All fell back several paces.
“The scourge of God!” said the priest with deep solemnity.
“Damnable Eastern plague!” muttered the Roman soldier.
“Incurable! incurable!” exclaimed Magistus.
It was the leprosy!
That ghoul of diseases, which slowly devours a living victim, had made fearful ravages upon my poor father’s frame. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone; his chin and ears were much swollen, and a pearl-white scaly ulcer deformed his forehead; his hands had a sickly and withered appearance.
We now understood the meaning of his strange conduct. The disease began first about the joints and the covered parts of his body. As soon as it broke out on the skin, the poor man had shut himself up to conceal his affliction and to avoid contaminating his family. Knowing himself stricken with a disgusting and incurable malady, which would exclude him from society and drive him away from his children, he bore the burden of his awful secret alone. Magistus had discovered his condition, and anxious to revenge himself upon virtues he could not imitate, and to get possession of the property, he laid the case before the authorities, and insisted that the law of separation should be executed upon his brother-in-law.
As the unhappy man stood in the doorway, he turned his eyes upon the pale faces of his terrified children, and, silently wringing his hands, looked upward to heaven. He was turning away, when all three of us sprang forward at once, and with cries which would have moved the coldest heart, fell at his feet and clung about his knees.
“Touch me not! my sweet children!” he exclaimed, in a hoarse and feeble voice. “Touch me not. It is all over! Caiaphas will befriend my orphans.”
He had not finished the words before several strange [pg 27]domestics, who had rushed in at a signal from Magistus, proceeded to drag us from the spot.