Ben Hur, Lew Wallace [top 10 novels txt] 📗

be mountains, and the sky, its shadowy depths brilliant with stars. The city was still. Only the winds stirred.

“Amrah tells me something has happened to you,” she said, caressing his cheek. “When my Judah was a child, I allowed small things to trouble him, but he is now a man. He must not forget”⁠—her voice became very soft⁠—“that one day he is to be my hero.”

She spoke in the language almost lost in the land, but which a few⁠—and they were always as rich in blood as in possessions⁠—cherished in its purity, that they might be more certainly distinguished from Gentile peoples⁠—the language in which the loved Rebekah and Rachel sang to Benjamin.

The words appeared to set him thinking anew; after a while, however, he caught the hand with which she fanned him, and said, “Today, O my mother, I have been made to think of many things that never had place in my mind before. Tell me, first, what am I to be?”

“Have I not told you? You are to be my hero.”

He could not see her face, yet he knew she was in play. He became more serious.

“You are very good, very kind, O my mother. No one will ever love me as you do.”

He kissed the hand over and over again.

“I think I understand why you would have me put off the question,” he continued. “Thus far my life has belonged to you. How gentle, how sweet your control has been! I wish it could last forever. But that may not be. It is the Lord’s will that I shall one day become owner of myself⁠—a day of separation, and therefore a dreadful day to you. Let us be brave and serious. I will be your hero, but you must put me in the way. You know the law⁠—every son of Israel must have some occupation. I am not exempt, and ask now, shall I tend the herds? or till the soil? or drive the saw? or be a clerk or lawyer? What shall I be? Dear, good mother, help me to an answer.”

“Gamaliel has been lecturing today,” she said, thoughtfully.

“If so, I did not hear him.”

“Then you have been walking with Simeon, who, they tell me, inherits the genius of his family.”

“No, I have not seen him. I have been up on the Marketplace, not to the Temple. I visited the young Messala.”

A certain change in his voice attracted the mother’s attention. A presentiment quickened the beating of her heart; the fan became motionless again.

“The Messala!” she said. “What could he say to so trouble you?”

“He is very much changed.”

“You mean he has come back a Roman.”

“Yes.”

“Roman!” she continued, half to herself. “To all the world the word means master. How long has he been away?”

“Five years.”

She raised her head, and looked off into the night.

“The airs of the Via Sacra are well enough in the streets of the Egyptian and in Babylon; but in Jerusalem⁠—our Jerusalem⁠—the covenant abides.”

And, full of the thought, she settled back into her easy place. He was first to speak.

“What Messala said, my mother, was sharp enough in itself; but, taken with the manner, some of the sayings were intolerable.”

“I think I understand you. Rome, her poets, orators, senators, courtiers, are mad with affectation of what they call satire.”

“I suppose all great peoples are proud,” he went on, scarcely noticing the interruption; “but the pride of that people is unlike all others; in these latter days it is so grown the gods barely escape it.”

“The gods escape!” said the mother, quickly. “More than one Roman has accepted worship as his divine right.”

“Well, Messala always had his share of the disagreeable quality. When he was a child, I have seen him mock strangers whom even Herod condescended to receive with honors; yet he always spared Judea. For the first time, in conversation with me today, he trifled with our customs and God. As you would have had me do, I parted with him finally. And now, O my dear mother, I would know with more certainty if there be just ground for the Roman’s contempt. In what am I his inferior? Is ours a lower order of people? Why should I, even in Caesar’s presence; feel the shrinking of a slave? Tell me especially why, if I have the soul, and so choose, I may not hunt the honors of the world in all its fields? Why may not I take sword and indulge the passion of war? As a poet, why may not I sing of all themes? I can be a worker in metals, a keeper of flocks, a merchant, why not an artist like the Greek? Tell me, O my mother⁠—and this is the sum of my trouble⁠—why may not a son of Israel do all a Roman may?”

The reader will refer these questions back to the conversation in the Marketplace; the mother, listening with all her faculties awake, from something which would have been lost upon one less interested in him⁠—from the connections of the subject, the pointing of the questions, possibly his accent and tone⁠—was not less swift in making the same reference. She sat up, and in a voice quick and sharp as his own, replied, “I see, I see! From association Messala, in boyhood, was almost a Jew; had he remained here, he might have become a proselyte, so much do we all borrow from the influences that ripen our lives; but the years in Rome have been too much for him. I do not wonder at the change; yet”⁠—her voice fell⁠—“he might have dealt tenderly at least with you. It is a hard, cruel nature which in youth can forget its first loves.”

Her hand dropped lightly upon his forehead, and the fingers caught in his hair and lingered there lovingly, while her eyes sought the highest stars in view. Her pride responded to his, not merely in echo, but in the unison of perfect sympathy. She would answer him; at the same time, not