portents attendant upon the supreme and central fact—that Resurrection of the Master which absorbed their whole hearts and minds, leaving no room for any other interest therein at this tremendous epoch—the grand turning-point of human destinies and of our whole planet's history.
From the parapet against which they were leaning, they now gazed in silence upon the splendid scenes below and opposite. Across a maze of narrow streets they saw the mansions, the pinnacles, the towers, and that great supernal "Temple of God," all so soon to perish violently, in a general, a complete, and an irreversible destruction. They saw the play of light and shadow upon one long tree-lined side of Herod's proud palace; they saw the ripple of quivering leaves reflected upon the white colonnades (and their tessellated, shady floors) of Pilate's fatal house; and, while revolving thoughts and questions of unspeakable importance and solemnity, they all three suddenly beheld an acted picture, a passing scene, voiceless to them, yet impressive, which blent itself into their recollection of other scenes, never to be effaced from the memory of mankind, which, not a week before, had been under those very colonnades enacted.