By Frederick Goodall.

MARY AND THE INFANT SAVIOUR.

MARY:
THE
QUEEN OF THE HOUSE OF DAVID
AND
MOTHER OF JESUS.

THE STORY OF HER LIFE.

Gabriel.—“Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee:

Blessed art thou among women.”

Mary.—“All generations shall call me blessed.”

BY
Rev. A. STEWART WALSH, D.D.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Rev. T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D.

ILLUSTRATED.

PUBLISHED EXCLUSIVELY BY
A. S. GRAY & CO.
SUCCESSORS TO
Central Publishing House and Keystone Publishing Co.
Pittsburgh, Pa.
1889.

COPYRIGHT BY H. S. ALLEN,
1886.
COPYRIGHT OWNED BY
A. S. GRAY.
1889.

ARGYLE PRESS,
Printing and Bookbinding,
265 & 267 CHERRY ST., N. Y.

TO WOMANKIND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
THIS
STORY OF A LIFE
MOST
BEAUTIFUL, BENEFICENT, AND INSPIRING
Is Dedicated
BY THE AUTHOR.

INTRODUCTION TO
THE QUEEN OF THE HOUSE OF DAVID.

By Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D.D.

I have been asked to open the front door of this book. But I must not keep you standing too long on the threshold. The picture-gallery, the banqueting hall and the throne-room are inside. All the fascinations of romance are, by the able author, thrown around the facts of Mary’s life. Much-abused tradition is also called in for splendid service. The pen that the author wields is experienced, graceful, captivating, and multipotent. As perhaps no other book that was ever written, this one will show us woman as standing at the head of the world. It demonstrates in the life of Mary what woman was and what woman may be. Woman’s position in the world is higher than man’s; and although she has often been denied the right of suffrage, she always does vote and always will vote—by her influence; and her chief desire ought to be that she should have grace rightly to rule in the dominion which she has already won.

She has no equal as a comforter of the sick. What land, what street, what house has not felt the smitings of disease? Tens of thousands of sick beds! What shall we do with them? Shall man, with his rough hand, and heavy foot, and impatient bearing, minister? No; he cannot soothe the pain. He can not quiet the nerves. He knows not where to set the light. His hand is not steady enough to pour out the drops. He is not wakeful enough to be watcher. You have known men who have despised women, but the moment disease fell upon them, they did not send for their friends at the bank or their worldly associates. Their first cry was, “Take me to my wife.” The dissipated young man at the college scoffs at the idea of being under home influence; but at the first blast of typhoid fever on his cheek he says, “Where is mother?” I think one of the most pathetic passages in all the Bible is the description of the lad who went out to the harvest fields of Shunem and got sunstruck; throwing his hands on his temples, and crying out, “Oh, my head! my head!” and they said, “Carry him to his mother.” And the record is “He sat on her knees till noon and then died.”

In the war men cast the cannon, men fashioned the muskets, men cried to the hosts “Forward, march!” men hurled their battalions on the sharp edges of the enemy, crying “Charge! charge!” but woman scraped the lint, woman administered the cordials, woman watched by the dying couch, woman wrote the last message to the home circle, woman wept at the solitary burial, attended by herself and four men with a spade. Men did their work with shot and shell, and carbine and howitzer; women did their work with socks and slippers, and bandages, and warm drinks, and scripture texts, and gentle soothings of the hot temples, and stories of that land where they never have any pain. Men knelt down over the wounded and said, “On which side did you fight?” Women knelt down over the wounded and said, “Where are you hurt? What nice thing can I make for you to eat? What makes you cry?” To-night, while we men are soundly asleep in our beds, there will be a light in yonder loft; there will be groaning down that dark alley; there will be cries of distress in that cellar. Men will sleep and women will watch.

No one as well as a woman can handle the poor. There are hundreds and thousands of them in all our cities. There is a kind of work that men cannot do for the destitute. Man sometimes gives his charity in a rough way, and it falls like the fruit of a tree in the East, which fruit comes down so heavily that it breaks the skull of the man who is trying to gather it. But woman glides so softly into the house of want, and finds out all the sorrows of the place, and puts so quietly the donation on the table, that all the family come out on the front steps as she departs, expecting that from under her shawl she will thrust out two wings and go right up to Heaven, from whence she seems to have come down. O, Christian young woman, if you would make yourself happy and win the blessings of Christ, go out among the poor! A loaf of bread or a bundle of socks may make a homely load to carry, but the angels of God will come out to watch, and the Lord Almighty will give His messenger hosts a charge, saying, “Look after that woman, canopy her with your wings, and shelter her from all harm.” And while you are seated in the house of destitution and suffering, the little ones around the room will whisper, “Who is she? is she not beautiful?” and if you will listen right sharply, you will hear dripping through the leaky roof, and rolling over the broken stairs, the angel chant that shook Bethlehem: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will to man.” Can you tell why a Christian woman, going down among the haunts of iniquity on a Christian errand, seldom meets with any indignity?

I stood in the chapel of Helen Chalmers, the daughter of the celebrated Dr. Chalmers, in the most abandoned part of the city of Edinburg; and I said to her, as I looked around upon the fearful surroundings of that place, “Do you come here nights to hold a service?” “Oh, yes,” she said; “I take my lantern and I go through all these haunts of sin, the darkest and the worst; and I ask all the men and women to come to the chapel, and then I sing for them, and I pray for them, and I talk to them.” I said, “Can it be possible that you never meet with an insult while performing this Christian errand?” “Never,” she said; “never.” That young woman, who has her father by her side, walking down the street, and an armed policeman at each corner is not so well defended as that Christian woman who goes forth on Gospel work into the haunts of iniquity carrying the Bible and bread.

Some one said, “I dislike very much to see that Christian woman teaching these bad boys in the mission school. I am afraid to have her instruct them.” “So,” said another man, “I am afraid too.” Said the first, “I am afraid they will use vile language before they leave the place.” “Ah,” said the other man, “I am not afraid of that; what I am afraid of is, that if any of those boys should use a bad word in her presence, the other boys would tear him to pieces—killing him on the spot.”

Woman is especially endowed to soothe disaster She is called the weaker vessel, but all profane as well as sacred history attests that when the crisis comes she is better prepared than man to meet the emergency. How often have you seen a woman who seemed to be a disciple of frivolity and indolence, who, under one stroke of calamity, changed to be a heroine. There was a crisis in your affairs, you struggled bravely and long, but after a while there came a day when you said, “Here I shall have to stop;” and you called in your partners, and you called in the most prominent men in your employ, and you said, “We have got to stop.” You left the store suddenly; you could hardly make up your mind to pass through the street and over on the ferry-boat; you felt everybody would be looking at you and blaming you and denouncing you. You hastened home; you told your wife all about the affair. What did she say? Did she play the butterfly; did she talk about the silks and the ribbons and the fashions? No; she came up to the emergency; she quailed not under the stroke. She helped you to begin to plan right away. She offered to go out of the comfortable house into a smaller one, and wear the old cloak another winter. She was one who understood your affairs without blaming you. You looked upon what you thought was a thin, weak woman’s arm holding you up; but while you looked at that arm there came into the feeble muscles of it the strength of the eternal God. No chiding. No fretting. No telling you about the beautiful house of her father, from which you brought her, ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. You said, “Well, this is the happiest day of my life. I am glad I have got from under my burden. My wife don’t care—I don’t care.” At the moment you were utterly exhausted, God sent a Deborah to meet the host of the Amalekites and scatter them like chaff over the plain. There are scores and hundreds of households to-day where as much bravery and courage are demanded of woman as was exhibited by Grace Darling or Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc.

Woman is further endowed to bring us into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is easier for a woman to be a Christian than for a man. Why? You say she is weaker. No. Her heart is more responsive to the pleadings of divine love. The fact that she can more easily become a Christian, I prove by the statement that three-fourths of the members of the churches in all Christendom are women. So God appoints them to be the chief agencies for bringing this world back to God. The greatest sermons are not preached on celebrated platforms; they are preached with an audience of two or three and in private home-life. A patient, loving, Christian demeanor in the presence of transgression, in the presence of hardness, in the presence of obduracy and crime, is an argument from the throne of the Lord Almighty; and blessed is that woman who can wield such an argument. A sailor came slipping down the ratlin one night as though something had happened, and the sailors cried, “What’s the matter?” He said, “My mother’s prayers haunt me like a ghost.”

In what a realm is every mother the queen. The eagles of heaven can not fly across that dominion. Horses, panting and with lathered flanks, are not swift enough to run to the outpost of that realm, and death itself will only be the annexation of heavenly principalities. When you want your grandest idea of a queen you do not think of Catherine of Russia, or of Anne of England, or Maria Theresa of Germany: but when you want to get your grandest idea of a queen you think of the plain woman who sat opposite your father at the table or walked with him, arm in arm, down life’s pathway; sometimes to the Thanksgiving banquet, sometimes to the grave, but always together; soothing your petty griefs, correcting your childish waywardness, joining in your infantile sports, listening to your evening prayer, toiling for you with needle or at the spinning wheel, and on cold nights wrapping you up snug and warm; and then, at last, on that day when she lay in the back room dying, and you saw her take those thin hands with which she had toiled for you so long, and put them together in a dying prayer that commended you to the God whom she had taught you to trust—oh, she was the queen! The chariots of God came down to fetch her, and as she went in, all heaven rose up. You can not think of her now without a rush of tenderness that stirs the deep foundations of your soul, and you feel as much a child again as when you cried on her lap; and if you could bring her back to life again to speak, just once more, your name as tenderly as she used to speak it, you would be willing to throw yourself on the ground and kiss the sod that covers her, crying, “Mother! mother!” Ah, she was the queen!

Home influences are the mightiest of all influences upon the soul. There are men who have maintained their integrity, not because they were any better naturally than some other people, but because there were home influences praying for them all the time. They got a good start. They were launched on the world with the benedictions of a Christian mother. They may track Siberian snows, they may plunge into African jungles, they may fly to the earth’s end, they can not go so far and so fast but the prayer will keep up with them. Oh, what a multitude of women in heaven. Mary, Christ’s mother, in heaven. Elizabeth Fry in heaven. Charlotte Elizabeth in heaven. The mother of Augustine in heaven. The Countess of Huntingdon is in heaven—who sold her splendid jewels to build chapels—in heaven; while a great many others who have never been heard of on earth, or known but little of, have gone into the rest and peace of heaven. What a rest. What a change it was from the small room with no fire and one window, the glass broken out, and the aching side and worn out eyes, to the “house of many mansions.” Heaven for aching heads. Heaven for broken hearts. Heaven for anguish-bitten frames. No more sitting up until midnight for the coming of staggering steps. No more rough blows on the temples. No more sharp, keen, bitter curses.

Some of you will have no rest in this world; it will be toil and struggle all the way up. You will have to stand at your door fighting back the wolf with your own hand red with carnage. But God has a crown for you. He is now making it, and whenever you weep a tear, He sets another gem in that crown; whenever you have a pang of body or soul, He puts another gem in that crown, until after a while in all the tiara there will be no room for another splendor; and God will say to his angel, “The crown is done; let her up that she may wear it.” And as the Lord of righteousness puts the crown upon your brow, angel will cry to angel, “Who is she?” and Christ will say, “I will tell you who she is; she is the one that came up out of great tribulation and had her robe washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.” And then God will spread a banquet, and He will invite all the principalities of heaven to sit at the feast, and the tables will blush with the best clusters from the vineyards of God and crimson with the twelve manner of fruits from the tree of life, and water from the fountains of the rock will flash from the golden tankards; and the old harpers of heaven will sit there, making music with their harps, and Christ will point you out amid the celebrities of heaven, saying, “She suffered with me on earth, now we are going to be glorified together.” And the banquetters, no longer able to hold their peace, will break forth with congratulation. “Hail! hail!” And there will be a handwriting on the wall; not such as struck the Persian noblemen with horror, but with fire-tipped fingers writing in blazing capitals of light and love and victory: “God has wiped away all tears from all faces.”

And now I leave you in the hands of Dr. Walsh, the author of this book. He will show you Mary, the model of all womanly, wifely, motherly excellence—the Madonna hanging in the Louvre of admiration for all Christendom, and for many millions in the higher Vatican of their worship.

T. De Witt Talmage.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE
QUEEN OF THE HOUSE OF DAVID

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEEN’S PORTRAIT.

“And breaking as from distant gloom,

A face comes painted on the air;

A presence walks the haunted room,

Or sits within the vacant chair.

And every object that I feel

Seems charged by some enchanter’s wand.

And keen the dizzy senses thrill,

As with the touch of spirit hand.

A form beloved comes again,

A voice beside me seems to start,

While eager fancies fill the brain,

And eager passions hold the heart.”

Master, we would see a sign from Thee, was the cunning challenge of the Scribes and Pharisees. They were certain that, in this at least, the hearts of the people would be with them. A sign, a scene, a symbol, were the constant demand and quest of the olden times, as of all times. Even Jehovah led forth to victory and trust, as necessity was upon Him in leading human followers, “with an outstretched arm, and with signs and with wonders.” The Jews, seemingly so doubtful and so querulous, after all articulated the longings of the universal humanity. The longing stimulated the effort to gratify it, and forthwith the artist became the teacher of the people. Presentments of Mary, as she might have been, and as she was imagined to have been by those most devout, were multiplied. Piety sought to express its regard for her by making her more real to faith through the instrumentality of the speaking canvas, but beyond this there was the desire to embody certain charms and virtues of character dear to all pure and devout ones. These were expressed by pictured faces, ideally perfect. They called each such “Mary”; and if there had never been a real Mary, still these handiworks would have had no small value. Who can say that those consecrated artists were in no degree moved by the Spirit which guided David when “he opened dark sayings on the harp,” and rapturously extolled that other Beloved of God, the Church? Music and painting—twin sisters—equal in merit, and both from Him who displays form, color and harmony as among the chief rewards and glories of His upper kingdom. These also meet a want in human nature as God created it. The artists did not beget this desire for presentments through form and color of the woman deemed most blessed; the desire rather begot the artists. Stately theology has never ceased truly to proclaim from the day Christ cried “It is finished!” that “in Him all fullness dwells;” but no theology, has been able to silence the cry of woman’s heart in woman and woman’s nature in man which pleads through the long years, “Show us the mother and it sufficeth us.” It has happened sometimes that gross minds have strayed from the ideal or spiritual imports of Mary’s life and fallen into idolizing her effigies. That was their fault, and must not be taken as full proof that nothing but evil came from the portrayings of our queen. The facts are conclusively otherwise. The painters that made glorious ideals shine forth from the canvas unconsciously painted the shadows largely out of the conditions of all women. Before this second advent of the Virgin, the paganish idea that women were the “weaker sex,” the inferiors of men, at best only useful, handsome animals, prevailed. The renaissance of Mary, as the ideal woman, was an event seeded with the germs of revolutionary impulses socially. Like sunrise it began in the East, at first dimly manifest, then it became effulgent and quickly coursed westward along the pathways of Christianity’s conquests. Like sweet, grateful light then there came to the hearts of men the braver true persuasion, that the woman who not only bore the Christ but won His reverent love must have been morally beautiful and great. In the track of this persuasion, and as its sequence, there came the conviction that the sex, of which Mary was one, had within it possibilities beyond what its sturdier companions had dreamed. After this it came about that the painters, often the interpreters of human feelings, began to represent all goodness under the form of a Madonna. Not knowing the contour of Mary’s face they began gathering here and there, from the women they knew, features of beauty. They combined these in one harmonious presentment. They set out to represent the ideal woman, but had to go to women to find her parts. It became a tribute to womankind to do this. It was like a voyage of discovery, and the artist voyagers depicted not only the best things in womankind, but by putting these things together illustrated what woman could be and should be at her best.

It was thus that Guido produced a picture of the Madonna which enravished all that beheld it. Once he had said, “I wish I’d the wings of an angel to behold the beatified spirits, which I might have copied.” After, here and there, he picked out fragments of color and form on earth; then put them into one ideal composition. It was a heart-expanding work; the work of a prophet, since it told of what might be in woman wholly at her best. Then he said, “the beautiful and pure idea must be in the head” of the artist. It was a deep saying. Given the ideal, and the worker will need only proper ambition to present a grand composition, whether on canvas or in the patternings of the inner life. The presentments of the Virgin rose in fineness when priests turned from their exegesis to kneel and paint for men. The great Saint Augustine, held in high honor by Christians of every name, redeemed from a youth of darkest sinning, revered as his guiding star two lovely women, Monica, his mother, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. He argues, in stalwart polemics, that through the acknowledgment of Mary’s pre-eminence all womankind was elevated. Her presentment, so as to be fully comprehended, was in the beginning a blessing to every soul in being an inspiration to purer, sweeter living. So far as such presentment now conserves the same results the work is worthy and profitable. In all times the representations of the Virgin, whether by the historian or the master of the studio, varied; but the piety they awakened always seemed to be of one type, and that lofty. Thus we have “the stern, awful quietude of the old Mosaics, the hard lifelessness of the degenerate Greeks, the pensive sentiment of the Siena, the stately elegance of the Florentine Madonnas, the intellectual Milanese, with their large foreheads and thoughtful eyes, the tender, refined mysticism of the Umbrian, the sumptuous loveliness of the Venetian; the quaint, characteristic simplicity of the early German, so stamped with their nationality that I never looked round me in a room full of German girls without thinking of Albert Durer’s Virgins; the intense, life-like feeling of the Spanish, the prosaic, portrait-like nature of the Flemish schools, and so on.” Each time and place produced its own ideal, but all tried to express the one thought uppermost; pious regard for the Queen and model. All seemed to feel that in this devotion there was somehow comfort and exaltation—and there generally were both.

The writer of the foregoing quotation, a woman of widest culture and admirable good sense, attested the need that many feel by her own rapturous description of the Madonna of Raphael in the Dresden Gallery. “I have seen my own ideal once where Raphael—inspired, if ever painter was inspired—projected on the space before him that wonderful creation.” “There she stands, the transfigured woman; at once completely human and completely divine, an abstraction of power, purity and love; poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; with melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly dilated sibylline eyes looking out quite through the universe to the end and consummation of all things; sad, as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart through him, now resting as enthroned on that heart; yet already exalted through the homage of the redeemed generations who were to salute her as blessed. Is it so indeed? Is she so divine? or does not rather the imagination lend a grace that is not there? I have stood before it and confessed that there is more in that form and face than I have ever yet conceived. The Madonna di San Sisto is an abstract of all the attributes of Mary.”

The foregoing representation marked a step forward in things spiritual. Before Raphael, painters numberless, under the influence of the luxurious and vicious Medici, had filled the churches of Florence with painted presentments of the Virgin, characterized by an alluring beauty which seemed next door to blasphemy. Then came that Luther of his times, Savonarola. He thundered for purity, simplicity and reform; aiming his blows at the depraving, sensuous conceptions of the grosser artists. He made a bonfire in the Piazza of Florence, there consuming these false madonnas. He was, for this, persecuted to death by the Borgia family. They could not bear his trumpet call to Florentines, “Your sins make me a prophet; I have been a Jonah warning Nineveh; I shall be a Jeremiah weeping over the ruins; for God will renew His church and that will not take place without blood—” Art heard his voice, the painters became disgusted with their meaner handiwork, the rude, the obscene, the mischievous was obliterated; finer, more spiritual and loftier concepts of the Virgin appeared as proof of a reformation of morals. And Raphael, later on, seeing these productions, felt the influence that begot them, and then produced that masterpiece. Tradition says Saint Luke painted a picture of the Virgin from life. The picture, reputed to have been so painted, was found by the Turks in Constantinople when that city fell into their conquering hands. They despoiled it of its princely jewel-decorations, then tramped it contemptuously beneath their feet. The latter act was typical, and the Turk still lives to trample in contempt on honest efforts to portray with amplitude and finished details this splendid character, whose outlines alone are presented by the Gospels. But though the Vandal spirit survives, there survives also the strong yearning for the representation of that woman beyond compare, and some will still revel amid the ideals of painters, and some will be gladdened still more by truth’s complete presentment which words alone can make.

CHAPTER II.
THE PILGRIM, CRUSADER AND VIRGIN.

“There is a fire—

And motion of the soul which will not dwell,

In its own narrow being, but aspire

Beyond the fitting medium of desire;

And but once kindled, quenchless ever more,

Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire

Of aught but rest.”

—“Childe Harold.”

There is something very fascinating about the contemplation of life as a continuous pilgrimage, and the fascination grows on one as the conviction of the truth of the conception is deepened by study of it. The course of our race has been a series of processions from continent to continent, from age to age, from barbarism to refinement, from darkness toward light. Whether measuring the little arcs of individuals from birth to dust, or following along the mighty marches of our universe with all its grouping hosts of whirling constellations, we have before us ever this constant truth; man moves willingly or unwillingly onward, as a pilgrim amid pilgrims. “Move on” is the constant mandate and necessity of being. Man’s course is mapped; onward from the swaddling clothes to the shroud, from life to dust; then onward again; while all the mighty planet fleets of which the earth-ship is but one, move along their courses, over trackless oceans, toward destinations, all unknown, yet concededly in a grand as well as in an inexorable pilgrimage. Partly because the motions of his earth-ship makes him restless, partly because he is a being that hopes and so comes to try to find by distant quests hope’s fruitions, and more largely because he is of a religious nature, which impels him to seek things beyond himself, the man becomes a pilgrim. He that is content as and where he is, always, is regarded as a fool playing with the toys of a child, by wise men; by religionists, lack of holy restlessness is ever adjudged to be a sign of depravity. Hence almost all religions, whether false or true, have given birth to the pilgrim spirit. The zeal to express and to utilize this spirit has been often pitiful to behold. Multitudes, failing to grasp the fact that life itself is a pilgrimage, have invented other pilgrimages and gone aside to useless, needless miseries. But all the time they attested human nature seeking something beyond itself, better than its present. So the tribes that lived in the lowlands nourished traditions of descent from gods or ancestors who abode on the mountains, and they inaugurated pilgrimages to seek inspiration or a golden age “on high places, far away.” The chosen people of God thus constantly were allured from the worship of the Everywhere and One Jehovah by the enthusiasm of the heathen devotees who flocked to the mountain fanes. Turn which way one will in the night of the ages and the spectacle of the pilgrim is before him. Ancient Hinduism, followed by that of to-day, witnessed annually, pilgrims counted by hundreds of thousands to the temple of murderous Juggernaut, the Ganga Sagor, or isle of Sacred Ganges. The Buddhists journey to Adam’s Peak in Ceylon, and the Lamaists of Thibet travel adoringly to their Lha-Isa; the Japanese have their pilgrim shrines amid perilous approaches at Istje, while the Chinese, who claim to be sons of the mountains, clamber with naked knees the rugged sides of Kicou-hou-chan. The pilgrimages of the Jews occupy many chapters of Holy Writ, for all their ancient worthies “not having received the promises, but seeing them afar off ... confessed that they were pilgrims and strangers.” Christ confronted the pilgrim spirit perverted in the person of the woman of Samaria, at the eastern foot of Gerezim. She and her people rested their hopes in pilgrimages to their supposed to be sacred places, but the Saviour declared to her by Jacob’s well, truths, both grand and revolutionary, in these words: “The hour ... now is when the true worshiper shall worship the Father in spirit ... not in this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” “Go call thy husband and come hither. Whosoever drinketh the water I shall give shall never thirst.” There were volumes in the golden sentences and they plainly said no need to travel far to find the Everywhere God Who ever comes where men are to satisfy their every thirst. “Go call thy husband.” Go to thy home and find the water of life through doing God’s will; it is better to be a missionary than a pilgrim unless the pilgrim be also missioner. But the truths of that hour have found tardy acceptance among many. The children of Jacob are pilgrims throughout the earth, and the disciples of Christ, since His departure, have gone pilgriming often, as did their fathers before them. Constantine, the Roman emperor, and his mother, Helena, by example and precept, urged Christendom to re-embark in such pious journeys, and at the end of the first thousand years of its existence, Christianity had hosts of disciples actuated by the same old passion that sent religionists everywhere to seek shrines, fanes and blessings. Then the belief began to be held everywhere among Christians that the millennial period was at hand. Multitudes abandoned friends, sold or gave away their possessions, and hastened toward the Holy Land, where they believed Jesus Christ was to appear to judge the world. Here two pilgrim tides, utterly opposed to each other, met; the Christian and the Mohammedan. The followers of the False Prophet, like other men, were imbued with the pilgrim spirit. Some of these thought perfection could be attained only within the precincts of Babylon or Bagdad, and others sincerely believed that they could find peculiar nearness to heaven about the stone-walled Kaaba of Mecca. It was held to be not only a privilege but a duty, incumbent upon all, to take these religious journeys; hence men and women, young and old, undertook them. Even the decrepit were under the obligation, and they must either undertake the work, though failure by death were certain, or hire a proxy to go in their behalf. So was rolled up stupendously the numbers of pilgrim graves which have marked this earth of ours. The Christian pilgrims for a time thronged toward Palestine, first as a small stream, then as a torrent. Europe at large was aroused, and all impulses converged toward the Holy Sepulcher. The soldiers of the Cross soon added swords to their equipments; the flashing of spears outshone the altar lights, and almost before they realized it the priests and pious pilgrims were transformed to mailed knights. There was a root to the impulse, and that the universally felt need of ideals, patterns, personages of heroic mold in all goodness, to show men how to live. The pilgrims turned their eyes to the worthies of the past, and soon came to believe that they could best imbibe their spirit amid their tombs and former abodes. Like most religionists they grew to believe God their especial friend, and they therefore soon came to feel that, against all odds, He would help them to victory. Then they easily grew to believe that death in their crusades would merit the martyr’s crown. Their courage was unbounded, for many went out with a passion to die in the cause they had embraced. The following crusades were marked by conflicts between Moslem and Christian, filled with fanatical and merciless fury, though both the opposing hosts claimed to be doing all they did in God’s name and under his especial direction. “Deus vult,” “God wills it,” was the war-cry of a mighty army, each of which bore on his banner and on his breast the sign of the Cross, the emblem eternally exalted by the Prince of Peace, who willingly died that others might live; but these soldiers were bent on slaying those they could not convert. They were in a transitional state, passing from being pilgrims to being missionaries, but the course was a bloody one. They promoted their self-complacency by persuading themselves that it was a heaven-offending wrong to continue to suffer heretics to occupy the places made sacred by the Saviour when in the world. Then multitudes of Christian priests taught that the pious needed free course to visit the holy places of the East, that they might upbuild their faith and their grasp of theological abstractions by beholding objects associated with the tenets they had adopted. The Moslems had no interest in these proceedings beyond a desire to thwart them. The Christians, to be sure, had the moral disadvantage of being invaders, but then censure of them is mitigated by the fact that Syria was stolen property to the Turk. The latter held it by the stern title deed of the sword. The reader of this summary will be chiefly advantaged by remembering that this conflict was one of the mightiest efforts in the direction of missionary work ever attempted by man, and that being attempted by force it failed utterly. Now the Crusaders were believers in Christ and devoted to Mary. These facts awaken questions as to how, since the spirits of these twain are finally to conquer all hearts, their champions were so defeated? The Crusaders desired to promote the glory of the Man of men and the woman of women, but sought it by aims only weakly worthy, and means often atrocious. It never matters to Christ’s kingdom who possesses His grave if He only possesses all hearts. The Crusaders, beginning with a warm sentiment of respect for the Virgin, suffered their sentimentality to run mad, and mad sentiment is ripe for folly and defilement. An opal, they say, will change its color when its wearer is sick; so a man wearing a priceless virtue on the sleeve of his creed, will find its luster bedimmed when evil sickens his heart. The Crusaders had grand banners, mottoes, war-cries and ideals, but they did not know how to honestly and truly apply them. Their efforts and results well serve to emphasize the truth that moral advances are made with grander forces than those of the sword; that in the end the heroes and heroines of the world’s regeneration will appear potent and regnant solely in the sweetness, truth and exaltation of personal character. Crusader and Moslem, at heart, were each desirous of making the world better, but they each, in fact for a time made it fearfully worse. Probably the followers of the Cross and the followers of the Crescent would have been glad to have bestowed all kindness each on the other, if only the one would have accepted the creed of the other. But the humanity and charity of each were as to the other eclipsed utterly by a zeal for theories. There was need to both that there arise a harmonizing ideal. It would seem as if Providence suffered these opposing pilgrims to peel each other until each in sheer disgust was driven to seek some better way. An able historian affirms that the Crusades did not “change the fate of a single dynasty, nor the boundaries and relative strength of a nation”—but they did leave a history, the contemplation of which affords rare thought-food. The conflict ended in the utter route and flight of the Christians. The tragedy ended at Acre, but there were left some things that took shape in men’s thinking, and the world was made thereby better. The populations and properties of Christian Europe had been squandered to a startling degree in these religious wars, and it was fitting that there be some return to compensate. The result of all others, that grew out of the Crusades, and was indeed also a leading cause of their vigor, was the rising of the spirit of chivalry. The dawn of chivalry first begat brave fighting, but in time the chivalrous discovered a theater for their activity amid the amenities of peace. Chivalry was a rebound from the rugged, barbarous belief of the semi-civilized, whose trust was in brute force and whose constant dictum was, “Might makes right.” Men became impressed with a spirit of tenderness, and, little by little the duty and beauty of the strong’s helping the weak dawned upon humanity. To be chivalrous, by the unwritten laws of custom, became the obligation of every man who sought popular respect. Chivalry was in the creed of the noble and brave, and men delighted to become the companions of lone pilgrims, patrons of beggars, protectors of children and defenders of women. Toward the gentler sex, the spirit of chivalry finely expressed itself by not only defending helpless females amid physical perils, but by according to womankind distinguished courtesy, refined politeness, and all those proper respects that so appropriately garnish and ornament the social intercourse of the sexes in properly cultivated societies. Before the advent of this chivalric time, women had been deemed as generally every way inferior to men; chiefly desirable as ministers to the necessities or appetites of their lords; useful as mothers, but worthy of very little respect, confidence or lasting admiration. The dawn of this new and fine gallantry was a step toward woman’s disinthrallment. Chivalry tried to express itself in the Crusades; defeated, its ardor still burned, and Europe felt its beneficent glow long after the conflict for Syrian sepulchers had ceased. And here it is of the utmost importance that the reader forget not the key fact, that before the advent of the attractive spirit of chivalry, men’s minds in Christian communities were profoundly penetrated and wondrously incited by a deep and new regard for the Queenly woman Mary, the mother of Jesus! She had been almost rediscovered. By a common consent, Christian pulpits had begun sounding her praises, as the ideal woman; a woman worthy of the veneration and emulation of all. The various religious communities vied with each other in doing her honor. The Cistercians declared her purity by wearing white, the Servi wore black to commemorate her touching sorrows, and other bodies elected as their distinguishing badges, various garbs or signs solely to proclaim their allegiance to their ideal woman. A popular moral coronation of Mary resulted. The Crusaders outran all others in their adulation of, and committal to, the wondrous woman. They were the first to call her “Our Lady.” She was the Lady of the hearts of all. These chivalrous soldiers to her spoke their pious vows, from her besought holy favors, and in her name, with sacred oaths, committed their all to effort to wrest all Palestine from the enemies of Mary’s Son.[1] Now these millions of men were not mad, nor in pursuit of a phantom. It was all very real to them. They desired to express a long pent-up natural feeling, and they found an object all satisfactory in Mary. The Crusaders returned finally and for good from battling with Moslem; they returned thoroughly, disastrously defeated: but with their love for Mary all aglow. When they first called her “Our Lady,” there may have been an admixture of irreverence and dilettante in the thought of many; they were purged of these in the hurricane of battle and in the terrors of that inhospitable land of their pilgrimages. Amid trials, far away from his home, often in severe want, frequently confronting slavery and death, the Christian knight while adding “Ave Marie” to his “Patre Nostre,” learned to think of the Madonna as his mother. Missing the latter keenly, worshiping the other unfeignedly, woman took a high throne in his esteem. Sword conquest began to seem to the war-wearied soldier very insignificant as compared to a ministry of comfort, peace and good will. The defeated Crusaders returned to scatter through all Europe a new gospel of humanity. They exalted the Queen of David’s line and forgot to recount the fortunes of war in the East in expounding the dawning beauties of the woman that entranced them and the queenship this ideal had gained over their minds. So they prepared multitudes of the sterner sex for a lasting belief in the worthfulness of true womanhood at its best. The Christian world was ripe for such a revival, when the priests began to thunder “On to Jerusalem!” but men needed not so much war as conversion; not so much relics and tombs as loving principles exemplified. It is wonderful how conversion womanizes some men. That is a triumph of the spiritual over the sensual, the beautiful over the gross. It will make a man of brutal, selfish fiber, in time, as tender as a mother toward her child and as self-denying as a maid toward her lover. The Crusaders started out to rescue the tomb of the dead Saviour from unbelievers and failed, but they returned to herald the renaissance of Mary, the disenslaving of woman; to call the state, the home and individuals to all the refinements which the exaltation of such an ideal of necessity offered. Toward this advening the rising spirit of chivalry was bending the finest hearts when the clarions of war, sounded from altar and baptistry, summoned all to raise the red banner against the Moslem. Right here it is worthy of notice that God’s providence presented other, though allied, principles in the conflict against the Orientals. Two pilgrim hosts, thinking to choose their own ways, were wisely led to better goals than they knew. The Turk presented the throng of the harem as his family; the Christian was committed to the union of only two in holy wedlock. One party presented a banner with a Cross, forever the emblem of self-sacrifice; the other the Crescent, emblem of youthfulness increasing, a hint ever of the hope of endless lust, whether borne of the master of a harem or by the heathen follower of the ancient moon-horned Astarte. The last at Acre, by the Syrian border of the Mediterranean Sea, the Saracen hugged victory and the Cross-bearers were utterly routed. So reads human history, but in truth the defeat was only apparent and local. The followers of the Crescent, holding the creed of lust and making pleasure of sense their end came surely toward their destruction when successes encouraged them in their courses; the followers of the Cross, on the other hand, had within some germs of truth, life-giving in themselves and too beautiful to be suffered to die from the earth. Trial and defeat watered these germs and the knightly hosts returned to Europe by thousands to proclaim finer doctrines than those by which the priest had incited them to war. The returning soldiers were transformed from pilgrims to missionaries, from being taught to teaching, from restorers of Palestine’s graves to restorers of European society. Of the “Teutonic Knights of Saint Mary,” a fine and representative order, an impartial historian writes: “They defended Christianity against the barbarians of Eastern Europe.” “After many bloody encounters introduced German manners, language and morals.” Of the Knighthood, as a whole, says another, “the institution that could breed such characters as these, obviously rendered an enduring service to humanity. Its spirit lives on, offering examples which the young still welcome in their joyous, dreamy days. The ideal still remains, purified by time, freed from its frailties, and aids in fashioning modern sentiment to the conception and admiration of the Christian gentleman.”

CHAPTER III.
ARMAGEDDON; THE KEY AND SICKLE.

“From the moist regions of the western star,

The wandering hermits wake the storm of war;

Their limbs all iron, their souls all flame;

A countless host the Red Cross warriors came.”

—Reginald Heber.

As a traveler climbs the mountain to see the sunrise, so he that would overlook the past or present must needs clamber to some lofty point of vision in a significant era or historic location. There are two plains in Syria; one lying along the Mediterranean, the other jutting out from the base of the former toward Jordan; the two together, in shape very like a sickle, have witnessed events wonderfully instructive and determinate to the student of the philosophy of time’s course. These two plains are known respectively as Esdrælon and Acre. The sea and the mountains give these plains their sickle shape, and the geographical outlines are constantly suggestively before the mind as one remembers these plateaus not only as the highways but the battle-fields of the ancient nations. For while, as one says, “the face of nature smiles”—“no spot on earth more fertile,” he also says “no field on earth was so fattened by the blood of the slain.” There the Philistines, the Ptolemys, Antiochus, the Maccabees, Herod, Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, Salah-ed-din, Cœur-de-Lion, Melek-Seruf and Napoleon, each in turn, put their ambitions and their beliefs to the stern arbitrament of swords. There the kingdom of the House of David struggled for life; there the splendid dream of the Crusaders ended as a nightmare.

As a jewel in the haft of the sickle, at the northerly end of the plain by the sea, sits the city of Acre. This city compels the attention of the preacher and student of history and gives theme to him who blends symbol into song. Acre gave its name to its adjacent country round about, and though both city and plain witnessed many a change of master in the past, those changing masters, to gratify their whims or strengthen their policies from time to time, giving the places various names. The Knights of Saint John made it their elect city, honoring it as Saint Jean de Acre, the martyr maid of France. From the city itself one may look out over the sea-highway of nations; from the drear and lofty mountains of its surrounding country one may look over many memorable places. Acre was often called the “Key of Palestine” by the soldier strategists and by the chroniclers of events. To their testimony is added that of the inspired writers and prophets who made it their key and mountain of outlook frequently.

These plains, dotted all about by sacred places, memorable for two great victories; Barak over the Canaanites and Gideon over the Midianites; and two great disasters, the death of Saul and the death of Josiah, became to the Jews the symbol of the conflict of right and wrong. Prophetically, and in the serene hope that righteousness at last would prevail, the plain was called Armageddon, “the Mountain of the Gospel.” We hear the rapt Zechariah thus descanting: “The Lord also shall save the glory of the house of David and the house of David shall be as God.” “And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications; and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.”

The prophet looked forth to the Pentecostal day of salvation and the assured victories of David’s great successor. Following this ancient seer, John the beloved, in the Visions of the Apocalypse repeats, these oracles. During the wars of the Crusaders, Acre was sometimes in their possession and sometimes held by their Turkish foes. In the year 1191 Richard the Lion Heart wrested it from the infidel leader Salah-ed-din. The Christians held it firmly until 1291, the time when the last wave of the Crusader advance ebbed, in bloody defeat, from the shores of the Holy Land. For two hundred years the believer of the West and the Moslem grappled with each other in deadly conflict; war’s fortunes often changing, but the awful price in human misery and human blood was inexorably exacted at every stage of the conflict. Acre was the focus toward which the eddying tides ever and anon moved; therefore it saw not only the end but the worst of the Crusades.

Our story begins A. D. 1291 at Acre, the Key of Palestine, in Armageddon, “the mountain of the Gospel.” The situation may be briefly depicted: Acre was filled with a mixed and un-homogeneous population. There were the ubiquitous Galilean traders, without politics; shrewd to the last degree in traffic and courtly as a Parisian; there some secret, sullen, silent enemies of the Christian invaders, awaiting the coming end; there hundreds of those camp-following nondescript “good lord and good devil” characters, and there the remnants of the Crusader armies. The latter were not only diminished as to numbers but greatly degraded in moral tone. Their warfare had been belittled to a defense and a retreat. The adventurers were uppermost; courts-martial, intrigues and fanfaronade were their occupation daily. Prince Edward, the Christian leader, had made a sworn treaty with the Moslems long before this time; but his pious followers had quickly, wickedly violated it. Thereupon the Sultan, Kha-tel, had made an irrevocable treaty with himself, sealed with the most awful oath he could register, that he would never tire until he had exterminated the last of the Western invaders now circumscribed and besieged in Acre. With 200,000 dusky followers the Sultan besieged the last stronghold of the Crusaders. The hearts of the defenders sank within them, and scores sought safety in homeward flight, loading down every vessel bound for Europe. Among the first fugitives was the chief leader, Hugh de Lusignan, who wore the phantom title, “King of Jerusalem.” He preferred the safety of distant Cyprus to the doubtful regality which was overshadowed with nearing death. Only 12,000 were left to represent the Crusade cause which once mustered millions. May 18, 1291, the devoted city was stormed by the Turks; an entrance was effected and a murderous carnage, heaping the streets with the dead, and redding the foam of the moaning sea, followed. But there was no easy victory to the Moslem, for the steady, vigorous, brilliant, desperate fighting of the knights, laying low piles of their foes for every one of themselves that fell, compelled the respect of the Sultan’s host. The Turks attempted to gain a surrender by offering bribes; these failing, terms were offered. The latter, which included permission for the Crusade remnant to depart the country in peace, were accepted. But the Sultan, taught, if he needed the lesson, by the perfidy of Prince Edward’s Christian truce-breakers, quickly broke his promise of safe conduct. Though the retreating band was in no way party to the wrong he sought to avenge, they were mercilessly ambuscaded. There followed another struggle to the death, a handful against a host and but few succeeded in cutting their way through the cordon of death. History has often recounted the preceding events up to the point; from this point it is proposed to lead the reader along the career of a fragment tossed out of the foregoing whirlpool of disaster.

CHAPTER IV.
SIR CHARLEROY; THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE AND KNIGHT OF SAINT MARY.

“’Tis quickly seen,

Whate’er he be, ’twas not what he had been;

That brow in furrowed lines had fixed at last,

And spoke of passion but of passion past.”

...

“Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,

How woke he from the wildness of his dream?

Alas! he told not, but he did awake,

To curse the withered heart that would not break.”

—“Lara.”

The course of the knights fleeing from Acre was turned toward Nazareth. There being but one way open to them, they took that way quickly and with one accord. The fugitives from Acre represented various knightly orders, but they were disorganized, without any definite destination and without an authorized leader. Among them was Sir Charleroy de Griffin, a knight famed for valor, a central and commanding personage; one that would have attracted attention in almost any assembly of men. As he went, so went the rest of the fleeing Christians, and when he reined in his panting steed, after a time, at the top of a fir-crested knoll not far from Nazareth, the knights following him did likewise. Then they drew around him in a semi-circle, without command, and simultaneously, as if to solicit his direction. They had followed the course he took because he took it, and now with one accord they halted because he had done so. There is to some a subtile influence that makes them leaders of men; so the disorganized Crusaders, by an unvoiced but fully expressed concession, admitted the leadership of this dashing horseman. Some may designate this a triumph of personal magnetism, but be that as it may, it was a fact that Sir Charleroy was chief. Sir Charleroy, just at the time of the foregoing incident, presented an admirable study for the philosopher or painter. From his saddle he was able to overlook leagues of bright landscape, but he could not claim the protection of a foot of it; for the first time in his life he yearned for home, now a spreading sea, and a wall of death shut it out from him apparently for ever; by circumstances absolute sovereign almost of the men about him, but doubt and danger were confounding all his ability to give commands. He fell into a train of thought, leaving his comrades to converse with their pawing steeds and to questionings within themselves as to the future. Sir Charleroy had reached an eminence in life, one of those points of out-look where a man’s past meets him and demands review, that it may explain the present. He believed that he had reached very nearly the end of his career, and in that belief he began to weigh it for what it was worth. In imagination he saw one writing the story of his life. Sir Charleroy, the refugee, began faithfully to review Sir Charleroy, the wayward youth, pleasure-seeker and reckless man. The former dictated mentally to the imaginary scribe: “Write, Charleroy de Griffin was the son of a stalwart French Baron, used to duels and trained to war. The boy inherited from his father a splendid physique, of which he was unduly proud, and a restless disposition that he never sincerely asked God to control. By the death of the baron, his son, an infant, was left to the sole tutelage of his English mother. The latter was of high birth, by nature a noble woman, and in every way worthy of a better son than the one whom he had turned out to be. She had idolized her brawny spouse in his lifetime, and when she had recovered from the shock his death caused, her yearning heart, little by little, turned from the idol in the tomb to the child he had left her. Ere long she lived again in the rapture of a love all absorbing, all bestowing, all ruling. She lavished her affection on the youth, not because he was particularly lovable, for he was not, but because he was the only one left her to love, and she was so constituted that she must love; the necessity of loving to her made it easy.

“Then there were many things in the features and form of her son that reminded her of the man who, in brighter days, had won entirely her maiden heart and her young wife love. The child was wont to wonder why his mother embraced him as she did sometimes, with a wondering, startled, wild, passionate embrace; but when he got older he discerned the meaning of these outbreaks. He knew that the mother-heart was having a vision of past wifehood, memory’s grace-given solace of widowhood. Besides this the embraces were her appealings or warnings to death; her heart suddenly seizing as if to shelter and save her last and only idol; for the thought would sometimes come with shadows deep enough, that perhaps the boy might also die. Such love would have been a prized wealth and blessing to some; but in this case, on the one hand, it unfitted this mother for the proper disciplining of this son, and this son though, sometimes, when his conceit permitted it, realizing that the love was given, not won, began to expect it as his due or despise it for its lavishness. In due time he entered the period expressively designated, ‘The monster age.’ This is the time when expanding young life has outgrown the tenderness of infancy and failed of putting on manly and womanly graces; a time when there is a mighty ambition to put on the characteristics of adult life and a mighty lack of ability gracefully to wear them. At this period, perhaps, the majority of youths of both sexes, are interesting chiefly for what they have been, or what it is hoped they will be. They feel, conscious of their growing powers, great self-conceit, and with their growth comes an expansion of their capacities and wants. The plenitude of their wantings makes them avaricious, hence parsimonious toward others of every thing, especially of gratitude. Reverence for elders, respect for fathers, holy regard for mothers, tenderness toward women, chief charms of youth, are buried in the tomb of other virtues by great, selfish, ugly demons of desire. The monster age came to Charleroy in its full virulence, but his mother discerned little of his monstrosity; what she did discern, all unasked, she condoned. She believed all things, hoped all things good of him, although seldom comforted by an expression or act of gratitude on his part. She was to be pitied; but it may be said that the lad was to be pitied almost as much as herself. It was the old story over; she unconsciously went about destroying her own happiness and though she would have willingly died if need be in his behalf, she harmed him beyond estimate by her indulgent loving. Then the youth was surrounded by those who sought the favor of the baroness by constantly sounding in her ears, and in the ears of the boy, praises of the dead baron. They told of his daring, they descanted upon his adventures, his powers, his wisdom. He was the widow’s idol, and the incense was grateful to her, but the worst of it was that they befooled the lad by continually assuring him that he was the image of his father, and surely destined to equal, if not surpass, his sire in deeds of valor. A dangerous burden is wealth; whether it come as great name or great intellect, great physical strength or as much gold, it is a fateful load which few can gracefully support. The youth had wealth in all the foregoing directions; if he had had a mother whose love loved wisely enough to save, if it need be by pain, he might have been saved; but her love infatuated her. The youth’s folly brought him frequently into shameful entanglements; but she extricated him each time. Nobody ever heard of her even rebuking him; as to chastising him, that were a thing abhorrent to her thoughts. His face always bespoke his pardon in advance with her. She would have smitten her husband’s corpse, as it lay in its coffin, as soon as she would have smitten the one whose features constantly reminded her of him her heart had held most dear. Then she hoped, with a mother’s large-hearted faith, that each escapade would be the last. But as the youth grew older his acts were bolder. Again and again, without notice and with heartless inconsiderateness, he left his home to pursue some adventure, and again and again, mother’s love followed him, ever to find him at last in some sore plight, and then quickly to forgive him. By the time Charleroy had reached his majority, the family fortune had been severely tried and depleted in paying the penalty of his follies. He himself had become an old young man, with too many gray hairs and too much experience for one of his years.

“At that time, a few enthusiasts having determined to make one last effort to secure the Holy Sepulcher, Charleroy de Griffin ardently enlisted in the pre-doomed enterprise, allured largely by its very desperateness. The crusade spirit was then a fitful dying flame throughout Europe. England and France were left practically alone to furnish the men and the money for the last crusade. Prince Edward of France was its leader, and De Griffin, having in his veins the blood of both of the supporting nations, a French name, a splendid physique, together with a fearless, dashing temperament, was enthusiastically hailed to the enlistment and pushed forward to leadership. ‘Sir Charleroy de Griffin!’ smilingly called out Prince Edward, the day of review, before the one set for departure. The young man’s comrades, many of whom had been his associates in former days of wassail, hearing the Prince’s word, shouted out with one accord, ‘Knighted! The prince has knighted de Griffin! Hurrah for Sir Charleroy!’ The day following Sir Charleroy bowed his head, as he stood on the quay ready to embark, to receive the benediction of a bishop. As the sacrist laid his hands on the young man’s head, the latter, throwing back his cloak, reverently touched the cross he had attached to his bosom with his jeweled sword-hilt. The young knight for a little while was very complacent; for he was enjoying a sentimental emotion of virtue, arising from sophistries with which his mind toyed. Some way he felt he had become a soldier of the holy Christ, and somehow it seemed to him he was making atonement for past follies by now placing himself side by side with the pious and noble. Though in reality only bent on seeking excitement, adventure, change, he looked forward to the rewards of conscience belonging alone to the penitent, and to a possible public canonizing as one going forth to die for God. A little piety paralleling one’s own desires is often made to do great service in silencing the clamors from within. His proud, tearful mother was by his side. Passionately she kissed his cross, then his brow, then his eyes and then his lips; leaving on the brow the glistening, dewy jewels that told the story of the heart which bade him stay, yet go. The young knight was for once in his life very serious, but tearless. After all this, in rapid steps, followed the disaster at Acre; the desperate struggle outside the city; the flight toward Nazareth. Sir Charleroy finally stands between the sea and the city, a mother’s idol ready to be broken; at twenty-five, near the apparent apex and end of a life, having had great opportunities, now, with all lost, he stands there an epitome of paradoxes. He had made life a pursuit of pleasure only to find the pursuit ending in misery; he had enlisted to serve the Prince of Peace, but that service he had undertaken with the sword; he had championed, as he said, the cause of Christ, the all-conquering, but he meets utter defeat. He had taken for his patron saint Mary, after years of libertinism. He elected Mary, he said, because his mother was so like her. But Sir Charleroy’s mother demoralized her son by over-indulgence, while Mary, though informed by Gabriel that her offspring was divine, followed her child as a true mother, with the divinely appointed authority of a mother, serenely, constantly directing his career up to the feast of Jerusalem, where he began to reveal his divine commission. Even then, motherhood affirmed its rights in the very presence of God manifest, in the question: ‘Son, why hast thou dealt thus?’ Nor was the right challenged, for ‘he went down and was subject to’ father and mother!” At this point Sir Charleroy ceased mentally tracing his own career, and lifting his eyes looked intently toward Nazareth. “Ah,” he said, but so that none could hear his words, “my mother loved as many another, in part selfishly, for the joy of abandoned love, and I squander that patrimony like a spendthrift, to my harm. Mary’s love for her son was like his for the world, a constant self-abnegation. That love survives as an inspiration to the world. By these contrasts I explain my failure in life, and the present is the natural sequence of the past.”

By Murillo.

THE BIRTH OF MARY.

CHAPTER V.
NAZARETH.

“This is indeed the blessed Mary’s land,

Virgin and Mother of our dear Redeemer!

All hearts are touched and softened by her name;

Alike the bandit with the bloody hand,

The priest, the prince, the scholar and the peasant,

The man of deeds, the visionary dreamer,

Pay homage to her as one ever present.”

—Longfellow—“Golden Legend.”

“I walked along the top of the hills overlooking Nazareth. A glorious scene opened on the view. The air was perfectly serene and clear. I remained for some hours lost in contemplation of the wide prospect and the events connected with the scene. One of the most beautiful and sublime prospects on earth.”—Robinson’s Biblical Researches.

The avenging Turks easily persuaded themselves that they could serve God better by participating in the sacking of fallen Acre than by pursuing the conquered, fleeing Christian knights; so they let the latter escape inland, while they themselves returned to the pillage. Ere long, by stealth, good fortune and Providential leading, the fugitives arrived unmolested at the top of a hill, overlooking the little city of Nazareth, forever memorable as having been once the earthly abiding place of Jesus and Mary. On the way thither scarcely a sentence had been spoken, for each felt that murmuring would be harmful, mirth inopportune. They chose their course indifferently, all following Sir Charleroy de Griffin because he rode bravely and onward. The fugitives paused, partly sequestered by the shrubbed hillock, forgetting for a time all else in admiration of the outspreading panorama in view. Heaven and earth were smiling at each other; thousands of leagues of sky were filled with the raptured songs of larks, while as echo and challenge of the songs from above, the thrush and robin of the grass knoll and thicket responded. From the plains of El Battaf on the north to Esdrælon on the south Nature, God’s flower queen, had decked the earth everywhere with blossoms of pinks, tulips and marigolds.

“Those dusky cowards,” spoke Sir Charleroy, “though numbering ten to one, will not seek us here; they’ll wait an opportunity to ambuscade us.”

“We’ve broken our knight’s pledge, never to flee more than the distance of four French acres from a foe, and yet methinks we’ve made them respect our swords; that’s something to say, though we’ve not made them respect our creed.” It was a Knight of the Golden Cross that spoke.

Sir Charleroy continued, while his eyes turned toward the city: “I thirst for the waters of a fount in Nazareth as did David once for one in Bethlehem.”

“For all of our getting at it, Nazareth’s water might as well be in Ethiopia,” spoke a Hospitaler.

“I’ve a yearning that comes near to sending me on a charge into the city.”

“That would be a hot pursuit of death surely.”

“A fair one, then, since death has been long pursuing us.” After a moment’s pause Sir Charleroy continued:

“Ah, death! None can escape, none overtake him; see we are his prisoners now, yet he tantalizes us by a show of immunity. As a sarcophagus is let down by suspending ropes in tedious stages, with jogglings and pauses, into the grave, so passes each through perils and sickenings from life to death. No, no, an undue fear of death intoxicates us until phantasmagoria possess the brain. We call these hopes; they are delusive! But will any of you follow for a charge down to the Virgin’s fountain? We can not more than die; that we must soon, in any event. I think I could die more complacently, having cooled my thirst where she was wont to cool hers.”

“Ugh,” exclaimed the Templar, with a shudder of disgust, “the fountain flows out through an old stone coffin! By my plume! while drinking there I’d be fancying that the ghost of the one robbed of his last house were leering at me and reveling in the thought that I’d soon be poor and thirstless as he. Verily the flavor of a drink depends much on the goblet!”

“We may have plenty of miserable fancies, if we only court such; for me, Templar, I prefer to comfort myself by cheerier thoughts; while I drank there, I’d think of the coolings of death’s streams; of her, that at this fountain slaked her body’s thirst and from the chalice of death drank serenely at last. My sword, the gift of my king, after having shed torrents of blood, hangs uselessly at my side. It seems cruel as powerless; ay, ’tis hateful! My mother gave me, on my departure, better gifts by far; tears, kisses, undying love, and the charge to call on Mary if ever evil befell me. The latter I know not how to do; but still my weak faith, methinks, would be helped to cry ‘Mother’ to God, if I could only stand where that mother stood who won the first love of the infant Jesus, the last anxious thoughts of the God man.”

“Sir Charleroy is unusually pious to-night; but alas, though I’ve been taught to say our church’s Litany, calling on ‘the Virgin most faithful,’ ‘Virgin most merciful,’ ‘Help of the Christian,’ ‘Lady of Victories,’ I can not use those phrases here. Where’s the help, the mercy, the victory now? The Litany, belongs to England!”

“We are in our present plight because we have won heaven’s neglect through having more vices than graces, probably.”

“Whatever the cause, the mocking disappointment is apparent. It is nigh thirteen hundred years since the Holy son and His mother began proclaiming and exemplifying the White Kingdom here. Now in all this land of theirs, we thirteen, fateful number, alone are left of those who openly own His cause. Yea, and the city where He grew in favor, these nature-blessed plains whose flowers gave Him picture sermons, are all filled with burrowing monsters eternally at war with Him and His.”

“Faith will rest until assured that the Promiser is dead, and that can never be, Sir Knight.”

“My faith staggers at the sights of Nazareth. Chief, look yonder.”

The knights all now called Sir Charleroy chief, when addressing him.

“At what?”

“The ruins!”

“Ah, all that’s left of our Crusader church. They say it was built on the very spot where Mary fell fainting, when she saw the Nazarenes in wrath dragging her son away to cast him down from the precipice to death. But He escaped, though the church since built did not!”

“True; therefore it seems to me that the hand on time’s dial turns backward. This city is filled with creatures having hearts as hard as the limestone walls of the cave-like houses they fittingly inhabit. If Christ and His Mother were again on earth as before, mercy’s ministers, the present inhabitants of Nazareth would surpass His ancient persecutors in the zeal with which they would drag not only Him but His mother to the cliffs.”

“Over the door of yon ruined church, some hand of faith carved the word ‘Victory!’ The word is there yet, and though the hand that carved it is dead, the faith which prompted it hath victory assured it.”

“‘Victory,’ in ruins! A meaningless boast, as it seems to me, Sir Charleroy. Such victory as ours; shadowy and very distant!”

At that moment one of the Templars, who had been secretly praying behind a cactus hedge, drew near and the Hospitaler addressed him:

“Brother, any token?”

“Praise Jehovah! yes, of peace.”

“How came it?”

“In my communings, God brought to my mind how the wondrous Deborah, not far from here, pushed the pusillanimous Barak from his refuge among the pistacas and oaks, from waverings to courage and to glorious victory over God’s foes.”

“A happy thought; ‘the stars on their course fought against Sisera!’”

“Barak was called the ‘thunderbolt,’ but Deborah was the ‘lightning.’ The lightning gave force to the bolt and God to the lightning.”

Sir Charleroy, catching the last sentence, joined in the debate:

“Gentlemen, there is another lesson on the brow of that history; it is, that women, having more trust, cleave closer to God in peril than do men. Men are in a panic when their devices fail; women have fewer devices to fail, hence are less easily confounded. For that reason God sent out our race in pairs.”

“Hermon’s breast holds the last ray of the setting sun,” remarked the Golden Cross.

“And the Transfiguration of Christ is recalled! I think some angel of God is holding the sunlight there for our instruction, now,” exclaimed the chief.

“Our instruction?” queried the Templar. “I do not discern its meaning; campaigning I fear has dulled my brain.”

“The Son of Mary, on yon mount, met Elijah, representative of the prophets, Moses, representative of the law; both called from the deathless land to proclaim the fulfillment of all prophecy and law through His coming passion.”

“And still I question how this applies to us?”

“A Knight of the Red Cross should easily discern that suffering unto death for truth’s sake is the way, all prophecy declares that a reign of law transforming things to spiritual splendor shall at last come to earth.”

“Ah, Sir Charleroy, the interpretation is entrancing, but why did the glory need to fade into night, and to be followed by Gethsemane and Calvary?”

“Life is but a series of temporary glimpses of the glory that shall be revealed. Night and cloud come and go, yet the sun never dies.”

“But, Sir Charleroy, was it not hard that the loving Immanuel should be forced to bide these pangs though ever pursuing true righteousness?”

“Yea, Templar, but the glory of the Transfiguration came to all that group while Jesus prayed; as the angel hastened to minister when Gethsemane was darkest. These things teach that heaven watches its own, with succor according to want; great light at hand to baffle great darkness and royal answers for anxious prayers!”

“You mean, Sir Charleroy, that we few, surrounded by a sea of enemies, in an inhospitable land, far from home, should despise each despairing thought?”

“Good Templar, I am certain of this, anyway: Suffering for the right has full reward, for after passion as Christ’s, so to His followers there comes the ascension.”

“Amen,” fervently ejaculated several surrounding knights, and Sir Charleroy felt the glow that he felt that time the English bishop blessed him.

As they thus communed, the sun had quietly sunk down into the far-off Mediterranean, flooding the west with light like molten gold. Doubtless one thought came to each at the sight; for all smiled sadly when one remarked: “The West is very beautiful to-night!” They thought with deep yearnings of home. But the darkness quickly drew over the scene and the song of the baleful nightingales began to start forth here and there from thickets which, in the darkness, appeared like plumes of mourning on acres of black velvet. One knight, for a while entranced by the grim, gloomy spectacle, shuddered; then looked up as if to say: “When will the moon rise? the darkness is oppressive!” Another tried to cheer his comrades by crying: “England’s songsters know us and come to sing us into hopefulness!”

“Men, to rest; you’ll need it.” It was Sir Charleroy who spoke. Responsibility made him motherly.

“Let us revel awhile in memories of better days,” replied the Templar.

“But listen; do you not hear afar off something like the moaning of the winds before a storm?”

“What of it? A storm could add little to our misery.”

“The sound you hear is the cry of jackal and wolf; our omens. Forget now all unnerving thoughts of home and steel yourselves to meet hard fortune. For a while rest. Rest is now our wisdom; night, our mother; for a time in safety she will swaddle us within her black garments. And then——”

“Even so, good Sir Charleroy, and I’m thinking this is her last visit to us. She has come, I guess, to lead us to the portals of eternal day.”

“When I say good-night to you, comrades, it will be with the expectation of next saying good-morning where the wicked cease from troubling,” solemnly said the Golden Cross.

“But,” interrupted the Hospitaler, “while the pulse beats we have a mortgage on time and a duty to plan to live.”

“Bravely said; now tell us how to plan,” exclaimed several knights.

“Merge all our orders into one, for the present; elect a leader, and——” The Hospitaler paused, for he could not guess the needs or course of the future. But the knights quickly acquiesced in the unity of action proposed.

“Who shall lead?” was the next question.

“I nominate,” shouted the Hospitaler, “the one whom we all believe must be under the especial care of the good angels of these places sacred to all revering mother Mary.”

The knights, with one voice, responded, “Sir Charleroy de Griffin, Teutonic Knight of the Order of St. Mary!”

The little band dared their danger for a moment by a spontaneous cheer.

“We have no priest to anoint the chief of the Refugees, but with God to witness, let each who would ratify the choice place hilt to shield, as an oath of service and defense.”

Every hilt rang against Sir Charleroy’s shield, as the Hospitaler ceased speaking.

“Comrades,” said Sir Charleroy, “I thank you for your confidence in this hour when the issue is life or death. Let us seek the God of battles.” The knights formed a hollow square about their leader, and all kneeled upon the earth.

Their wondering steeds seemed to catch the spirit of their riders, and, drawing near, drooped their heads. For a few moments there was awing silence, and then in deep measured tones the Hospitaler began chanting, “Kyrie Eleison” (Lord have mercy). The companions responded, “Christi Eleison.” Then, amid those scenes of sacred history, the kneeling soldiers, together, and without command, with only the stars for altar-lights, solemnly chanted a portion of the sublime Litany of their church. Galilee never before, nor since, heard a more sincere orison: “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, oh, Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and His cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection, through the same Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

As they arose, a Templar spoke: “Companions, if it so please you, put a seal, the seal of the Red Cross Knights, upon our act.” So saying, the knight crossed his feet, then spread out his arms horizontally; similitude of the crucifixion. All reverently imitated the action, meanwhile, their swords being in hand with blades crossing, forming a fence of steel.

“Comrades,” spoke Sir Charleroy, with emotion, “I accept the trust, and vow by Him that gave the single-handed Elijah on yonder far-off wrinkled Carmel, sign by fire, that confounded Baal and its regal hosts, to lead you to liberty and home or to glorious graves.”

“In hoc signo vinces, living or dead,” was the chorused response. Just then the rising moon flooded their interlaced swords with light, and, as they glittered, the knights took it for an omen that there was a blessing in the union of their swords.

“Sir Charleroy, I proclaim thee king of Jerusalem; what say you, comrades?” exclaimed a hitherto silent Knight of St. John. Once more every knight’s sword touched the leader’s shield.

“Nobly proclaimed!” remarked the Templar. “When De Lusignan deserted us, ceasing to be kingly, he ceased to be king.”

“Have charity, men,” interrupted their chief; “it takes a world of courage to fall with a falling cause when a way of escape is open.”

“Oh, we’ll have charity; the same that Tancred had for that brave preacher and craven soldier, Hermit Peter; the latter ran from peril and Tancred raced him back. We can not reach Lusignan to whip him to duty, but we can vote him dethroned and dead. All cowards are dead to the brave.”

“But, companions, I must decline the presumptuous title and phantom throne. Jerusalem shall have, to us, but one king; the Son of Mary. For the future, to you, let me be simply Sir Charleroy. Now let us be moving.”

“Whither?” anxiously inquired several knights in a breath.

“Over the valley to the cactus hedges against the limestone cliffs before us, where runs along the great highway from Damascus to Egypt. We shall not need the route to either point, probably; but those hills are full of caves for the living and tombs for the dead.” All obeyed.

“Why so thoughtful?” said the Hospitaler to the Knight of the Golden Cross, who marched along with his cloak partly shielding his face.

“I’m living in the past,” he sententiously answered.

“The past? Ah, to make up by a back journey for an expected briefing of thy future?”

“No, raillery here, Hospitaler. I was just wishing that since we are so near Endor, Saul’s witch would call up some saintly Samuel to tell us where we shall be this time to-morrow.”

“Oh, Golden Cross, know we can best bear the good or evil of the future by seeing it only as it comes; for me, I prefer to think of another place, near us, but having a more helpful incident for the memory of such as we.”

“Dost thou mean Nain?”

“The same. There a dead only son was raised from the bier to comfort a widowed mother.”

“Well said, Hospitaler,” responded Sir Charleroy, “and let us not forget that it was a mother’s tearful prayers that won the working of the miracle.”

“Alas, knight,” sighed the Templar, “we have no mothers to so petition for us here, if we be quenched ere long.”

“Some of us have living mothers who never cease to pray for us, nor will until their breath ceases. In this land, where God appeared through motherhood, I have a strong confidence that our mothers’ prayers, re-enforced by our appealing but unvoiced needs, will move the motherhood of God, if such I may call His tenderest lovings. I’ll trust to-night my mother’s prayers, reaching from England to Heaven and from thence to here, further than all the sympathy forgetful Europe will vouchsafe us. A nation cheered us to battle, and yet it will never seek for the fragments defeat has left; but the man never lived, no matter what his ill deserts, whom true mother love and eternal God love ever forgot.” After this long address, Sir Charleroy again felt the glow within and the approvings that he felt on the quay when the bishop’s hands were on his head.

CHAPTER VI.
THE FUGITIVES.

“’Tis not in mortals to command success;

But we’ll do better, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it.”

—Cato.

The fugitives slept, some in the obliviousness of complete fatigue and others restlessly, their minds perturbed by dreams of their impending perils. Dawn summoned all to renewed activity, but its coming was not greeted joyfully by the knights.

“Sir Charleroy,” mournfully spoke a Hospitaler to the former, as they met at the outskirts of the camping place, “our comrade, the Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, made good his escape from this woeful country during the early morning, before dawn, as our comrades were sleeping!”

“Why, impossible!” questioningly responded the chief.

“Alas, ’twas rather impossible for him not to go!”

“I’m in no humor for such petty jesting! See, his steed is there yet,” and Sir Charleroy turned on his heel impatiently as he spoke.

“Pardon, companion, he that departed was borne away by the white charger with black wings!”

“Dead?”

“Mortals say ‘dead’ of such, but it were better to say he is free.”

“Peace to his soul,” fervently spoke Sir Charleroy.

“Ah, knight, thou canst not imagine the peacefulness of his going!”

“But why were we not summoned? We might have consoled him at least; perhaps we might have healed. What was his malady?”

“A poisoned arrow wounded him in the retreat from Acre. He did not realize his peril until the agonies of the end were wracking his body. Then he said, ‘Too late; it’s useless to attempt resistance of the inevitable.’”

“Now this is pitiful—a humiliation of us all. Heavens, Hospitaler! there’s not a knight among us who would not have periled his life in effort in the dying man’s behalf.”

“But he cautioned me against disturbing any one on his account. ‘Poor men,’ he said, ‘they’ll need all the rest they can get for the struggles of the day to come.’ Only once did he seem to yearn for a remedy, and that time he spoke mostly as one dreaming. I remember his every word—‘I wish I could bathe these hot and bleeding wounds in the all-healing nards said to exude exhaustlessly from the image of the Virgin Most Merciful at Damascus.’ I roused him, then, with an appeal for permission to summon thee, but he forbade me.”

“Thou shouldst have overridden all protests of his! By my tokens! I’d have emulated faithful Elenora, who sucked the poison from the dagger stab given her spouse, our knightly Prince Edward, by the would-be assassin at Acre.”

“I could not resist him; his face shone in the moonlight with heavenly brightness; mine was covered with tears. Oh, chief, the dying man spoke like an angel. Once he said: ‘It is sweet to go out here, nigh where the resurrection angel, Gabriel, gave Mary the glad tidings that her humanity was to join with the Good Father to bring forth One capable of sounding each human sorrow here and hereafter. He overcomes the dread last enemy of all our race!’ I watched as he fixed his dying gaze upon the golden cross he wore; his last words still fill and inflame my soul: ‘Brother, good-night—say this to each for me. I feel great darkness creeping in to possess this broken, weary body. It comes to stay, but my soul moves forth out of its dungeon. I see gates most lofty, all glorious, and oh, so near! They open to an eternal day.’ Then he breathed his last, murmuring tenderly: ‘I’m going; good-night; good-morning!’” The Hospitaler ended his recital with a great sob, then burying his face in his cloak, was silent.

Presently the knights formed a hollow square about an old tomb in the hillside. The Hospitaler supported tenderly the head of the dead comrade in his lap. On the naked breast of the corpse lay the many-pointed golden cross of the Knights of the Sepulcher, while round the body was wrapped a Templar’s banner, with its significant emblem, two riders on one horse; symbol of friendship and necessity.

“Let the one who received the dying prayer of our brave companion speak,” said Sir Charleroy. The knights all knelt, and the Hospitaler still reverently supporting the head of the dead, spoke. “Knight of Christ, sleep; the clamors of war shall no more disturb thee. The dead at least are just and merciful. Israelite, Mohammedan and Christian may lie together in these vales, reconciled at last. They that would not share a loaf to save life to one another, in death share quietly all they have, their beds. The ashes of the long sleepers have no contentions; here are no crowdings of each other; no misunderstandings; no alarms. Sleep, soldier, thy worthy warfare finished; thy cause appealed to the Judge of All! Sleep and leave us to battle on ’mid perils and pain. Sleep thy body, while thy soul fathoms the mysteries to us inscrutable. Rest now, and leave us here a little longer to wonder why it is that human creatures must needs inhumanly oppose and slay each other for the enthroning of Truth, the friend, the quest of all! Sleep, and leave us to wonder why death and conflict are the openers of the gates of life and peace.” Some of those kneeling wept, but they were too much depressed to speak. Quietly they laid the body within its resting place; quietly they sealed up the tomb’s entrance. Then they mounted their steeds at their chief’s command.

“There are but twelve of us left; a lucky number. Perhaps the breaking of the fateful spell believed to follow the number thirteen, was death’s beneficence!” It was the Templar who so spoke.

“It is said, Templar,” responded Charleroy, “that our Mary, in her girlhood, was escorted ever by an invisible heavenly guard, a thousand strong. In the guard there were twelve palm-bearing angels of rare splendor, commissioned to reveal charity.”

“A worthy companionship, chief!”

“I’m inclined to pray heaven to send again to these parts the beautiful twelve, to assure us good fortune and victory.”

“Surely the prayers of us all join thine, Sir Charleroy; but methinks we have forgotten how to pray aright, or heaven has forgotten to answer us. We have been praying and fighting for months only to find at last that our prayers and our battlings are alike vain. I fear there are no palm-bearing angels at hand.”

The horsemen slowly wended their way back to the hill-top, overlooking Nazareth, on which they first paused the night before. Again they halted to admire the prospect, as well as to look for a route of safe retreat. Nazareth was astir. The little band on the hill could hear the morning trumpeters calling the Moslem to worship.

“Gentlemen,” said the leader of the band on the hill, “it is wisdom to divide into two parties, and make for the sea by different routes. At Cæsarea we may find some vessels with which to leave these to us fateful shores. If we meet the foe anywhere, the odds against us now are so great that death or enslavement must be the result. Perhaps if there be two parties one may escape.” The knights paused about their leader a few moments in affectionate debate; all opposing at first the plan that was to scatter them, but all, finally, convinced that it was the highest wisdom to go on their ways apart. Lots were cast by the eleven, De Griffin not participating. Four were grouped in one party and seven in the other by the result.

“I’ll join the weaker party, remembering the five wounds of Jesus,” said Sir Charleroy, reining his steed to the smaller company. A moment after he continued: “Now, good souls, away with grief; part we must; here and now. May God go tenderly with the seven, a covenant number. Now make your wills; then a brief farewell; then use the spur.”

“Wills?” said a Templar, and they all smiled in a sickly way at the word. “We knights, boasting our poverty, our holding of all we have in community, know nothing of will-making.”

“True, the pelf we each have is small enough; a few keep-sakes, our arms and such like; but our love is something. Let’s will that, and if we’ve aught to say before we die, we’d better say it now. There is work ahead, and plenty of it. There will be no time for ante-mortem statement when we meet the cimeters of the Crescent.” So spoke Sir Charleroy. He continued, “My slayer will take good care of my jewels.” He commenced writing upon a bit of parchment, using for rest the pommel of his saddle. In a few moments he paused.

“Wilt thou read thine, that we may know how to make ours, chief?” inquired one near him.

“A message to my mother; that’s all.”

“Enough; that’s sacred.”

“Yes—but—no. Misery has knit us into one family. I feel to confide.” So saying, he read his writing, omitting only the portion that recited their recent vicissitudes:—

“And now, beloved mother, we turn from Nazareth toward the sea with only a forlorn hope of reaching it. I long to meet thee, but the longing must, I fear, content itself in reaching out my heart’s best love across the distant ocean toward thyself. It is all I can give in return for the mysterious consciousness that thine is a constant presence. My memory teems with records of my life-long ingratitude toward thyself, that gave me birth and all a loving heart could bestow, and now I’m tasting bitterest remorse for all those selfish days of mine. I wish I could recall their acts. Take these words as my request for pardon. I shall bind this little parchment scrap in my belt in a vague hope that some way, some time, it may reach thee. If it do, remember it is sent to bear to thee, beloved mother, the assurance that thy once wayward boy remembers now, as he has for months, as the brightest, best, most exalting and blessed things of all his life, thy loving words, thy patient trust in him and all thy pious exhortations. I thank God now for all my trials and perils. They have brought me to full prizing of thy goodness and near to the religion thou dost profess.”

The reader paused, and the companion knights at once began begging him to inscribe messages for them each, he being the only one in all the company having the priestly gift of the pen. Most of them said, “To my mother” or “To my sister, write;” but one blushed as he said, “I’ve no mother nor sister.” His comrades rallied him at once: “Name her, the other only woman!”

“A heart as brave as thine, knight,” said the Hospitaler to the blushing youth, “has a queen on its throne, somewhere.”

The youth blushed more and drew away a little.

“Only a lover,” said the Templar. “Lovers, absent, assuage their pinings by new mating! They forget; mothers never do. Write for us, Sir Charleroy.”

The blush of the youth deepened to anger, evincing his heart’s high protest against any hint of doubt being aimed at his queen; but he was self-restraining, silent. “I’ll not reveal her by defense even,” was his whispered thought.

The writing was finished. “Farewell! Forward.”

The chief suited the action to the commands, and soon his steed was dashing swiftly away with its rider, followed by the others of his party. The seven departed toward Nain; perhaps it was an ominous choice, for their route led them toward the cave of incantation, where Endor’s witch called up for Saul the shade of Samuel. Most likely the words of the dead prophet to the haunted warrior, “To-morrow thou shalt be with me,” would have told the fate of the seven that morning fittingly, for they were never heard from by any of their earthly friends.

CHAPTER VII.
ICHABOD.

“Oh, that many may know

The end of this day’s business, ere it come;

But it sufficeth that the day will end,

And then the end is known.”

—Julius Cæsar.

A tedious ride brought the five knights nigh Shunem, the City of Elijah.

“We’ll find no prophet’s chamber here for such as we,” remarked Sir Charleroy.

“Perhaps,” said a comrade, “we may by force or cajoling find a breakfast; a cake or cruse of oil.”

“Anyhow,” replied the chief, “we must try for a little food. We can neither fight nor flee with gaunt hunger on our flanks. Who knows, after all, but that we may happen on a humane being in these parts.”

“Well, good captain, if we should find a Shulamite, black, but comely, she might be as loving to thee as that one of old was to Solomon, although——”

The sentence was broken off by the interrupting command of Sir Charleroy, “Men, quick to cover; to the lemon-tree grove on the right!”

A glance back revealed a host of armed men behind the knights.

“All saints defend!” cried the Templar, as the little band wheeled toward the refuge.

The tale of the battle to the death that ensued, is quickly told.

Sir Charleroy, though he had fought with reckless bravery, as one hotly pursuing death, alone survived. A bludgeon blow felled him; when he recovered consciousness, he beheld standing by his side a gorgeously bedecked Moslem. The clangor of the conflict was over; the blood in which he weltered, and the vicious eyes that watched him, were all that reminded the knight of what had recently transpired. Presently the latter addressed the one that stood guard:

“Why is the infidel so tardy in finishing his work?”

“Is the Crusader in a hurry to reach night?” sententiously replied the man of gorgeous trappings.

“He would like to stay long enough to execute a murderer—the chief of thy horde.”

“My horde? Thou knowest me?”

“Oh, yes, ‘Azrael, Angel of Death,’ thy minions call thee; but I defy thee as I loathe thee.”

The chief’s brow darkened; his sword rose in air, and he exclaimed: “Hercules was healed of a serpent bite, ages ago, at Acre; Islamism in the same place recently; I must finish the hydra by cutting off thy hissing head, Christian.”

Sir Charleroy steadily met his captor’s gaze, eye to eye, and was silent.

The chief paused; then lowering his sword, toyed its point against the cross on the prostrate man’s breast.

“Bitter tongue, thou dost worship a death sign; dost thou so love death?”

“Death befriends those who wear that sign in truth; this is my comfort standing now at the rim of earth’s last night.”

“Thy bright red blood and unwrinkled brow bespeak youth, the power to enjoy life. Youth and such power is ever a prayer for more time; thou liest to thyself and me by professing to seek thy end.”

“How wonderful! The ‘Angel of Death’ is a soul-reader as well as a murderer!” bitterly rejoined Sir Charleroy.

“Well, then, refute me! Here’s thy greasy, blood-stained sword; now go, by thine own hands, if thou darest, to judgment.”

“Trusting God, I may defy thee; yet not hurry Him!”

“I like the Christian’s metal. I might let him live.”

“Life would be a mean gift now; a painful departure from the threshold of Paradise, to renew weary pilgrimages.”

“I may be merciful.”

“I do not believe it.”

“Thou shalt.”

“When I believe in the tenderness of jackals and tigers, in the sincerity of transparent hypocrisy, I’ll praise the mercy of Azrael.”

“Our holy Koran reveals a bridge finer than a hair, sharper than a sword, beset with thorns, laid over hell. From that bridge, with an awful plunge, the wicked go eternally down; over it safely, swiftly, the holy pass to happiness. Art ready to try that bridge?”

“Ready for the land of forgetfulness; no swords nor crescents are there.”

“No, thou wouldst only reach Orf, the partition of hell, where the half-saints tarry; thy bravery merits that much; but I’ll teach thee to reach better realms.”

“Turk, Mameluke, ’tis fiendish to prejudge a dying soul; leave judgment to God, and share now all that is within thy power, my body, with thy fit partners, the vultures!”

“A living slave is worth more to me than a dead knight; I’ve an humor to let thee live.”

“Oh, most merciful hypocrite! I did not think thou couldst tell the truth so readily; but let me, I beseech thee, be the dead knight.”

“What if I save thy life, teach thee the puissant faith of Islam, give thee leadership, and with it opportunity to win entrance to that highest Paradise, whose gateway is overshadowed by swords of the brave? There thou mayest dwell forever with Allah and the adolescent houris.”

“Enough; unless thou dost aim to torture me! I’m a Knight of Saint Mary, and thou full well knowest the measure of my vows; how throughout this land my Order has warred against thy hateful polygamy, thy gilded lusts here, thy Harem heaven hereafter! Ye thrive by luring to your standards men aflame now with the fire that burns such souls at last in black perdition. I tell thee to thy teeth, thou and thine are living devils. But ye war against the wisdom of the world and the law of God; though triumphing now, ye will rot amid your riots and victories.”

The chief’s face grew black as night for an instant, but recovering himself, he continued, sarcastically at first, then with the zeal of a proselyter:

“Speak low, thou, last dying vestige of a wan faith! Thou mightst make my solemn followers yell with ridiculing laughter! I tell thee of life and of a faith as natural as nature herself. Listen; there is for the brave and faithful a Paradise whose rivers are white as milk as odoriferous as musk. There are sights for the eye, fetes most delicious and music never ceasing to ravish; these lure the brilliantly-robed faithful to the black-eyed daughters of Pleasure. One look at them would reward such as we for a world-life of pain; and the children of the prophet’s faith are given the eternities to companion these splendid creatures whose forms created of musk know no infirmity, but survive, always, as adolescent fountains. The heaven of Islamism is eternal youth, eternally luxurious.”

“It befits the Angel of Death to gild a deformed hell with bedazzling words. Thou and thine glorify lust, and thy heaven, like thy harem, is but a brothel after all. Now let me blast thy gorgeous charnel-house with the lightning of God’s Word: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God!’”

Sir Charleroy had raised himself up as he was speaking; now he fell back, exhausted. He again felt the glow in his heart that he felt on the quay when the English bishop blessed him; but it seemed more real now than then, and the approvings of conscience some way came with rebukes that caused tears to flow. He felt something akin to real penitence for a life that had not been always up to the ideal that this debate had caused him to exalt. As he fell back he closed his eyes and turned his face from his captor; the act was a prayer to be helped to shut out of his mind the picture of gilded lust depicted by the false teacher that stood by. For a few moments the wounded man was left to his own thoughts, and then his heart went out toward home crying like a sick or lost child in the night, for “Mother!” Once more he returned to that duality of existence which comes when one enters into personal introspections. There seemed to be two Sir Charleroys, one writing the history of the other, and the writer was recording such estimates as these: “As he lay there, nigh death, he drew near to God. He had once been a rover, seeking the wildest pleasures of the European capitals; but meeting passion, presented as the ultimate of life, for all eternity, his soul recoiled from it and he became the herald of purity. Once he had friends, wealth and physical prowess; but he squandered them as a prodigal; when he lay bleeding, powerless in body, amid strangers, a slave, he rose to the majesty of a moral giant.” The Sir Charleroy that was thus reviewed was comforted, and he stood off from the picture in imagination to admire it, as one standing before a mirror. Just then he thought of his mother and Mary, his ideal, standing on either side of him, before the same presentment. It might have been a dream; but he believed they smiled through tears, pressed their beating hearts to his and upheld him by their arms with tenderness and strength. His captor left him for a few moments only, undisturbed. At a sign from Azrael, he was soon carried away by a guard; the parley was ended and he that had so bravely spoken doomed to confront that that is to the vigorous mind the worst of happenings, uncertainty. For months the captive mechanically submitted to the fortunes of the Sheik’s caravan; in health improving; in spirit depressed, numbed. The knight had constantly before him three grim certainties, escape impossible; rebellion useless; each day hope darkened by further departure from the sea. The captive’s treatment from the Sheik was not unkind. The latter met him by times with a sort of courtly condescension, varied only by an occasional penetrating, questioning glance. They had little conversation, yet the Sheik’s looks plainly said: “When thou art subdued, sue for favors; they’ll be granted.” De Griffin nursed his pride and firmness and prevented all familiarity on Azrael’s part. The latter was puzzled sometimes, sometimes angered; but he was too polite to show his feelings. For months the only conversation between the two alert, strong men might be summed up in these words on the Sheik’s part: “Slave, freedom and heaven are sweet.” “Knight, Allah knows only the followers of the Prophet as friends.” On the knight’s part a look of scorn or an expression of disgust was the sole reply.

In the Sheik’s retinue was another captive, a Jew. He was constantly near the knight; for being more fully trusted than the latter, the Sheik had made the Israelite in part the custodian of the Christian. The knight discerned the relationship very quickly; though both Jew and chief endeavored to conceal it. Sir Charleroy, at the first, treated his companion captive with loathing and resentment, as a spy. After a time, the “sphinx, eyes open, mouth shut,” as Azrael described Sir Charleroy, deemed it wise and politic to make the Jew his ally. The resolution once formed, he found many circumstances to aid in bridging the gulf that separated the captive and his guard; the cultured Teutonic leader and the wandering Israelite. They both hated the same man, their captor; both loathed the religion he was covertly aiming to lure them to; both were anxious for freedom. They gave voice to these feelings when together, alone, and ere long sympathy made them friends. The next step was natural and easy; the stronger mind took the leadership of the two, and Sir Charleroy became teacher; his keeper became his pupil and protégé.

The twain one day, after this change of relation, walked together conversing, on a hill overlooking Jericho, by which place the Sheik’s caravan was encamped.

“Ichabod, thou wearest a fitting name.”

“I suppose so, since my mother gave it. But why say so now?”

“Ichabod, ‘glory departed,’ thou art like thy people—despoiled.”

“Oh, Lord! how long?” piously exclaimed the Jew.

“Till Shiloh comes!”

“Verily it is so written,” was the Jew’s reply.

“But He has come, Israelite!”

“Where?” the startled Jew questioned, drawing back as if he expected his, to him mysterious, companion to throw back his tunic and declare: “I am he!”

“In the world and in my heart.”

“Ah, Sir Knight, Israel’s desolation refutes all that.”

“Jew, thine eyes are veiled. I’ll teach thee to see Him yet.”

The Jew was puzzled.

The twain fell into prolonged converse, and then in that lone place the Crusader waxed eloquent, preaching Christ and Him crucified to one of Abraham’s seed.

When the two captives descended to their tents, each was conscious of a new, peculiar joy. One had the joy of having proclaimed exalted truth, faithfully, to the almost persuading of his hearer; the other was moving about in the growing delight and wonder of a new dawning faith.

At frequent intervals Ichabod besought the knight to take him “to the mountain.”

Each visit thither was a delight to the new inquirer.

On such a journey one day spoke Ichabod: “Christian, I am consumed with anxiety to hear thy words and another anxiety lest they do me harm. I am thinking, thinking, by day, and, what little time my thoughts permit sleep, I’m filled with wondrous dreams! I fear to lose my old faith, and yet it becomes like Dead Sea apples under the light of this new way. So new, so infatuating. None I’ve met, and I’ve met many, ever so moved me. Why, knight, I’ve traversed half the world; sometimes as wealth’s favorite, sometimes of necessity in misfortune; I’ve seen the faiths of Egypt and India in their homes, and walked amid the temples of great Rome, but with abiding contempt for all not Israelitish. Not so this creed of the knight affects me.”

“And for good reason; I offer thee the true, new, refined and final Judaism!”

“It seems so, and yet I tremble. I dare not doubt; that’s sin; but here’s the puzzle that harasses me: What if, in doubting these things I’m now told, I be doubting the very truth, the Jewish faith!”

“Ichabod, thy heart has been a buried seed awaiting the spring. It has come.”

“Oh, knight, I’m trusting my dear soul to thee. As a dog his master, a maid her lover, so blindly I follow thee. I can not go back: I can not pause nor can I go onward alone. I’m in the misery of a joy too great to be borne, almost, and yet too much my master to be given up. Oh, knight, thou art so wise, so strong! Steady me; hold me up! I can only pray and adjure thee to be sincere with me; only sincere; that’s all; as sincere as if thou wert ministering to the ills of a sick man battling death.”

The child of Abraham, with a sudden movement, flung his arms with all vehemence about Sir Charleroy. The East and the West embracing, truth leading, love triumphant.

“Poor Ichabod, if thou hadst no soul, thy clingings and yearnings would bind me to thee faithfully. Thou hast tried to give me charge over that that is immortal. A Higher Being has it in loving trust; were it not so, I’d turn in dread from thy confiding!”

“Is mine so bad a soul, master?”

“Indeed, no. Its preciousness to Him that created it, is what would make me dread its partial custody.”

“Thou’lt help me, master, now?”

“For three objects I’ll willingly die; my mother; our lady, and the soul of one who abandons himself, as thou, to my poor pilotage.”

“Then, thou strangely lovest me. Oh, this but more persuades me that thy faith is right; it makes thee so good to a stranger, a slave, a hated Jew!”

“But then we are so apart and so unlike each other!”

“No, Jew, I want to show that humanity is one. The very creed I’m trying to teach thee and would fain have all thy race, ay, all mankind fully understand, is full of love, joy, peace. These follow it as naturally as the flower the stem, the humming the flying wing made to fly and be musical.”

“Oh, my dear light, with thee I’m in joy and wilderment. Thy presence seems to bring me hosts of crowned truths, all seeking to enter my being. I feel like a tired runner ready to faint when thou’rt absent, but when thou talkest the tired runner is plunged into a cooling ocean, whose circling waves, as it were charged with the stimulus of tempered lightnings, glowing with a million rainbows, overwhelm, lift up and rest him. I’m floating thereon now!”

“Thy strange fancies make me wonder, Ichabod.”

“Wonder; why my strength dies from over wonder. I was ill for hours yesterday. Light to my sweat-blinded, feverish eyes, all calm and healing, comes when I yield to thy will; but still all my joy is haunted by ghosts which rise in day-mare troops, pointing rebukingly to labyrinths into which I seem to be pushed. I sometimes wonder if I’m seeing real spirits or going mad.”

“Dost pray, Jew?”

“I dare not live without praying!”

“Then tell the All Pitiful what thou hast this day told to me. He loves the sincere, down to the deepest hell of doubt, and from it all, at last, will lead tumulted souls safely. An honest doubt is a real prayer, well winged; quickly it reaches heaven, at whose portal it dies to rise again all peace.”

CHAPTER VIII.
FROM JERICHO TO JORDAN.

“Through sins of sense, perversities of will,

Through doubt and pain, through guilt and shame and ill

Thy pitying Eye is on Thy creature still.”

“Wilt Thou not make, eternal Source and Goal,

In thy long years life’s broken circle whole,

And change to praise the cry of a lost soul?”

—Whittier.

Jew and Crusader came to love each other after the manner of David and Jonathan, and they were both made stronger and happier men on account of this loving.

“Sir Charleroy, a year gone to day, thou and I climbed to glory.”

“Thou hast a prolific imagination or I a poor memory. I have no remembrance of either climbing or glory of a year ago.”

“I may well remember the greatest day of my life; the day thou tookst me up yon hill over against Jericho; I saw, as Elisha, in the presence of his great master Elijah, the mountains, that day, full of the chariots and angels of God.”

“But, Jew, the chariot separated Elijah and Elisha; we were, in thy ‘great day,’ made one.”

“True, but I got the prophet’s insight and power. Oh now I see Shiloh coming in the redemption of Jew and Gentile.”

“Radiant proselyte, give God, not me the glory.”

“I’ll call thee, knight, Jordan—my Jordan.”

“The Jew rambles amid strange conceptions. Why am I like that mighty stream?”

“Its bed and banks, God’s cup; they nobly serve, catching the pure waters of mountain springs and heaven’s clouds, to bear them, mingled with sweet Galilee, to the black burning lips of Sodom’s plains below. I was a dead sea, alive alone to misery; nothing to me but my historic past, and that sin-stained. I’m now refreshed and purified; sometime there’ll be life growing about me!”

“The highlands of Galilee gather from heaven, oceans of sweet, pure water, which Jordan, year after year, night and day, hurries down to the Asphalt sea; but still that sea remains lifeless and bitter. Even so, the clean, white truth comes to some, life-long, yet vainly. I think I’m little like Jordan, but much like that sea.”

“And yet, knight, all is not vain that seems so. I learned this once, long ago, in the vale of Siddim, by the sea of Lot. As I entered that place of desolation I thought of Gehenna! The lime cliffs about, all barren and pitiless as the walls of a furnace, shut out the breezes, and intensified the sun’s scorching rays. A solemn stillness, unbroken by wind, wave or voice of life, was there; suffocating, plutonic odors ladened the air, and a fog hung over that watery winding sheet of the cities of the plain. I watched that overhanging cloud until my heated brain shaped it into a vast company of shades; the ghostly forms of the overwhelmed denizens of those accursed habitations, now in mute terror and confusion, holding to one another desperately; fearing to go to final judgment. Once I thought they were together trying to look down into the depths, perchance to seek for vestiges of their ancient, earthly habitations. These fancies grew and grew upon me, mad dreamer that I was, until I was nigh to desperate fright; but I found some little angels on the shore who comforted.”

“Angels at Sodom?”

“Even so. The first was light and liquid silver; it sang a bar of nature’s tireless, varied melody by my footsteps. Ah, the little, fresh spring that burst forth through the rim of the crystalline basin, was an angel to me. Then I found others here and there. At first I was glad, then I began to pity them, and to wish I could change their courses. They all wended their ways to the desolate sea, and their sweet currents were swallowed up in the yawning gulf of death. ‘Vainly,’ I said at first. Then I saw other angels in the forms of bending willows, and gorgeous oleanders. Just then it all came to me; the springs, though small and few, were not in vain. The oleanders and the willow, whose roots kissed their fresh life, were evidences that the springs had been for good. Aye, more, the flowers rejoiced me in those desolations more than could the rose gardens of the Temple in days of happiness. Yea, knight, thou hast been a rivulet to Ichabod in a day when he wandered as among arid mountains and dead seas.”

“Blest child of Abraham, thy faith is great, though I be but a pitiable guide; yet I’ll adopt thy similes. Be thou and I, to each other, Jordan, rivulet and flower by turn; the fresh current gives life to plant and blossom, while plant and blossom both shade and beautify the streams. With both it shall be well, if we well learn to seek deep for the hidden springs of the life that can never die. Already thou hast blessed me very greatly, gathering truths I failed to find. Thou return’st to me multiplied all I bestow.”

“Would I could gather for all; for my race, so blinded! Oh, it is a tristful thought that the nearer I get to God, the further I get from them I love next after Him. Even my mother was wont to say to me, when, as a questioning boy, I inquired beyond the traditions of the Rabbis, that she’d disown me to all eternity as a heretic. My belief has made me an outcast to her, and yet the thought of her hating me tears my heart.”

“I’ll love thy orphaned heart.”

“Me? Love me; so far beneath thee and with such pauper power of payment?”

“Thy desolation makes thee rich; having none other to love, thou canst love me the more. Thou know’st this open secret of loving; its selfishness demands all; getting that it gives all. Fear not Ichabod, but that thou’lt find the hunger of thy heart well fed. It is as natural for us to love those we have helped as to hate those we have harmed. Thou know’st how men wonder that the Infinite can love the finite, but they forget, or never realized, that one may love because he has loved. So is it with God. He loves, and that He loves becomes therefore rich and worthful to Him.”

The morning after the betrothal, shall we call it, of these two men to each other, long before dawn the knight was wakened by a cautious step on the stone floor of his sleeping place. Sir Charleroy was at once all alert and leaped from the couch, sword in hand, expecting to confront some gipsy thief, for there had been a band of these wanderers hovering near the day before.

“Who’s there?” sternly he demanded, advancing, on guard meanwhile.

“Ichabod, Ichabod!” with trembling voice and in a half whisper. It was the Jew.

“I did not mean to fright thee,” he hurriedly explained, when he had recovered from his fear of being thrust through, “but I’ve news; bad news that would not wait!”

“What is the bad? Is it near?”

“Oh, knight, speak low—the news is bad enough and the ill, though not on us, close after us!”

“Thou art excited, my friend; sit down and then unfold the matter. Meanwhile I’ll light a faggot.”

“In truth, I can’t sit, and I’ve reason to be nervous.” Then the man spread out his arms and his fingers as if he would stand all ready to fly; his eyes wide open, staring as he talked.

“Our Sheik leaves Jericho to-morrow; summoned by the sheriff of Mecca. The sheriff is supreme to Moslem. The command is for war toward the east. Blood, blood; when will the world be done shedding blood!”

“Well, my loving alarmist,” replied Sir Charleroy, coolly, “that’s not very bad news. If the Sheik leaves us, we’ll be free; if he takes us, there will be a change and for that I could almost cry ‘Blessed be Allah!’ I am sickened, crushed, dry-rotted by this hum-drum life; this slavery; dancing abject attendance on a gluttonous master, whose sole object seems to be eating or dallying about the marquees of his harem.”

“Oh, Sir Charleroy, the change has dreadful things for us!”

“Why?”

“I heard that the runner bringing the mandate from Mecca brings also command that all prisoners, such as we, must be made to embrace Islamism, enlist to die, if need be, in this so-called holy war, or be sent to the slave mart.”

“This is a carnival for the furies! Why, Ichabod, the latter is burial alive; the former death with a dishonored conscience!”

“Sir Charleroy, I prefer the slavery.”

“Well, I prefer neither. Is the mandate final?”

“Yes; I’ve an order to commence packing at sunrise; by noon we will be enlisted or in chains.”

“Who gave thee these state secrets, so in detail? Perhaps ’tis only camp-fire gossip recounted for lack of novel ghost stories.”

“Ah, ’tis too true. I’d swear my life on it!”

“Rash, credulous; but which now, comrade, I can not tell.”

“Master, I had this from one that loves me as I love thee; the young Nourahmal, light of the harem, favorite of the Sheik.”

“Well, now it seems to me that this light of the harem is thy favorite rather than the Sheik’s.”

“She adores me.”

“Doubtless! Where a woman unfolds her mind there she brings all else an offering easily possessed. She seals her change of allegiance by scattering the secrets of the dethroned to the enthroned lover. ‘Nourahmal’? Is she as charming in form as in name?”

“Hold, now! If thou lov’st me thou will’st not continue thus to wound. I love that girl, but not the way thou meanest!”

“So? Is there an elopement pending?”

“Unworthy gibe! Say no more like it, but answer this: Is it not possible for a man and woman to be knitted together in soul, as I and thou have been, without the shadow of a remembrance that they are animals of different sexes?”

“Possible? Really I do not know. It may be possible, but so very rare that I have failed to hear of any such relationship.”

“Then thou shalt hear of it now in Nourahmal and me.”

“I’ll take both to Paris! Another wonder of the world! But explain further.”

“My Nourahmal is a captive; hates the man to whom she must submit as we hate him, and loves me with the new love that you have revealed to me, because I’ve shown her that I love her that way; so different from any thing she ever knew before.”

“Well, there are many women yoked to men for whom they feel no great affection, yet they glorify womanhood by their unfaltering loyalty. Loyalty is woman’s glory; the hope of society. If the women be traitors, then, alas!”

“Nourahmal is not a wife! The man that parcels out his heart to a dozen favorites buys but scraps in return. A woman in misery’s chains, without the bands of the confiding, utter love of her lord, will talk; she must talk, or go mad. I tell, thee, knight, such gossip is the panacea of suicidal bent. There’s many a woman kills herself for lack of a confidant!”

“Thou hast learned much philosophy going around the world, Jew, but perhaps not this bitter truth; the woman who is traitor to one man will be to another. Thou mayst be the next. What if she set us fleeing for the sake of laughing at our forced return?”

“Impossible, knight; she reveres me truly; even as she does God; just as I did Sir Charleroy when he brought me light and rest. I was to her what thou art to me. One day I told her women had souls, as dear to heaven as the souls of men! She laughed at me like a monkey, at first, and reminded me that were I a true disciple of Islam I’d know that only young and beautiful women go to heaven, and they even there have a lowly place. Thou knowest these infidels believe that the large majority of hellions are women.”

“Not strange Jew; they treat women as pretty or useful animals, and so degrade, not only themselves, but these very women. A woman so demeaned does not become heavenly, to say the least. But I think, if I were a Turk, I’d keep only argus-eyed eunuchs to guard my harem; in faith, I’d even have the tongues out of those guards.”

“There, now, thou dost jest again.”

“Well, go on, in seriousness. Tell us the pipings of this seraglio beauty.”

“I’ve won her over completely.”

“This is not strange. Poets are always valiant, victorious orators with women. The female heart is emotionally moved up to belief with little logic, if the speaker be fair, or musical, or brave!”

“I was none of these; I told her of the ‘Friend of Publicans and Sinners;’ that fed her soul. I do not believe there is a woman on earth that can resist that story.”

“Oh, well, I’m not going to forget that the first woman outran her mate in evil, nor that she exchanged the All Beautiful for the snaky demon.”

“It would be nobler for a knight, truer for all, to judge, if judge they will, by wider circles. Do not remember the sin of one, or a few, to the disparagement of all!”

“Eve, the best made of all, fell; then her weaker sisters are more likely to follow in her way,” said the knight.

“She found a sin and fell: thousands of her daughters have fallen by sins that men invented and thrust on them. Thou knowest that most women who go wrong, go in ways they would not without the temptings of the stronger will. The sin that ruins most is that to woman’s nature abhorrent, until honeyed over by the tongue of man.”

“Dexterous lance, art thou, Jew; but, anyway, some women are born bad.”

“No; I’m not able for one so wise as the knight, unless I’ve the strength of truth. I’ve heard that our wise men say that if we could trace the ancestry of any one evil, from birth, we would find somewhere, up the line, a father, prëeminent in wickedness. Say, women are weak to resist evil; then, say men are strong to propagate it. Now, which way turns the scale?”

“Oh, I say always, dogmatically, if need be, in man’s favor.”

“Let me see: Eve’s humanity that sinned was out of the finest part of Adam’s body, and the serpent which betrayed her was a male.”

“I’ll parry the thrust by asking why the Holy Writings reveal no female angels? I think there are none.”

“I’ve a wiser reason, knight. It is this: Man has so foully dealt with the angels in the flesh that God’s mercy reserves their finer spiritual counterparts for the sole companionships of heaven, which justly appreciates these holy, pure and tender creations. Heaven would not be perfectly beautiful without them and, methinks, can not spare one for a moment!”

“Not even to minister to a needy world?”

“Woman’s life is here, generally, all service, all ministry; her return to earth after death would be a work of supererogation. God sends back the male spirits to help restore the world their sex did most to ruin.”

Then both the debaters laughed out as heartily as they dared, but there was in the tones of the knight’s laughter a part-confession of defeat. After a time Sir Charleroy spoke again: “Thou art calm now, after this diversion, Ichabod; proceed with thy story of danger.”

“Well, Nourahmal——”

“Oh, yes, begin again with Nourahmal. Samson was a pretty good man for a giant, but he had a betraying Delilah!”

“True enough; but he had also a noble mother. Remember the better, rather than the worse.”

“I remember her peers, Mary and my mother.”

“So, then, when sweepingly condemning all the sex, please except the mothers, at least of those who may be thy hearers.”

“Good Jew, I’ll not wound thee!”

“No pity for me; pity thyself. Such thoughts as thou hast spoken wound thine own soul. We Jews have an order called ‘Tumbler Pharisees;’ they affect humility, shuffle as they walk and stumble on purpose that they may not seem to walk with confidence. Akin to them we have the ‘Bleeding Pharisees;’ they walk with shut eyes, lest they should see a woman, and, stumbling against many a post, are soon covered with their own blood, receiving real harm in flying from imaginary dangers.”

“‘Maya, Maya,’ Ichabod,” laughing aloud, exclaimed Sir Charleroy.

The latter, catching the knight’s arm, hoarsely whispered: “Hush! Thou mayst be heard. What dost thou mean by ‘Maya’?”

“Perhaps, Nourahmal! Maya was the reputed wife of the supposed god Brahm of the Hindus. It is reported that she was in form like unto fog and her name means ‘illusion.’ A subtle truth, Jew; even a god, in love, is near a fog bank!”

“Thou dost not know Nourahmal and dost discredit her; that’s slander; thou dost know me and ridiculest me; that’s—but—I’ll not say it.”

“I’d not pain my Ichabod.”

“Nor discredit Nourahmal?”

“No; but did this angel, or Syren of thine, having shown the peril, present a map to a city of refuge?”

“Ah, poor, helpless girl! she has none for herself, much less for us. She just told me all and wept and kissed me a farewell, praying me to flee. I could think of no question in the delight of hearing her say, she hoped I’d meet her in Heaven, in peace away from Moslem and wars. Only think of her faith! All new; just a little while ago she did not know there was a heaven for women. I felt I could die then in peace. I’ve taught one woman that she is more than a pretty animal!”

“Then, Jew, to thee, life is worth living?”

“Oh truly! Oh, if this light could only spread over Egypt and all my own Syria!”

“Thy desire is akin to that of Mary’s son and noble. Certain it is that we can not spread that light by fighting to sustain the fateful Crescent.”

“By the glory of God, I never will.”

“Nor I, son of Abraham; so let’s decline.”

“And go to the slave mart?”

“Oh, no, not while I’ve a sword, Ichabod.”

“Then to flee is the word?”

“The eastern campaigning with the sheik, would be a little longer route to Paradise?”

“Perhaps not; I am assured that we are needed of God by the use He has recently made of us. He will keep us in our flight from bloody persecuting war, and possible apostacy.”

“I hate the last word! A knight enchanted of Mary can never become a renegade; not I, at least. I was born October ninth. Tradition says that the holy St. John Damascene, having had his hand cut off by the Saracens that day, was by Our Lady miraculously made whole, and lived long after to wield a powerful, facile pen in her behalf. I’ll trust my head and saber hand, used for her, to her protection.”

“And I’ll trust Him that led the wandering hosts of Moses; for ‘in all their affliction, He was afflicted with them, and the angel of His presence saved them; and He bore them and carried them all the days of old.’ Oh, master, I’ve comfort I can not tell, when I feel orphaned, by thinking of my Maker, not only as a Father, but as a Mother! God is our Mother when we, bereft of mother-love, most feel our need of it. So thou toldst me in the mountains.”

“True; but shall we try our escape now?”

“Nay, we had better wait till a little before dawn; the camp patrol is then withdrawn; then we’ll embrace freedom.”

“The Jew seems very confident.”

“Oh, I spent the hour after I met Nourahmal (God keep her), amid the palms for which Jericho is fitly named, and got a token.”

“A token?”

“My eyes were touched in the darkness.”

“Sweet Nourahmal followed thee?”

“No, but He that opened the eyes of blind Bartimeus near here.”

“What didst thou see?”

“Elisha healing the streams about this palm city, type of God healing the floods of bitterest fates; after that I saw Jericho’s walls falling at the blasts of Joshua’s trumpets, and remembered that his God then is ours now.”

“Didst thou see two poor men fleeing in the dark from peril to peril, pursued by a hundred horsemen, who saber-lashed them; a little further two corpses, one of a Christian the other of a Jew, on which fed fighting jackals?”

“I saw no such horror! I saw two led forth from their captors, as Peter from his dungeon; the angels that blinded the eyes of the monstrous men, who of old sought to defile Lot’s house, blinded the eyes of the pursuers of the two; and the angel of Peter gave them guidance and light. But come, the night-guard has retired; between now and the call to morning prayers is our opportunity.”

Out of the old stone stable silently knight and Jew glided, threading their way amid splendors they believed to be, but could not see. The ministering spirits were over and around them, their path was through the Kelt, the sublimest waddy of Palestine; but night shrouded the latter; their weak faith dimly discerned the other.

“Can’t thou see any way-marks, Jew?”

“I discern but few. Yet, what matter? It is enough that He who leads us sees?”

“The night is getting blacker and blacker; the omen makes my heart shiver as it beats.”

As the knight spoke there came a terrific crash of thunder and a succession of blinding lightning flashes. Sir Charleroy clasped the Jew’s arm and in startled voice questioned:

“Dost thou not fear these?”

“Why should I? The angel guides swing the torches of the unchangeable Father to give us glimpses of our way. All is well; I saw by the lightning flash that we are passing safely the camp lines of our captors.”

A few miles were over-past. The storm had abated a little, and the first streaks of dawn, like spears, were rising in the east.

“Would God, good Jew,” said the now wearied Sir Charleroy, “that the Prophet of the Moslem, who, near by here, is said once by a stamp of his foot to have brought forth from the rock a camel, were present to dance for us now.”

“He is not here, so we must help ourselves, knight.”

“Ah, my dear man, canst thou dance rocks into camels?”

“No, but there are houses nigh, and each thou knowst has it’s stable-yard in front.”

“But there is the thorny nubk tree, surrounding the herds.”

“I’ve faith to try my faith when all I have is faith.”

“What for; to steal a camel?”

“Oh, no; I’d not steal a camel but I’d borrow a couple of them. Two; for I’m not one of the knights who exhibit poverty, by riding double, thou dost know.”

“Borrow? Well so be it; the black infidels owe us for two years’ service. They borrowed us!”

“It’s pious to take the beasts; for we pay so honest debts of these heathens and shorten the list of their souls’ sins by removing from them, in our escape, the opportunity for our murder.”

“If this be sophistry, Ichabod, it is so sweet that it is taken as delightful truth.”

“Thou art persuaded?”

“No man can out run me, be he rabbi or priest, in condemning vices, if they be such as I do not care to practice, and I am a profound believer in every creed that’s sweet to my desires. Here action treads the heels of persuasion.”

On beasts, borrowed without formality, the fugitives hurried toward Jordan, only there to find a barrier to their progress in the angry torrent swelled by the recent storms. It was clearly futile to attempt a passage, and to tarry, waiting the ebb of the waters, was to bring certain detection. They turned the heads of their borrowed camels toward their master’s homes and waited the sunrise, meanwhile moving about to find some means of safety.

“Well, my comrade, I think it will not be long until those Turks will give our souls an Elijah-like ascension except that there will be no chariot. The morning shimmering on his mountain makes me think of this, Ichabod.”

“The tracks of our returning camels in the wet earth will guide our pursuers.”

“Suppose we climb a tree as Zacchaeus, since we can not have a chariot. By my plume! which I’ve not seen for a year, I think that would be safety; the Turks never look up except in prayer, and the wolf Azrael seldom prays. But God pity us! there they are coming.”

“To the tombs, master! On the left.”

“Refuge for jackals?”

“Yes, but also for the miserable, living and dead! Now haste!”

Sir Charleroy obeyed quickly, but recoiled with a groan of disgust as he suddenly pushed against an entombed body. He touched his hilt, as if determined to abandon attempt at flight, and then, overcoming the rash impulse to confront the pursuers, turned about, seized the corpse, and dragging it from its place, hurled it over the river bank into the torrent. He was in the dispoiled nich in an instant. A cry from the pursuers drew him forth. “See, Ichabod, the Turks are running along the river banks watching the mummy bobbing along in the torrent. See, it sinks. Ah, the brutes, how they shout! They think that body alive, and that one poor slave is hounded to death.”

“Jehovah Jeireh, now help us; they’ll soon be back,” cried Ichabod.

“Ah, I forgot; they’ll remember there were two of us.”

“Calm, Sir Knight, ‘By this sign I conquer,’ quoting thy words of another. I’ll go forth; the only one left; at least so they’ll think.”

Sir Charleroy turned and looked at the Jew, and was amazed to see him binding in front of himself a board having the ominous words, “Unclean” upon it.

“What; thou, a Jew, and touch that foul thing, worn to festering death by some leper!”

“Better night and a clean soul, though in a body burned by the cursed leprosy, than life in Moslem slavery.”

“But what if the disease cleave to thee, and we escape?”

“Sir Knight, thou wilt live to tell others that a once hated Jew was led of thee to truth, and after died a living death, that his benefactors might survive. I think such deeds cause noble lights to glow in human souls.”

“God bless and pity thee, Ichabod.”

“Ah, he does; even now. I see the scarlet line of Rahab, and it binds the pestilence that walketh by noonday.”

The furious pursuers spurred their steeds up toward the tombs, but as they beheld the solitary man, sitting in painful attitude with beggar-like palm extended and wearing the dread sign, they rapidly wheeled their steeds about and galloped away. The Moslem had heard that a Jew would suffer any torture rather than ceremonial pollution; hence judged that the object before them could not be the refugee they sought.

“I wonder not that the demoniac cut himself madly when among the tombs, good Jew. Sure it’s like going to glory to get out once more. Methinks freedom is only sweet when taken with fresh air! Well, we are out and the enemy thwarted.”

“Methinks, master, that the leper that died here, leaving no legacy but the sign of his death, did some good in unknowingly making me his heir.”

“And the corpse I disposed of so unceremoniously left me a house of safety, though small and musty. I’ve a bitter thought.”

“So, Sir Charleroy, tell it me, perhaps I can sweeten it.”

“I, the heir for a little time of that soulless clay, am like it.”

“Not much being here and alive.”

“I rather think like it. See me tossed about by strangers, robbed of my rights, helpless to resist fate’s tides, begrudged the room I occupy, and not one who once knew me to weep over my besetments.”

“Sir Knight, the miracles of our frequent preservation should make our murmurings dumb.”

In the evening Jordan ebbed a little and the two wanderers passed over. Nor did they regret the consequent immersing in its flood. No word was spoken as they passed through the current, for, before they entered, having remembered that at this Bethabara ford man’s Savior was baptized, they were each busy with his own meditations. When they stood on the other shore, Sir Charleroy reverently said: “Comrade, I prayed as we passed that we might have the dove of peace henceforth above our souls at least.”

“I prayed on my part that God would accept the act as the Christian’s typical burial to the world and separation from its sins.”

“How like death and birth is that beautiful type. They level all life.”

“Are our lives leveled? knight.”

“Henceforth; and we are brethren.”

“And our King and Savior was baptized here by the herald of His Kingdom, John?”

“Yea; here the new Judaism was formally inaugurated. Tradition says also that Jesus baptized his mother afterward at this ford.”

“How filial; how beautiful; how expressive! He was her God, yet her son, she his mother and disciple; and each by all ties and forms bound together in a fellowship of helpfulness.”

“The Jew’s an interpreter.”

“Sir Charleroy sweetens my trust as Jordan sweetens the bitter waters of Bahr Lut.”

CHAPTER IX.
THE FEAST OF THE ROSE.

“They arise now like the stars before me

Through the long, long night of years;

Some are bright with heavenly radiance,

And others shine out through our tears.

They arise, too, like mystical flowers,

All different and all the same—

As they lie on my heart like a garland

That is wreathed around Mary’s name,”

“Good morning and a blessing, comrade.” It was the greeting of the Jew to the knight who lay asleep under a palm the day after the flight. The sleeper slowly rising, murmured:

“I’m half vexed at thee, Ichabod; thou hast dissolved a dream filled with sights of home and mother.”

“I’ve brought lentils, barley, and grape-clusters; they are better than dreams when the sun is up.”

“To those sad when awake, joyful dreams are welcome.”

“There are real joys just before us.”

“Real joys, just before us? Grim sarcasm; a sorry jest, Jew!”

“No; oh, no. I’m telling thee the smiling, clean-faced truth. We’ll be safe at Jabbock’s city by sun set!”

“Safe? safe? I’m unused to that word; almost afraid of it. What does it mean in this country?”

“Oh, these cavalrymen! always on the charge; now here, now there. Thy thoughts go by habit, sometimes racing forward, sometimes retreating. A while ago thou wert as full of faith as Gideon, now thou art as timorous as Canaan’s spies.”

“My habits have grown fat by feeding on piebald experiences.”

“Experience is a lying prophet, when it counts without reckoning God.”

“I can not see a step ahead. That’s certainty to me, though thou callest it doubt. I know not how to hang rainbows upon the ghostly brows of the future when I’ve no power to lay hand on the ghostly form and have no rainbows.”

“He that lifted the burdens of the past from off us holds the changing winds of the future in His fists. One second of life goes ever with only one second of care. I learned this of Sir Charleroy long ago. Now he forgets his own teachings. Shall I call him Reuben, never excelling because unstable as water?”

“Call me slave: Uncertainty’s slave! Thou didst waken me from a dream of home, to the shock of remembering again that I was homeless, dead to all that once made life worth living. The gorgeous hopes of thy fertile mind are mocked by stern present facts.”

“Odd talk from one just dreaming of his mother; a good woman didst say? then very hopeful; all good women are. Then remember how thou didst lift me to the very gates of heaven yesterday. Thou canst not see a step ahead? Well, then look back; miles; years. Was not our God in thy battles in the thickets; in the mountains; in Jordan? My poor reasoning tells me that He has wrought too much for us to drop us now. He must get His reward in keeping us to the end.”

“Some of the past makes me shudder, Ichabod.”

“Pick out the best, not the worst. We escaped the very Gehenna at Jericho, following murderers, the storm, slavery; now free, fed, rested, the eastern air washed and sunned to a tonic. I’m drinking lotus balm out of it.”

“There it is; the sun’s in thy brain, poet-preacher.”

“No, I’m only giving thee back some of thine own sermons. I draw from my own heart no monster memories. If I’ve fought hard battles it sufficeth that I have fought them once. I’ll not recall their bloody sweat and tears for the sake of refighting them. No, I’m going back to the sweet, happy hours of babyhood; for I tell thee, knight, there is a world of joy to a man, scorched by stern experience, to forget himself sometimes back to the lullabys and warblings of the days of his innocence.”

“I can’t do it.”

“I can’t help doing it, especially in this place! My whole being feeds on a present scent of home.”

“Thou knowest the country hereabouts?”

“My soul laughs in friendly converse with these crocuses, pinks, and asphodels, turning the velvet, grassy plains to palace carpets. I’m saying to myself these blossoms must know me, their bowing heads and offered odors being my reward for nursing their mothers when I was a boy.”

“Well, flowers are sincere friends; they never change and are all charitable. That’s why they are deemed fit presents to those in prison, or proper offering to be laid on the breast of the dead Magdalene.”

“Ah, dead Magdalene; for even the symbol of a broken promise; born to be a queen of love, by perverted love dethroned! Woman, man’s ward, by man betrayed; the guide star setting in black night; the savior of human purity befouling all purity! Given the power by which Eve was to crush the serpent’s head and using it to breed all serpentine ills. This is Eve turning a volcano upon Eden. Put flowers upon her once passionate, now dead, heart, in awful contrast! Nature at her worst is intensified anguish; at her best an ocean of joy, an universe of light and song. So I learn of nature under man. Listen to nature’s perfumed throb now: these thousands of feathered songsters, millions of lesser creatures, whose melody is larger than themselves and more perceptible. Hear the humming, thrumming, buzzing, trumpetings. Oh, this is life as the All-Saving tuned it to utter joy! It widens, deepens, thickens; getting sweeter, louder, happier all the way. A tempest, set to music, knight. I’m caught in its whirl and join in its praisings. It comes over me as an insight of what nature really is. God cares for it all and made it thus, to throb and exult!” Ichabod paused in transport. “But I sometimes think there’s a great waste of these things; there is so much in places where there is no human ear or eye to hear or see.”

“Reuben is narrow-viewed just now. Man is not all! God makes happiness because He is so full of goodness He must. Our rabbis call Him ‘The Fountain.’ There is no waste! He makes these things for His own joy, and, methinks, looks down from the circle of the heavens to say to what is in the desert or wilderness, ‘Very good.’ Then, beyond this, I’ve sometimes thought He kept the processions of joy and beauty moving along; coming, going, dying, living, ending and beginning again, as a sort of practice; by action keeping all fresh and new. He causes things of beauty and power to pass through His divine alchemy from one glory to another, as the general causes his squadrons to move through the evolutions of the battle before the conflict. The Father is awaiting man’s hour, man’s return from sinning; the time for millennial advent; then all delights, as if fresh born, all goods newly harvested, will appear to be multiplied, intensified, transfigured. That will be the beginning of hereafter.”

“Oh, Israel, the sun is in thy brain. I forget all logic of contention, charmed out of words, by feasting on thy orisons, Go on, Jew.”

“Then I’ll say ’twas God, not chance, nor fate, that brought us to wander alone with nature. Read well nature’s book that lies open in the lap of the Great Teacher! Only stand close to Him and He will hold the torch, turn the pages and give the sure interpretations of the sweetness that feeds quiet, the picturesqueness which evokes smiles and the stately grandeurs which beget faith.”

“Israel, thou climbest the sun-ladder to rhapsody!”

“Whether soaring, climbing, or creeping, I know not; but this I know, I’m tasting in these wanderings God’s kisses. They are in the flowers; my spirit rests on His as my body on the balm of the fresh breezes. Then, animate nature seems so contented and happy! Why, I’ve been ravished by the songsters; as I’ve said to myself, they echo the angelic anthem of heaven, peace. Had any such doubt as haunts thee, come to me, since passing Jordan, it would have been sung out of countenance by the winged warblers or dragged from my heart captive in floral fetters by Him that hath two staves, beauty and bands.”

“Oh, Ichabod, do not pause. Go on, I pray thee.”

“Then thou art glad to hear that nature is not a beautiful widow mourning her dead bridegroom through the ages?”

“I love to listen to thee.”

“Listen to a wiser. See those stately heliotropes. They stand above all of their kind with shining faces; great in aspiration, great in devotion. All day they turn toward the sun and when their blossoms fade they leave a hardy seed. The winter may bury it, but it springs forth in vernal days, strong in the life it won by loving the summer sun.”

“Ichabod, I’m charmed! Let’s abide here always amid these joys of nature.”

“What, be hermits?”

“Yes; life’s troubles are made by its people; the fewer people the fewer troubles.”

“While sharing their troubles may we not lessen them. No man may live to himself; we’re wedded to each other.”

“Yes, wedded to life. A royal phrase; since I’ve been constantly either hating or loving it; fearing to live and then fearing to die. Wedded! ah, ha, ha; the wedded are those who most madly love and then most bitterly hate.”

“Say sometimes; then thou’lt be like the stopped horologue, telling the true time once in twenty-four hours, at least.”

“Thy poetry runs into caustic quality. What hast thou been lunching on since morn?”

“At least not on Dead Sea apples, fair without, ashes within. My poetry, if I have any, always sings in accord with the company it keeps.”

“How many more arrows in thy quiver, hast thou?”

“Only one, and that a question; does my master intend to foreswear marriage himself? He ridicules it.”

“I have already done so.”

“Well, ’tis well thou didst not live in Rome, for its citizens that dared to live amid the temptations and soul-crampings of voluntary bachelorhood were highly taxed for their disregard of the claims of society and the state.”

“Yet even the Romans ever deemed bachelorhood a blessing. In this opinion royal Claudius decreed that the sailors who brought to Rome a ship loaded from the wheat granaries of Egypt in the time of Agabus’s famine, should be as a reward permitted to remain unmarried. If I were a Roman and a sailor I’d pray for a famine and a Claudius.”

“A world without wives? What a world!”

So saying Ichabod caught up a stick and began marking on the earth.

“How now, Israel; some sorcery?”

“No—yet, may be, yes. I’ll picture a world without women.”

The Jew outlined the Egyptian deity, “Kneph.”

“What have we, man or beast?”

“Truly, I think partly both. The knight has described his Elysium and I have here pictured a fit king for it. Behold thy god, sworn celibate. Egypt’s adored Kneph. Is this hideous enough?”

“A god! well he’s not handsome; a ram’s head; four horns; two up, two down; armed as both ram and goat?”

“Both were sacred to him in Egypt; also the horned snake with which Cleopatra put out her life; poor, unfortunate man-wrecked beauty.”

“But, Jew, thou dost dawdle! What of this play?”

“Oh, nothing, only Kneph would do well for a sailor, at Rome, under Claudius, in famine time!”

“My poet wanders, but yet stings.”

“So? Kneph was a god that boasted, or rather his spokesmen did, that he was the father of his mother. What economy! No need to be grateful to or love a mother; no need to wear a wife on the heart. The folly of a dark age by folly darkened in the mad attempt to lift up man without his purer better part.”

“How strange, Jew, whenever we touch a new belief, or an old one, new to us, we find peoples following an idea or ideal. There has been a crying through the world ever for a some one for pilgrim man to follow. How passing strange; our century wails the self-same cry; and somehow it always happens that this matter has something to do with woman. See; ‘Kneph’ was the monstrous birth of those who thought man superlative, and greatness to be by being all man. How sharply the devotion to the Madonna cuts across this! She was mother of the noblest, and man in the begetting left out. Oh, my head’s full of thoughts, but they tumble along toward my lips without system or leader. I talk like a madman, though I think like a Seraph.”

“I think, Sir Charleroy, that a healthy son of Adam sneering at all women, publicly, reproaches himself as being one who never knew a true one.”

“More javelins! I’d swear, anyhow, that if I’d been Adam, no winged serpent of gaudy colors and honey tongue could have lured me from Paradise, Eve or no Eve!”

“If thou hadst been there thou wouldst have been lonesome with the speechless herds; finding the new woman, would have loved her like the boy who mates just to see how it seems.”

“Oh, likely!”

“Then if thy ward or angel attempted to elope with the devil thou wouldst have gone along, too, from curiosity, as lad to a hippodrome, just to see the finish; or as thousands of men since Adam, tied to wayward women, have gone down with them to darkness, preferring hell with their idols to heaven without.”

“I suppose so. Oh, how strangely are the fates of men and women interwoven.”

“Then thou dost not now elect to live a hermit, without the companionship of the frail, fair and faithful sex which are said to double our joys?”

“Yes and multiply our sorrows!”

“I suspect thou’lt change thy late creed very soon.”

“Why so?”

“I expect ere long that we’ll meet some living blossoms.”

“By my token, that’s good news, Ichabod.”

“So, then, thou art ready to recant?”

Evening came, and the pilgrims supped on the meager meat they were able to procure in the fields.

“Now poet of the Palm Land mellow my dreams by possessing me of thy meditations. What fixes thy gaze?”

“The monarch of the sky; after a day such as this has been, he seems to me to take his departure with a peculiar sort of triumphal sweep of his trailing splendors.”

“Horus exulting over prostrate Set.”

“But night, not the green-colored son of Osiris, conquers now, master.”

“Night never conquers. It merely lives by sufferance; often routed by the invincible spears of the sun. Darkness creeps forth here because the golden charger in masterful strategy has gone elsewhere to rout other armies of the dark kingdom. Lay this to thy heart, good Jew.”

“I do, as precious ointment to a blister. Enlarge me.”

“There, Jew; see the fleecy clouds over Jordan. How grand!”

“Yea, as I’ve often seen them; some like alabaster thrones, and others like ships on fire, while others are like silver castles, banded with cornelian and gold, with here and there hyacinthian shields hung on their battlements, all fresh as the stones in heaven’s foundation walls! How they career and float along the empurpled ocean of the west! I forget myself even now into their midst. Oh, knight, such pictures, such visions make my soul shout in peals of holy laughter.”

“My Israel, the sun which woos the earth into making love to him with flowers never sets in thy brain; thou livest in the poet’s constant noon.”

“But we both are changing. Even the knight gets mellow. Hardship, the sun and faith are working in us both for good.”

“Getting to be? No; thou wert and art poet, painter and singer; all in one. If the world does not hear thee the Seraphim will, by and by.”

“I’ve noticed that souls unbent from some long, twisting pain, run, aspire and play. It is mercy’s rest, reward.”

“God fits some especially to catch passing joys, Ichabod.”

“Yea, and it all comes from a serene faith that all is very good as He made it. I’m just opening to the Sun Eternal, at whose right hand are pleasures evermore. I love thy wakening touch, my guide.”

“Ah, I’m a bungling player on the harp of thy soul, but I love thy melody. Child of nature, speak more and more to me.”

“I can but ill tell all. I’m dumb amid the waves of peace which enhalo, the hopes that thrill, the views of truth that fill my being.”

“I believe thee on my soul, Jew. I’d stop now to remember a little, perhaps to sleep, since so I can follow dreams that would craze me to contemplate awake; but if we now sleep, pray God our day-dreams go on and on. I think we are pilgrims following spiritual truths. They’ll lead us on high; let’s not miss their direction.”

“One may sleep, master, when he can not think; for me, now, I’d rather court, awake, my mind’s guests, for a time, meanwhile gainsaying the lullabys of cricket and nightingale now floating out from every bush.”

“So be it. How shall we proceed to pass the time?”

“Can we set up an Ebenezer? God hitherto hath helped us.”

“I have it; we’ll to the feast.”

“Well, we have what some great kings have not, and so shall find joy in a feast. We have appetite!”

“Thou dost miss my meaning, though thy point is prime. We seldom think to thank the Giver for the power to enjoy as well as for the enjoyable. I knew a French prince, once, who said he’d give his birthright for one good dinner, and he was no Esau, either. He had dinners and dinners, but what were they along with premature decay gnawing at his vitals like a rat, while he himself could eat less than a babe?”

“I see; the knight would have us thankfully commemorate to-day’s enjoyment of nature.”

“Just so; I think, in loving nature, because we begin to understand her, we will be on our way to all the natural joy of which she is God’s interpreter.”

“But our feast?”

“The stars are out on the blue; their queen will soon come up from the sea, then I’ll induct thee into the feast of the ‘Rose.’ The rose is the queen of flowers, and flowers the thoughts of God!”

“The feast of the Rose! I’ve heard it was a licencious, heathen orgy!”

“It was then a shameful misnomer. My Mary found it; transformed it. Out of it, through reverence of her, comes a beautiful observance. See here, Jew.”

So saying, the knight took from his bosom a string of precious stones and arranged them, as they glowed under the moonlight, on the ground heart-shaped.

The knight then questioningly observed the Jew.

The latter shook his head and remarked:

“I’ve seen such often among the Arabs. They have a prayer for each bead to be said the night after the death of one of their number, believing the shade departs not to Hades ’till the prayers are said. Thou dost not practice their enchantments?”

“Bah! Never. My gemmed circle has a deeper, holier significance. Each pendant is to recall to mind some virtue or event in the saintly Mary’s life. Then there are guilds called, ‘Brothers of the Rosary.’ I belong to one such; each member is sworn to pray for all the others wherever scattered. The Turks may have had a praying string, but the Crusaders have appropriated and applied it to nobler uses.”

“Tell me more of it, if there be more.”

“There are but fifteen in my brotherhood.”

“Only fifteen, no room for me?” said the Jew.

“Fifteen; to suggest the fifteen great events in Mary’s life; namely, the Annunciation; Gabriel announced to Mary that she was to be the Mother of Jesus; the Visitation; Mary in the Gospel spirit went quickly to tell her kinswoman of her promised favor; the Birth of Jesus, this was the crowning joy; then here is the gem that recalls the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. Thou knowest, Jew, thy fathers often wondered how, after all, a lamb, an animal, could stand between offended Deity and man. Jesus in the Temple was the fulfillment or explanation of the mystery!”

“Yea, truly, I’ve seen this. Oh, that all my people could also see it!”

“Then, here is the jewel that reminds us of the ‘Scourging at the pillar’ of Him ‘by whose stripes we are healed.’”

“Israel reads Isaiah with darkened mind, my loving guide. I’ve seen this. Oh, that my people could.”

“Here is the jewel that recalls the ‘Crowning with thorns’ of Him that hath to give, at His right hand, ‘pleasures forever more.’ He wore that thorny coronet that His redeemed should return with singing, crowned with everlasting joy.”

“I’ve felt it; feel it now. Hallelujah!”

“This one is to commemorate ‘Jesus bearing the Cross;’ this one ‘His crucifixion,’ and this ‘His resurrection.’”

“The hope of hopes by our Saducees denied!”

“Then we have here another to remind us of our Saviour’s ‘Ascension,’ with His pregnant promise of a royal return to take at last His children home.”

“Come, Lord Jesus, even so, quickly!” cried Ichabod.

“‘Wait patiently for Him and He will give thee the desire of thy heart,’ oh, heir of faithful Abraham!”

“I weary sometimes, my loved teacher.”

“So do we, of our brotherhood; but here is a thought of rest; this bead recalls ‘Pentecost.’ We are led of the Spirit, which guides to all truth and comforts by the way.”

“But what has all this to do with Mary?”

“Oh, here are two beads; one reminds us of her ‘Assumption’ into heaven, the other of her ‘Crowning.’”

“Was she crowned?”

“Yea, in heaven, for the Son of Mary promised to His faithful ones this exaltation; ‘I appoint unto you a Kingdom as my Father hath appointed unto me, ye which have continued with me in my temptation.’ Surely, she that followed him from the pains of parturition, as an outcast, to the Cross and the sepulcher, continued!”

“I would I could have been there to enter the race for such crowning.”

“‘He hath made us kings and priests unto God; if we suffer we shall also reign with Him,’ Jew.”

“Hallelujah! would I could shout it to heaven; no, I do; but rather to all Jewry!” exclaimed the Israelite.

“John was only a ‘voice crying in the wilderness,’ as he thought, but he was heard at the palace and down the ages. Even now I voice his words in this lone place.”

“Thou didst not tell me of the meaning of that black and red pendant,” said Ichabod, interrupting.

“Oh, Gethsemane, Jesus, the intercessor for the world, ‘who ever lives to intercede.’ The black sign is of that.”

“Then I’ve a Saviour in glory praying for me. Oh, this is balm and water to me! Why do I dare to think of myself as a poor Jew! God pity; no, forgive me! I, repining sometimes and yet defended in glory; honored by royal adoption, elected of God, called to kingship!”

“How we do go up and down; sometimes thou, sometimes I. Now I’m leading, awhile ago ’twas thou. Yea, we are all dependants; but this is healthful meditation, Ichabod, and thy confession rebukes me as well.”

“Is this all of the feast?”

“Oh, no. Here are some tokens to remind us of Mary’s life; so brief, so useful. See, here, five gems that remind us of the wounds of her son; her wounds as well, for the sword that pierced Him pierced through to her soul also. At each of these emblems we ‘Rosary Brothers’ repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Last of all, reverently clasping this crucifix, we sacredly repeat the Apostle’s Creed, the same as I taught thee at Jericho.”

“I remember, as I do the water courses, when thirsty.”

“What think’st thou of all this formality? Is it like the Arabic mummeries?”

“No, they are mocking devils, are they not?”

“I am not to judge of their sincerity, nor their needs, nor art thou.”

“Master, I wish I could be a Rosary Brother. Methinks it would help my ambling faith sometimes, if I could touch a token.”

“He above is all tender of baby faiths that can do no better than amble. Remember the words of thy own Hosea: ‘I drew them with cords of a man, with bonds of love, I taught Ephriam to go; taking them by the arms; just as a mother teaches her babe to walk,’ is it not?”

“Even so. Does the Rosary help some to walk?”

“I believe it does.”

“Tell me more about it.”

“The Crusaders were the first to call Mary ‘The Rose.’ To almost all mankind that flower has ever been the emblem of pure, unselfish love, and when the soldiers of the Cross grew to understand the character of her that gave the world its Saviour, they could think of no title more fitting for that queenly woman.”

“I’ve an Egyptian rosary, knight. See, I wear it on this golden chain, next my heart, for its safety——”

“To ward off witchcraft?”

“Bah! ’Tis a toy in usefulness. I keep it, thinking it may work incantation with the money-lender, and so save me sometime from starvation.” Then the Jew laughed aloud at his own wit. It seemed very ridiculous to him to liken his talisman to the real rosary or its saint.

“Wouldst thou let me examine it, Jew?”

The latter handed to the knight a chain and image.

“Egyptian?”

“An image of Neb-ta, sister of Isis, the wife of the Sun God Osiris. It was given me by a Copt priest, whom I saved from drowning in the Nile.”

“A Copt?”

“A Copt. He was a professed Christian; but, like some of the ancestral Egyptians, sought to be right by being a little of every thing. He was very superstitious, though he thought himself very broad-minded. He was quite certain that Coptic Christianity was true, though not equally certain that his pagan ancestors were in faith all false. He thought he’d be on the safe side by mixing a little of all creeds with his own, and so he prayed in Christ’s name and also Neb-ta’s.”

“A pretty fool, Jew.”

“Yea. He had a story about the goddess, very pretty when not absurd, running somehow thus: When Osiris was cut to pieces by Set, a type of day slain by night, I think, Neb-ta went round the world with her widowed sister, Isis, to gather up the fragments of her spouse. Isis is the moon above; below, reproduction. She is pictured in Egypt, as all the female deities, with two eggs and a half-circle at the side, to express the latter idea. Isis has in her hand also this sign—a cross supporting an egg, to typify immortality. The old Egyptian priest told me this sympathetic Neb-ta, if I trusted her, would reward me for saving his life, by defending my case in Hades. There is a good deal of mysticism in all this, but I rather prize the gift, since it reminds me that I once saved a man.”

“But, Nourahmal? Since thou knew of Mary thou hast saved a woman, Jew.”

The Jew was silent. The knight continued:

“These philosophic, inseeing, sign-writing, symbol-making Egyptians were pilgrims, too; a nation of graal-seekers; after an idea, example. I see always the huge Sphinx coming before me when I think of them.”

“The Sphinx! Well, that’s strange. I’d never think of that, unless I happened upon something very big and very meaningless!”

“No, no; the people that rocked the cradle of religions in their infancy, wrought all their theology into that one mighty symbol, to endure and challenge compare with all that man should find beside.”

“I do not see how!”

“The Sphinx faces the East—light!”

“True!”

“It can not reach that light toward which it looks, neither could the Nubians.”

“All true.”

“It was part man, part beast; but the upper part was man, and this is what we think we know, and all of man?”

“Oh, knight, Phthah, the ‘beautiful-faced,’ ‘secret-opener’ of the Nile gods has touched thee.”

“The Sphinx was like man’s thought; too great for words; at least such words as men can now fit to their lips.”

“I see; it’s all coming into my mind, master.”

“It sat still and was silent, but the world went on; the thought it expressed reached hearts after the men that formed the image had passed away. The truth lives ever, and can not die until it completes its purpose.”

“Thou art a magician, who pleases, astonishes, excites, instructs, and at the same time plays with me as if I were a pigmy!”

“It’s not I, but the truth. The Sphinx again! Its hugeness, truth expressed, appears mighty when placed by our sides.”

“Tell me where I am! Shall I fling Neb-ta away as a bauble, or beg its pardon for hanging so much meaning to a fool’s neck?”

“Vehement! The sun is in thy head!”

“But shall I sit and look as a Sphinx, or run mad because I can’t?”

“Be calm, and let me tell thee that the dwellers by the mighty Nile plagued themselves with lasting darkness when they banished the people whose leader’s face shone from communion with Jehovah. They clung to some half truths, left them by the progeny of Joseph, but the half was dimmed by courted lusts.”

“But my people had no Neb-ta, no women divinities to leave in Egypt.”

“No, yet Egypt, aiming to exalt the tender, the beautiful, the mother, incarnated certain virtues, and lo, a woman deity! It was an effort to find the ‘Rose.’ The nation was in a vast, serious pilgrimage through all their dynasties after an idea, a pattern; an opportunity to reach and to express the best things. I tell thee, Jew, the heathen nations sit in darkness; this side and that, along the track of time, holding here and there a torch, waiting through the night whose hours are tolled off at century intervals, for something, Some One. There have passed before them like phantoms, gods and gods; man invented, man evolved; but none of these tarried, none satisfied. Oh, ‘the Isles wait for thee,’ Jesus, Thou Ideal Man, and also for the true conception of Mary the ideal woman!”

“For two Gods? Is Mary divine?”

“Did I say that? Nay, as the child Jesus was subject to her, so she was subject to the Christ, at last. Christ was the Word, Mary His blessed echo; Christ the Sun, Mary the Moon that reflected that light, showing its beauty in woman’s life!”

“But now, what shall I do with my beautiful fright, Neb-ta, Sir Charleroy?”

“Put her away, in mind, amid the galaxies of woman deities; mythical in all but the pitiful sincerity of the adoration of their devotees and in the greatness of the truths they vaguely articulated. See, I’ll interpret: Isis going round the world to gather up the fragments of her dismembered husband. Woman’s ministry; the restoration of man; wife consecration to an only love. Then there was not only beautiful widowhood, second only to beautiful wifehood, but also the spinster sister. Hail Egypt! Thy Sphinx saw further than our peoples of boasted civilizations. At our best we never rose so near to a just altitude as to attempt the deification of the maiden sister, the omnipresent angel, who mothers other people’s children as if they were her own. Egypt worshipped motherhood, perhaps grossly, in adoring the earth’s fructifications, but she did not overlook those pious souls who in a glorious self-abnegation play waiting-maids to the real queens of earth, the child-bearers. I’d never tire praising the child-bearers, or all who love them, for they that bring forth a life are greater than the greatest kingly man-slayer on earth. The world is upside down; no religion is wholly false that aids to right it in any degree. Hail, creeds of Egypt, or any other land, that seek to efface from fame’s pages the names of life-destroyers that thereon may chiefly shine the names of those who give or save life.”

“Oh, oscillating Sir Charleroy, thou art just and courtly now.”

“Praise me, then! Mankind would average better by far than it does if all were right half the time.”

“Would I could gather all the threads of to-day’s blessed communings into a golden band to support over my heart faith’s breastplate.”

“I can give thee its summary: God, a beauty Creator, out of all things hideous in His good Providence will emerge the fine, tender and loving. Neb-ta, Egypt’s ideal, carried the lotus, the flower of unrestrained pleasure, as her scepter; Neb-ta-like the influences that sway most human hearts to-day; but the Rose of the world has blossomed. Mary, the flower of women. They that love and serve, as that warm, red-hearted woman, shall at last reign in eternal bliss within the ruby walls of the New Jerusalem.”

“I’m with the knight, to proclaim thy Rose!”

“A good profession! It will be well if we remember that woman is as essential to religion as religion to women. As for man he needs the one as the interpreter of the other. Therefore, it was that God sent to earth a flower that could talk.”

CHAPTER X.
AFTER EVE, ESTHER OR MARY?

“Still slowly passed the melancholy day,

And still the stranger wist not where to stray:

The world was sad—the Garden was a wild;

And man, the hermit, sighed—till woman smiled.”

—Milton.

The Israelites, along Jabbock, were all aglow with preparation for celebrating one of their feasts. Sir Charleroy and his comrade journeying along, in the early morning, were apprised of the advent of the festivities by the passing near them of a company of maidens, marching and chanting. The pilgrims drew apart and sequestered themselves behind a clump of nubt trees that they might observe, themselves unobserved, the graceful procession of singers.

“Well, my poet, didst thou conjure up these fairies, or have we come on the musk-born houri?” Sir Charleroy spoke in an absent-minded manner, perhaps, with an affectation of a lack of very much interest. In fact, long privation of the presence of women had somehow rusted from his bearing, in their vicinage, most of the confident courtier. In a word, he was now bashful in their presence. He spoke with a small witticism to subdue, his own embarrassment. His words were unheard, for the Jew was all engaged in contemplating the passing women.

In truth, the latter made a striking picture; garbed as they were, in holiday attire; all young, oriental in beauty, and fresh in face, form and action. They were rural maidens and that says all. It had been a long time since either Ichabod or Sir Charleroy had met such types of womanhood; all free from affectation; all natural and graceful in motion; a band of women, as sisters, bent to one purpose and that a lofty one, the proper observance of a joyous, pious, religious ceremonial.

Presently Ichabod drew a long breath and rapturously exclaimed: “Praise be to the Patriarchs, my people!”

“I’d rather say, Ichabod, praise the Patriarch’s daughters, if these be human!”

“Ha, ha! flesh, indeed! Our Hebrew maidens celebrating the Feast of Esther!”

“Are they praying God for Adams, so that each Esther and Vashti may have one all to herself? If so, we are part answers to their prayers.”

“Hush such jest! These be holy maidens, now honoring our Esther. Thou knowest about her?”

“Certainly; she was my heroine before Our Lady dethroned in my heart all others. I was wont to wish I’d been about in Haman’s time. I’d have aroused that old dotard, Ahasuerus, right quickly. By the sackcloth of Mordecai, if I’d been the king, the hanging would have put the Haman family into mourning long before it did.”

“Oh, how like angels! It’s years since I saw a woman other than as deflowered by harem life. Heavens, what a spoiler man is at his worst!”

“Dost forget Nourahmal? But no matter; I admire, and wonder that some roving band of Arabs, with less piety, or more force than we, does not swoop down upon these innocents for seraglio prizes. Perhaps these have the liveried angels about, that are said ever to guard saintly purity.”

“Doubtless; and besides them, with all the practical providence which belongs to the Jew, thou mayst be sure that the groves, not far away, are full of fathers, brothers, lovers.”

“I wish I were a brother to some of them.”

“Then thou’dst be a Jew.”

“I’d forget that in being a lover to the others.”

“Thou wouldst not change thy faith for a woman?”

“Now, I’d swear I would not. If like most men, and in love, I’d swear I would; and then, having gotten my new priestess, in a little while, backslide and drag her with me, or make her heart weep. My comfort in the last estate being my consistency, if not my constancy. What a mad rout it is when religion and love, born twins, cross purposes?”

“That’s a very true, yet bitter speech. I’ll tell the Hebrew maidens to beware.”

“Better tell me to beware, now. It’s the beginning that makes the trouble. No beginning, then no after folly.”

The procession glided past and the pilgrims followed at a distance.

“We are within an arm of dear old Jabbock,” remarked Ichabod, as they came to a river-bank, later.

“Ah, ha! my chartless pilot, does the current whisper its name to thee, in Hebrew? I’d not wonder if it did, since every thing is clannish in this country.—I hope there is no more swimming for us to do.”

“Its tumbling waters are full of voices to me, blending with echoes of things of the past; but one who spoke a thousand times more tenderly than ever spoke murmuring waters, told me its name, knight.”

“Nourahmal? No! rather some one of those pious beauties we passed not long ago. Oh, roguish Ichabod, I remember thou wert away a long time in the morning after our breakfast of peas and grapes. But, dear Ichabod,” continued Sir Charleroy, feigning rebuke, “didst thou so soon forget thy little convert of Jericho? I wonder if thou lifted up thy voice and wept when thou kissed the maid that told thee the river’s name? Come, confess, and I’ll call thee Isaac.”

“Raillery of prime quality, knight; but raillery and ridicule, though keenly pointed, are generally bad arrows for long range.”

“Well, no matter. I’m glad thou knowest the place, if thou dost know it. Who told thee the name of this water?”

“One with a voice to me sweeter, kinder than that of any betrothed lover’s ever can be.”

“Very, very eloquent thou art. Indeed, if we were in Italy, I’d guess ’twas a syren had communed with thee; in France, a Crusader troubadour; in Rhineland, the water sprite, Lurline; but, being in this wondrous country of revelations, apparitions, prophets, angels and the like, I can only as a catechumen, ask thy dulcet informer’s name?”

“How oddly thou dost talk when thou talkest as a double man; half sneering infidel; half Christian preacher.”

“A truce, Ichabod. That may be a home-thrust well aimed, but it’s enough that one of us be bitter. It’s sometimes natural to me, but not to thee.”

“A bee-sting will redden the high priest’s brow.”

“Well, I’ll not sting thee. Who gave the name of the river?”

“Master, one to me alone of all the world an angel, my mother. I was born near here, and the memories of a youth made happy by one all patient, all loving, rises above and survives all changes.”

“My noble friend, forgive my repartee. I’m glad, truly, that we are so lucky as to have this knowledge.”

“Lucky? Then all is not fate; there is some chance, if no Providence?”

“Pardon more; the bee-sting is still on thy brow. Ichabod, I can not help my feelings, which sometimes make me think that only God can tread the hidden, narrow line between stern fate and happy accident. They say the Sybil wrote her prophetic decrees upon leaves and flung them recklessly to the inconstant winds. Just so we’re in decreed courses, swirled by chance gusts.”

“Yet we two are getting on well together.”

“So do chance and fate; the pity is to the waif that falls between them.”

“I wonder how here, in Holy Land, thou canst think of any control but Providence.”

“Wonder? So do I. I’m a bundle of wonderings.”

“Listen to Jabbock.”

“I do, more attentively than Jabbock to me. What of it?”

“Grander rivers are forgotten; why is it so remembered?”

“We’re forgotten, meaner men remembered.”

“This river sings through the centuries of history the song of a fugitive of pale heart, who in sheer desperation, long, long ago, seized a fleeting hope and became a prince, having power to prevail with God.”

“Ah, Jacob, who worked fourteen years to win a woman. It was, I’m sure, the woman that nerved him to attempt greatness. Such a woman! Had she been like our moderns she would have jilted him, or eloped with him, before the end of one of the fourteen years.”

“I’ll not tilt with thy sarcasms. It were much better to remember that he, a pigmy, the night in his soul, as that about him, black as Erebus, grappled with the mighty, unknown, unseen apparition to find he was holding Deity. The mysteries of crossing fates and chances are as open nut-bur compared to that of all weakness prevailing with Omnipotence, my good master, I think.”

“But ever after that joust, Jacob was a cripple!”

“Oh, but remember, as he halted on his thigh the sun rose over Penuel, ‘the place of seeing God,’ by interpretation. He was stronger for his laming!”

“A very ‘Timor-lame,’ this prince of great chances and mean ways.”

“Time and trial repaired Jacob’s spotted soul.”

“There was much room for the mending, I do vow.”

“His weightings bespeak some charity. Think; a weak mother, one designing wife, and plenty of wealth!”

“Well, ’tis true, these were enough to have undone St. Anthony, if the devil had only thought to have tried them all at once upon him!”

“Sir Charleroy swings back to his old bitterness toward women; did he never love one?”

“No, not as a lover. I was never tried except by designing coquetries that nauseated finally.”

“Perhaps, like most solitary men, thou so revered thyself by habit that there was no room for other person in thy heart.”

“I never met one I deemed perfect and available.”

“Better to have loved some one far from perfect than none. If thy heart-fount had been once touched it would have set thy imaginations to weaving halos about the one touching. Thou wouldst have enthroned her by a love that would have transformed both. She would have become in time what she was in love’s young dream; while thou wouldst have grown by the experience to be twice the man thou hadst been—or art.”

“The sun in thy head is settling down into thy heart, Jew.”

“Is that so, Charleroy?”

“Yes, but not to harm; heart sunsets ripen heart fruits; that’s the reason the autumn suns run low; the low suns ripen. But after all, I’m not so very miserable in heart. I’ve loved some women; mother and my Mary——”

“Filial love, religious love! somewhat akin and blessing him that feels their mellow, exalting influences; but, oh, Sir Charleroy, they do not fill completely the heart’s temple. There are places there for the expression of ruddy, glorious lover’s love. The three make up an all-comprehending trinity, and fill the man as Deity the universe. I see religious love in adoration of God’s Fatherhood, mother love in the tender leading of the Spirit, lover’s love in the priceless self-surrender of our Saviour. That made the angels sing, and in the being of each of our race there is room, aye need, of the melody which only the experiencing of this passion in full can produce. In love-mating is a wondrous thrill which can be but faintly voiced even by those who have experienced it.

“There are other passions which ebb with time, or, being well fed, wax gross; not so with this one. Inspired by the potencies of life, which lie at the very core of being, it wells up in rills, rivers and torrents of pleasurable sensations. Out from the heart it goes to the remotest members, only to double on its courses and dash again through the beating heart, heating its flame by its doubling and hasting, making the beatings wilder by its hastings, and then hasting more because of the wilder beatings. Of all emotions love is the most tireless. It increases by giving, grows stronger by action and proclaims the secret of its heavenly birth, its immortality, by the way in which it deepens and ripens with every movement of its life. Aye, more, it proclaims itself the power of the resurrection by the way it transforms the lives it possesses. A man may be a lout, ever so crude in fiber, but this musical flame passing through his being, burns up his dross, making him all brave, courteous, tender, poetic, religious! Yea, religious! If it do not utterly redeem a sinner possessed by it, it will take him nearer to salvation than any other power known on earth, except the Spirit of Grace. It is as the opening of the eyes of the blind man, for it opens the doors of a new sense to the realizing of a world as new as delightful. As the thrummings on the harp-strings someway leave a lasting sonorousness and tenderness in the supporting woods about the lyre, so leaves this passion, through the beatings of every wave of it, wealth. Its devotee by it is inducted into exhaustless new realms and possessions, unalterably secured to him, and at the same time beyond all computation. He ever gathers treasures, as a prince from incoming fleets, and is made affluent beyond all counting. He surpasses all in wealth-getting, and yet is infinitely apart from the littleness of avarice. It is to him the advent of charity’s full-orbed day. It may be fancy in him, but it’s to him very real; the world about, as if having learned his secret, seems to be dressing for the wedding feast, while all things appear to be coming very confidentially to him to whisper the divine mandate, ‘marry and multiply.’ He is trusted, yet trusts; leads, yet follows. He is proud to display, a little, his conquest, but does so with a sort of alert charming selfishness, which gives notice to the world that he alone is to wear the chosen one upon his heart. He realizes the paradox of giving all and receiving all; the mystery of two lives merged into one by an utter surrender, each to each, which leaves both infinitely richer than the sum of all their ownings could make either if possessed by the one apart from the other. Oh, how almost imperiously each demands that the other shall surrender all and then how great the joy each feels in leading the chosen mate to surprises at the munificence and completeness of the giving up of all by the one who just now demanded all. I do not know the woman’s heart, but can readily believe it far surpasses the man’s in its consecration, enjoyment and aspiring. I know the man’s, but my words are ragged in description. I know that this grand passion makes him wondrously weak and wondrously strong. Sometimes these inner feelings come nigh overwhelming him; sometimes they fall upon his life like the musical ebb-waves on resonant shores. I can not word it all, nor is it strange, since I am speaking of a life of heavenly flights, and best expressed by voiceless signs, embraces. In love’s hour the man realizes, as never before, his lordliness and his pride and ambition are fed by a growing conviction that all the world is small beside himself and his; proud as a conqueror of untold wealth, he yields to the tender ties that unrelentingly bind him and crucifies his native roughness that he may be more like, more worthy her he rules and obeys. He is made finer; she stronger. Has she virtues, he appropriates them; at the same time, by the homage implied by his appropriation, makes them to shine more brightly on the brow and heart of his queen. He touches the fires on the altar she has erected within herself to love alone, and the altar-fires blaze until her whole being is illuminated as a temple on fête days. She puts on his best parts, and then he revels in delight as he beholds his virtues refined and so beautifully framed. There are times when, like a mighty anthem, his passion passes over and through him. Then is he nigh to madness, being in the mood to slay himself, or another doing aught to check the rapture of the mighty swellings of the music that pours over every nerve from head to heart, to limb. Then it is he embraces and kisses and embraces again; as an inspired artist of music, exhausting himself to prolong this joy, almost materialized. Indeed, I saw one who said ‘this is tangible music. I feel it; taste it; see it!’ It seems to thicken the air until I rise unwinged, and yet in a flight that seems to me as free and brilliant as that of the golden oriole’s. If the enchanted enchanter be pure and true, she leads her captive king, made tender and yet more manly by his captivity, surely upward from tumultuous passion’s sway to the ambrosial table-lands of higher affection where both may reign tenderly, bravely, hopefully, forever. I tell thee, knight, the finest spectacle on earth is a man in his prime, creation’s lord at his best, sincerely, completely in love with a queenly woman. Next after getting God into a man’s heart, the greatest blessing is the getting of a woman of genuine parts therein.”

“Oh, child of the sunny palm land, thou hast imbibed wondrous eloquence. But thou sayest truly. Now, for the women that are so to queen us men. No woman that I ever knew of could so intoxicate, transform and translate me.”

“One like Eve, the gift of God?”

“The first woman, like the first man, was pure without virtue, until tried; then she fell. I think of her chiefly as being a splendid animal, yet, as Adam was not left for man’s example, neither was she. I still think Eve passed by in history to be only what she was full proof that love which rises no higher than to give all to and for that which was like the fruit of the tempting tree, good for food and pleasant to the eyes, is not like the love that at last hung on the tree of Calvary. Oh, child of Abraham, I hear the ‘voice of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,’ saying to a world of flitting, false ideals, and those yearning for pilots and patterns, ‘Where art thou?’ I don’t know, for one, exactly where I am, but I’m going forward and upward someway.”

“Sir Charleroy thou dost dazzle me by thy correspondences and insights, if I do thee by my pictures. We are quits.”

“But we’ll not quit. This pilgrim idleness has value. I never knew what I believed until, thus flung out of life’s hurly burly, I had little company but my thoughts. There was method of reason in God’s taking His prophets to lone places, to fit them for understanding the rapturing visions with which He filled them.”

“’Tis so, true; but what thinks the knight of Esther, the beautiful Queen? She’s the idol and ideal in Israel in all times and places.”

“Wondrous woman! A girl, petted, ill-trained, from poverty suddenly exalted, surrounded by the skilled intriguants of court, a jealous, exacting, conceited, harem-demoralized old king for a spouse, she was then burdened with the salvation of a nation. I’ve so pitied her that I’ve forgotten to admire how well she did in her trying lot.”

“Can the world ever have a finer figure or presentment of all that is womanly? I do not challenge thy Mary, but may I not put the two side by side?”

“Israel has two great women in their way. The one, Esther, exemplifying all sweetness and the mild strength of a suddenly developed woman, doing grandly in one emergency when great peril and great love aroused her from only being an entrancing, petted beauty, to be the heroine of an hour. But she was not tried by the searching test of a lifetime. She never meets the needs of mothers seeking an ideal. Rizpah, your other grand woman, was the mother, even the mother of sorrows, of the Old Testament. It takes these two to make an ideal, and yet the pattern is incomplete. God walks yet in the garden where men live, with only these two before them, and ever and anon they hear the unanswerable, ‘Where art thou?’”

“Why, my mentor, master, thou hast touched our Scriptures with the rod that budded; the whole opens to me as if for the first time. Methinks, if I were permitted to lay hands now upon one of our sacred volumes, I’d be fairly overcome by the light that would break out on me from within it.”

“‘The entrance of the word giveth light,’ Ichabod.”

“I’m moved, master, along lines I can not turn from, to the one woman of all, Mary. She is thy ideal queen of hearts?”

“I’m a pilgrim and follow her, seeing none better.”

“Then thou wouldst be willing to wed such as Mary?”

“Hold! This is sacrilegious! I’ll not think of Mary in any such comparison. Leave my patron saint upon her high pedestal. I save her for my soul’s health, as every man should save some noble woman, for an inner enshrining, to be all that woman may be at her best, his beloved, his inspirer, and yet touching no spring of his life save such as responds to things of moral grandeur.”

“Ah, master, I’ve not yet been enamored fully of this woman. I feel a stranger to her, but I feel the meaning of the finer things thou hast just spoken. I have the need of which thou dost speak, and my life, like a babe, often now goes out crying, ‘Mother, mother.’ As we lay, yesterday night, beneath the quiet firmament, I gazed up and asked a sign of God in prayer. It was a baby cry I know, but I saw one star that staid and staid above me. It seemed to be warmed with reddish tintings, and I thought that its glitterings were proof that it was taking part in some anthem of the morning stars. Then I dreamed that my mother was in the star all luminous, holy, happy, looking down in constant guardianship of her outcast boy! Oh, can a child ever be outcast utterly to mother? Can it be that she, who so loved me and so loved God, can hate me now, loving her and loving God as I do? God knows my heart! Will he not tell her all? Her constant mandate to me was, ‘keep a loyal heart, an undefiled conscience.’ I’ve tried to do both, but then her soul loathed apostacy. Does she loathe me for leaving Israel’s fold? My heart all torn, cries to-day, ‘Mother, mother!’ I’m sure she can not hate me. To-morrow I hope I shall pray at her grave.”

Then the vehement Israelite fell on the ground in an ecstasy, utterly unconscious of his companion, and, kissing the earth as if already he was by that parent’s resting place, wildly called, “Mother! my mamma! oh, I’m so lonely, so unhappy! Let me come! God, God, let me go to mother! Mother, I did it as thou saidst. I’m no leper. I’m not a heretic! I love thee. I love God. I’ve kept pure. I’ve trusted God’s care in all my trouble. Mamma, my mamma, let Ichabod embrace thee!” Exhausted and quivering he there lay. The knight was silent. It was holy ground, and the whole thicket about seemed to be glowing with the fire that burns without consuming.

The travelers were encamped again under the sky, and it was now night. A shooting star sped through the constellation of Orion and fell down toward the Dead Sea.

“An omen, Jew.”

“Explain, brother knight.”

“Life; bright, short, ending in gloom.”

“Look at the fixed stars.”

“They preach fate.”

“Perhaps, but they have the majority. Few fall; I think, too, Someone holds them.”

“Thy hopefulness colors thy faith.”

“Thy murmurings run toward final madness, knight; the Rabbis, good men, so taught me.”

“If one star falls may not all? If Providence hold them, why does one escape?”

“Thou hast heard that the giant Orion having lost his eyes, afterward regained his sight by turning his sockets toward the rising sun; that meteor we saw shot through the constellation Orion. Look up.”

“A happy simile and pungent thrust, Jew.”

“He that sent the lightnings to show us our way out of dread Jericho, most likely now commissioned some angel to swing a meteor across the sky as a torch or beacon for our guidance. The trail of flame teaches me that God is writing His royal signature on some great message.”

“This world is too vast and too thronged with insignificants, such as we, for such especial carings on God’s part. There are too many kings, too many shepherds, too many follies for Him to constantly watch any one or two.”

“Backward, forward; now good, now bad. What a charging, changing knight! Pray God to get thee right and then fix thee.”

Their converse was interrupted by a prolonged trumpet blast, echoing from hill to hill. Sir Charleroy sprang to his feet and clasping his sword hilt, cried eagerly, “We’re ambuscaded!”

“No, by the glory of God, ’twas the temple call! How grand it sounds away in this wilderness!”

“No, no, Jew, I’ve heard that call; this one had six responses.”

“’Twas echo’s magic! Didst thou not notice how the sound spread as it traveled in a sort of sheet of melody? Then it rose and fell from low hill to high. One blast; seven responses. Nature proclaiming against fate and chance; the covenant number.”

“I’m not so confident that it’s a miracle; what if it were some Mamelukes or Druses, planning one of their pious immolations of heretics with us for the victims?”

“Nay, brother, It’s ‘Purim’; that feast is now due, and always begins at early starlight. I know it. Come, I’ll put it to the proof.”

“Hold; poets are more rash than knights in a charge, but not so skillful in retreat! Whither wouldst thou?”

“I’ll spy out the trumpeters and report.”

“Not alone. I’ll go, too. This camp will care for itself if they beyond be friends; if enemies, why then, without consulting us, they will care for all we have. But this,” said the knight, toying with his sword, “was blessed by a priest to preach to infidels.”

CHAPTER XI.
THE FEAST OF PURIM.

Stealthily Ichabod, followed by Sir Charleroy, approached the place from which the trumpet call had sounded. The foliage was dense, the necessary way somewhat winding, and these circumstances, together with the fact that it was expedient to move with great caution, made the progress of the explorers very slow. The last ray of day had faded, sung away by the evening bird and insect chorusers, whose concert strains, like the vanishing notes of æolian harps swept by dying breezes, were now blending, without a line to mark the place of transition, into the lull of the night. Nature’s lullaby to tired, drowsy life. It was a witching hour in the woods, and the scene that lay just beyond the pilgrims in an opening by Jabbock was an enchantment. The river, reflecting the moon rays and the lights of torches borne by many intermingling feasters, flowed silently along like a stream of mingled silver and fire, while tree and shrub along its sides, as green as green could be, bore as fruits lights of many colors. In the opening, surrounded by beacons, banners and the lamp-bearing trees, the beauty as well as the center of all was a magnificent patriarchal tent, made of costly materials. About the pavilion were mounds of earth, elevated upon high tripods, seven in all, in symbols of the seven temple candle-sticks. On each mound there blazed a fire fed by resinous faggots, and the lights of the fires falling upon the folds of the tent, caught up here and there by bands of blue and gold, made the whole glisten like jeweled silk.

“Hallelujah,” with suppressed joy, exclaimed Ichabod, “the tabernacle of God with men!”

“Hush, rash man, and watch!” rebukingly replied Sir Charleroy.

“Watch? Why, my soul is in my eyes. I’m as one famished for years smelling a feast!”

As they looked on the beautiful scene, they perceived that the front of the pavilion was lifted up and stretched forward as a canopy over an altar, richly decorated with twined olive branches and blood-red blossoms. A little way off, and yet partly encircling the altar, were little walnut trees, each tree having on its branches glistening lamps, half hidden by wreaths of hollyhocks and asters.

The moon sank behind the hills; the night darkened, but the fires and lamps burned still more brightly.

“It’s like fairy-land, Jew,” after little, spake Sir Charleroy.

“More beautiful, knight. Wait and see.”

There was a burst of music, instantly followed by the entrance of youths and old men; some singing, others vigorously playing ugabs, reed-flutes, and tambourines. Somewhere near, though unseen by the watchers, were happy women; they recognized their voices in refrains, choruses, and merry peals of laughter.

“Well, this is not warlike, but what is it, Jew?” queried Sir Charleroy.

“Wait a little.”

There came a commanding trumpet blast. Its tones died away in the melody-waves of a score of viols, managed by unperceived musicians. Then silence; presently the huge blue curtain that hung across the tent, just back of the outstretching front canopy, parted, and there emerged an aged man of stately form, wearing an Aaronic mitre and priestly robes; rich as well as ample. He paused before the altar a moment, as if in prayer, and then suddenly the air far and wide quivered with a sound like a cyclone hail. There were also cornet blasts mingling therewith.

“Heavens, Jew, explain!”

“Selah! These the drums and waking clappers; the signal to be given. Now for ‘Purim’ in earnest.”

The groves about seemed to be alive and moving, for from every direction toward the center gathered men and boys, bearing palm branches and torches; these, as they advanced, moved with speeded pace, presently they were in a perfect maze, the music of every kind growing louder and louder, then seeming to die away.

“They’re carrying the edicts of Ahasuerus to the Jews to defend themselves, master.”

“A fine play, Jew!”

Now the blue curtain parted again, and from the pavilion emerged another stately form, in all except that he lacked priestly robing, the very counterpart of the aged man first at the altar.

“Glory to Shaddah! again I see the holy brothers, Harrimai,” cried Ichabod.

The second patriarch motioned silence; all in the assembly bent their heads in breathless attention and the patriarch spoke: “Brethren of Israel, hearken and give God all the glory who this hour permits us, His chosen people, to celebrate in peace, with joy, our glad Purim feast. This day, Jehovah granted me the most wholesome comfort of hearing from a pashaw of our scourge that the last of the armies of the Moslem, beaten by want and internal discord, were melting out of our land like fog banks before the rising sun. He certified to me for a handful of barley (for which he had come to stand in need) that those hated cross-bearing invaders, the knights, were gone, never to return. So God has worked in our behalf as in the days of Esther, setting our enemies to destroying one another and then compassing the slinging out of His holy places, the abominable remnants. So may His thunders, as of old, forever beat on the heads of all who lift themselves against our Israel!”

There was a murmur of applause; first like the buzz of the noonday insects of the groves, then like a careering hurricane. The applause swelled up, drowning all sounds, causing the fires to flicker and flame, making the pavilion’s sides sway and wave as if all were feeling the joy present. The musical instruments quickly now caught up the strain of the cheery voices, and all was in a perfect whirl of excitement with one thought, ‘praise.’ It was free and fluent, because it came from hearts practiced in the ultimate swings from joy to sorrow and then from sorrow to joy. For half an hour nearly, the rhapsody continued, nor did it temperate until sheer exhaustion fell on the revelers.

Presently, after an interval of comparative quiet, there came a flourish of cornets and a roar of the rattling clappers. It was a signal followed by the uplifting of the old priest’s hands as if in benediction. All heads were bowed; some of the congregation knelt, and then he spoke in sonorous, yet soothing voice, words of benediction: “Blessed art thou, Oh Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hath wrought all miracles for our fathers and also for us, at this time.”

Then the people stood up, and the second patriarch, advancing to the front of the altar, began reading from the holy Kethubim of the Jews, the story of the Purim. At each mention of Esther’s name the congregation murmured “how beautiful is goodness;” at each mention of Haman’s name all in the congregation stamped their feet, also making gurgling noises with their throats, to imitate the false prince’s strangling; the whole being made more hideous by the shriek of discordant cornet notes and the springing of rattles.

The foregoing scene suddenly changed; a procession of maidens, in graceful evolutions, emerging from the surrounding groves, presenting a living picture, really entrancing. They were all richly robed in garments of graceful flow, caught round their waists by flowered girdles. Some wore sashes of jassamine, while others were crowned with lilies or asters or violets. Their arms and ankles were clad only with circlets from which pendant bells gave forth music at every motion. Seven of the foremost maidens bore lamps; behind each of these followed one with a harp; behind each harper two with tambourines and cymbals. Seven times this maiden train, with a step in time, half march, half dance, waltzed around the canopied altar. Then were given seven cornet blasts, the procession leaders waving their lamps with each blast, after which there was perfect silence. Now the old priest moved forward a little toward the procession; the congregation meanwhile gathering in a semi-circle, just outside of all, and he addressed the assembly: “Brethren and children, I would speak to you a little of the ‘Virtuous Woman.’ Daughters of Israel, hearts of homes to be, hopes of the nation looking for a Deliverer and deliverers yet to be born; hear me! Israel knows no queen of all womanly perfections like unto Esther, the beautiful. Evermore take her for your meditation by day and your dreams by night. Then shall you all realize to yourselves, your fathers, brothers, husbands, all that the holy Proverbs of our Kethubim declares of the true woman. Then the priest taking the parchment, solemnly and in mellow tones, read the last chapter of the book, ‘the birth-day chapter,’ a verse prophetic for every day of the longest month, as the Jews believe.”

When the reader ceased, the encampment was dim, many of the lights having been quenched. Then the congregation joined in chanting a soft-aired Jewish hymn.

“The devotions are ended; now for the sports;” so spoke Ichabod; the first words spoken between him and the knight during their observation of the last part of the proceedings before the pavilion. He had scarcely made the announcement when the second patriarch appeared, dressed in somber black, leading by the hand a maiden of wondrous beauty, wearing also black, in heavy trails; on her head a golden crown. As they appeared the applause as at first burst forth, but now blended with distinguishable cries of “Hail Esther!” “Hail Mordecai!”

“It’s the play, knight. Watch that pair.”

“No fear, Jew, such a wondrous beauty! Had I been Haman and she Esther, I never could have crossed her. Heavens, Jew, it is well said the people of promise produce the most beautiful women of earth. That’s why Deity elected one of them, through whom to be incarnate, I think.”

“I think I heard the knight say, awhile ago, that the revolution of all religions was to come when men’s admiration for women rose far above rapture over outward form. Is it not so?”

“Ah, it’s thy remembering and my forgetting that keeps us crossing each other! But no matter; am I looking at an angel or not?”

“That’s the priest’s only daughter; his idol, ay, the idol of every youth in all these parts of Israel. No nation can be dead while it produces such flowers.”

Suddenly the camp blazed with re-illumination, and then began a carnival. Games and dancers were everywhere. Some, evidently men, were dressed as women, and others, evidently women, were garbed as men. For one season, Purim, the command against the interchange of garments between the sexes, was suspended. Each reveler carried a little box. If he asked a favor or a question, the reply was a challenge to try lots. Partners were so chosen, tasks given and predictions made. Laughter was everywhere, and wine was flowing.

“Ichabod, I haven’t tasted wine since Acre! Why dost thou not introduce me yonder?”

“Wait; they will all be mellow, soon. They may be, too, for it’s a law that a Jew is not deemed drunk at ‘Purim’ so long as he can discern between a blessing for Mordecai and a curse for Haman.”

“Heavens! how they do imbibe.”

“It’s natural for doves to twitter after a thunder storm. They remember the past troubles.”

“Ay; but I fear they will consume all the beverage before we are with them. We have had plenty of trouble; now take me in to twitter with those doves.”

Ichabod started, as if to lead the way, and then drew back and moaned, “no, no; it cannot be. I’m forever anathema here, to them! I could bear their hate, not their contempt. They may call me renegade, but never spaniel nor hypocrite! If I appeared among them they would soon know, if they do not already, that Ichabod is changed. Then they’d sneer and tell me that I tried to play double, or thinking my people’s faith not good enough for me, I yet hungered for their feasts. No, no; it must not be! To-morrow, I hope to pray at my mother’s grave. I’d choke then if I had to remember I’d done aught that she, living, would have thought mean.”

“Now, I’ll not persuade thee, Jew, but go alone.”

“That’s reckless! thou mayst regret it. They may become riotous, being half drunk, and beat thee as a Haman. No, stay away.”

“No dissuasion, Jew, but just change garments. It’s the fashion to-night.” The Jew complied, remarking as he did:

“Will the knight wear this leather thong?”

“Heavens! no, nor the brand on thy neck.”

“Christian knights commanded me to wear one, and burned into my flesh the other years ago; they deemed it necessary to mark all Jews for hatred.”

“Dear Ichabod, I never counseled branding any man!”

“I believe it. I have forgotten all bitterness about these marks and have borne them as my cross.

“But, Sir Charleroy, don’t wear thy cross in their sight!”

“For once, I’ll cover it.” So saying he hid the emblem.

The comrades parted, and Sir Charleroy quickly found himself by the maiden who personated Esther. He approached unnoticed until he pleasantly said: “Queen of Shushan, a man out there behind a clump of Sharon roses, played me a game of lots. I lost the game, and he has put it on me to come to the Queen to fix the forfeit I shall pay.” The maiden turned her head haughtily and examined the speaker from head to foot with repelling gaze. It was her way of freezing off the amorous swains who constantly aimed to pay her court. But when her eyes met those of the self-possessed stranger, she gave a little start. Perhaps she caught sight, by some omen, of her fate; perhaps she felt the magnetism of the strong will which for the first time presented itself. In any event, it was the first time she had ever been alone, face to face, with such as he; a stalwart man, all reverential, yet all self-possessed. They were well matched, and they both felt it, intuitively, instantly.

“Who art thou?”

“A child of God.”

“Of Israel?”

“By faith, most holy of Abraham’s seed,” responded Sir Charleroy.

“Thy speech bewrayeth thee as lacking our shibboleth.”

“I’ve been a life long wanderer. Thou wouldst not reject one whom involuntary exile had robbed of tokens?”

“But I can not be free with an uncertified stranger. I’m afraid I err in tarrying here ’till now.”

“Hospitality is the boast of pious Hebrews who obey Him that ‘loveth the stranger in giving him food and raiment.’ Thou hast the Great Father’s law: ‘Love ye therefore the stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ Some have by hospitality unawares entertained angels, thou knowst.”

“I’d like to entertain an angel; are they ever so human-like as thou?” she smiled.

“Had I known the Esther of to-night long enough to convince her that my freedom was sincere, I’d say that she was a fine example of the union of the angelic in the human.”

The maiden laughed. The incense was agreeable, and the freedom of this feast-time justified her acceptance of this novel, bold flattery. Your proud, daring woman is very vulnerable to such assaults. The world often wonders why such women so often, after all, surrender; but that’s because the world does not appreciate the dexterity in such jousts of such skilled men of the world as Sir Charleroy; or how grateful to self-admiring beauties the admiration of superior intellects is.

“Well, will thou give me thy name?”

“Certainly. For to-night, Ahasuerus?”

“A presumptious jest, sir.”

“No, for I admire and respect Esther, that’s here.”

“And then?”

“I plead for help; gain me admittance to the festivities, and escape from inquiry further, as to my identity.”

“And afterward, be called by my people brazen by thee, a little fool!”

“Art thou driven from right, the claim of hospitality, by fear of a lie?”

“What if thou wert a Bedouin spy, or a hated cross follower?”

“Thou art a noble hearted maiden.”

“Ah, who told thee so?”

“Thy face.”

“What is that to thee, if true?” she blushed a little.

“Could’st thou drive from thy bosom a fleeing kid, there seeking refuge from pursuing lions?”

“I do not know ’till tried. Thou art at any rate no kid; there is no lion. If thou desirest refuge, see the path of departure is the one by which thou cam’st hither.”

“Well, then, farewell.”

The knight made as if he would go, but he knew he would not. The motion gave him excuse for looking sad, and he knew that next to a handsome face a sad one most easily conquers a woman.

“Tarry a moment ’till I think. Can I trust thee?” she was hesitating.

“I’ve trusted thee, and that’s ever the best proof of fidelity.” Women like to think they are especially trusted.

“Well——but, see, my father comes; there’s no time for argument; let me speak!”

As the aged priest drew near, Esther saluted him, and said, “Father, let me take this Galileean stranger to the youths and their games? He claims our hospitality.”

The priest, wont to be on the alert, was disarmed by the magic word hospitality; then, too, for a long time before, having been wifeless, he had been wont to put his daughter forward, according large confidence to her; hence his reply:

“If thou knowest him, Rizpah.”

“I do.”

“Welcome, brother, what is thy name?” said Harrimai.

Rizpah, his daughter, quickly made reply, “Ahasuerus, and I’ve laughed at the coincidence until he has been ashamed to repeat it.”

“’Tis strange, surely, and not like a Jewish one. I must examine the family rolls to-morrow. Peace be unto thee, son,” and the old man turned toward his pavilion. Esther plucked a lily from her crown and handed it to Sir Charleroy saying: “Here, king, a token.”

“Of what?”

“Shushan; in our tongue, the name of the flower signifies ‘surrender.’”

“They say, Esther, that Judith wore a crown of lilies when she assassinated Holophernes. Is there any danger to me impending?”

“Thou hast a lily. It is said to ward off enchantments, too.”

“I am enchanted. I do not want to awaken. In Egypt they call this the lotus, flower of unrestrained pleasure.”

“For now then, we’ll call it lotus.”

“All gods, even Osiris, bless thee, Esther.”

So the twain were charmed comrades, till watch fires were dim and the palm shadows were creeping in, like funeral attendants, to carry away the spirit of the dying revel. Here and there was heard anon the voices commending this one and that to pleasant slumbers. The stars were withdrawing behind dawn’s feathery curtains, and over all, at intervals, was heard the voice of the chanticleer, triumphantly proclaiming the coming day.

Charleroy and Rizpah were left alone with each other at the end of the last game.

The maiden gave a coy, furtive glance and tardily drew away from the knight. The language of the drawing-room of the day, is as old as the centuries, and that maid of the wilderness used it as finely as a queen, to say without words, “it’s time we part; please say so first, nor leave to me, the hostess, the first suggestion of a wish to have thee go——”

Still the knight spake not.

He was delighted and averse to breaking the first pleasure spell of years.

The Jewish maiden, with fine courtesy, renewed the subject: “King, methinks, thou art anxious to exchange the grove for the palace.”

“I can never think of weariness when restful Esther is nigh.”

“But thy life is precious to thy subjects; care for it, and go with freshness to to-morrow’s cares of state.”

“Ah, queen, I too keenly realize that with thy departure my kingdom fades to nothingness.”