In Both Worlds

by William H. Holcombe

“Away with them!” said the hideous old man, fiercely. “Confine them in the farthest room. We want no young lepers—no more scourges of God.”

“If it were a scourge of God,” cried I, struggling to escape, “it would have been sent upon you and not upon my noble father.”

We were carried weeping out of the courtyard. Looking back to the door, we saw the unhappy man waving his last adieu to us with his poor, sickly, withered hands.

The Mosaic law against the unfortunate leper was cruelly severe; but the Roman power which occupied the country and feared the ravages of leprosy among the soldiery, added greatly to its force and to the stringency of its execution.

The leper was sentenced to a social and civil death far more terrible to a man of sensibility than the mere separation of soul and body. He was driven from the face of his fellow-men, and dwelt in caves and hollow trees and deserted ruins. No one was permitted to touch him, to approach him, or even to speak to him. He was compelled to cry out, Unclean! unclean! so as to warn every one of his dangerous proximity. He became literally the wild man of the woods and the mountains and the desert—the companion and sometimes the prey of wild beasts.

Those who had friends and money had little huts erected for them in remote but safe places, and were amply provided with food and even luxuries by servants who deposited the articles upon the ground at a considerable distance from their habitations.

Such was the fate of our good and generous father—the idol of our hearts and the model of all social and heroic virtues.

We spent the night in tears, and the next day in an agony of grief. I do not know who witnessed the dreadful ceremonies of the law. He was examined by the proper inspectors, and pronounced unclean and incurable. He was led into the great highway. The people stood afar off. The priest in a loud voice pronounced the curse of God upon him—the service of the dead over the living body. He cut him off from the congregation of Israel. The guards then drove him before them into some uninhabited place, and he disappeared from the sight of men.

He was always visible, however, to the hearts of his three little orphans. We followed his steps with filial vigilance. We saw him toiling along in the sand of the desert, and we shared his burden of heat and hunger and thirst. We saw him seated under a palm tree, or in the shadow of some great rock, and we felt the sorrows of his thoughts as if they were our own. We saw him kneeling by the brook, and we mingled our prayers with his. We saw him sleeping in his lonely hut, lighted only by the moon, and we were comforted by his dream of angels and heaven.