Ben-Hur

by Wallace, Lew

  Down the gorge and over the bridge at the bottom of it. There was a great clatter on the floor as the crowd, now a straggling rabble, passed over beating and pounding with their clubs and staves. A little farther, and they turned off to the left in the direction of an olive orchard enclosed by a stone wall in view from the road. Ben-Hur knew there was nothing in the place but old gnarled trees, the grass, and a trough hewn out of a rock for the treading of oil after the fashion of the country. While, yet more wonder-struck, he was thinking what could bring such a company at such an hour to a quarter so lonesome, they were all brought to a standstill. Voices called out excitedly in front; a chill sensation ran from man to man; there was a rapid falling-back, and a blind stumbling over each other. The soldiers alone kept their order.

  It took Ben-Hur but a moment to disengage himself from the mob and run forward. There he found a gateway without a gate admitting to the orchard, and he halted to take in the scene.

  A man in white clothes, and bareheaded, was standing outside the entrance, his hands crossed before him—a slender, stooping figure, with long hair and thin face—in an attitude of resignation and waiting.

  It was the Nazarene!

  Behind him, next the gateway, were the disciples in a group; they were excited, but no man was ever calmer than he. The torchlight beat redly upon him, giving his hair a tint ruddier than was natural to it; yet the expression of the countenance was as usual all gentleness and pity.

  Opposite this most unmartial figure stood the rabble, gaping, silent, awed, cowering—ready at a sign of anger from him to break and run. And from him to them—then at Judas, conspicuous in their midst—Ben-Hur looked—one quick glance, and the object of the visit lay open to his understanding. Here was the betrayer, there the betrayed; and these with clubs and staves, and the legionaries, were brought to take him.

  A man may not always tell what he will do until the trial is upon him. This was the emergency for which Ben-Hur had been for years preparing. The man to whose security he had devoted himself, and upon whose life he had been building so largely, was in personal peril; yet he stood still. Such contradictions are there in human nature! To say truth, O reader, he was not entirely recovered from the picture of the Christ before the Gate Beautiful as it had been given by the Egyptian; and, besides that, the very calmness with which the mysterious person confronted the mob held him in restraint by suggesting the possession of a power in reserve more than sufficient for the peril. Peace and good-will, and love and non-resistance, had been the burden of the Nazarene’s teaching; would he put his preaching into practice? He was master of life; he could restore it when lost; he could take it at pleasure. What use would he make of the power now? Defend himself? And how? A word—a breath—a thought were sufficient. That there would be some signal exhibition of astonishing force beyond the natural Ben-Hur believed, and in that faith waited. And in all this he was still measuring the Nazarene by himself—by the human standard.

  Presently the clear voice of the Christ arose.

  “Whom seek ye?”

  “Jesus of Nazareth,” the priest replied.

  “I am he.”

  At these simplest of words, spoken without passion or alarm, the assailants fell back several steps, the timid among them cowering to the ground; and they might have let him alone and gone away had not Judas walked over to him.

  “Hail, master!”

  With this friendly speech, he kissed him.

  “Judas,” said the Nazarene, mildly, “betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss? Wherefore art thou come?”

  Receiving no reply, the Master spoke to the crowd again.

  “Whom seek ye?”

  “Jesus of Nazareth.”

  “I have told you that I am he. If, therefore, you seek me, let these go their way.”

  At these words of entreaty the rabbis advanced upon him; and, seeing their intent, some of the disciples for whom he interceded drew nearer; one of them cut off a man’s ear, but without saving the Master from being taken. And yet Ben-Hur stood still! Nay, while the officers were making ready with their ropes the Nazarene was doing his greatest charity—not the greatest in deed, but the very greatest in illustration of his forbearance, so far surpassing that of men.

  “Suffer ye thus far,” he said to the wounded man, and healed him with a touch.

  Both friends and enemies were confounded—one side that he could do such a thing, the other that he would do it under the circumstances.

  “Surely he will not allow them to bind him!”

  Thus thought Ben-Hur.

  “Put up thy sword into the sheath; the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” From the offending follower, the Nazarene turned to his captors. “Are you come out as against a thief, with swords and staves to take me? I was daily with you in the Temple, and you took me not; but this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”

  The posse plucked up courage and closed about him; and when Ben-Hur looked for the faithful they were gone—not one of them remained.

  The crowd about the deserted man seemed very busy, with tongue, hand, and foot. Over their heads, between the torch-sticks, through the smoke, sometimes in openings between the restless men, Ben-Hur caught momentary glimpses of the prisoner. Never had anything struck him as so piteous, so unfriended, so forsaken! Yet, he thought, the man could have defended himself—he could have slain his enemies with a breath, but he would not. What was the cup his father had given him to drink? And who was the father to be so obeyed? Mystery upon mystery—not one, but many.

  Directly the mob started in return to the city, the soldiers in the lead. Ben-Hur became anxious; he was not satisfied with himself. Where the torches were in the midst of the rabble he knew the Nazarene was to be found. Suddenly he resolved to see him again. He would ask him one question.

  Taking off his longer outer garment and the handkerchief from his head, he threw them upon the orchard wall, and started after the posse, which he boldly joined. Through the stragglers he made way, and by littles at length reached the man who carried the ends of the rope with which the prisoner was bound.

  The Nazarene was walking slowly, his head down, his hands bound behind him; the hair fell thickly over his face, and he stooped more than usual; apparently he was oblivious to all going on around him. In advance a few steps were priests and elders talking and occasionally looking back. When, at length, they were all near the bridge in the gorge, Ben-Hur took the rope from the servant who had it, and stepped past him.

  “Master, master!” he said, hurriedly, speaking close to the Nazarene’s ear. “Dost thou hear, master? A word—one word. Tell me—”

  The fellow from whom he had taken the rope now claimed it.

  “Tell me,” Ben-Hur continued, “goest thou with these of thine own accord?”

  The people were come up now, and in his own ears asking angrily, “Who art thou, man?”

  “O master,” Ben-Hur made haste to say, his voice sharp with anxiety, “I am thy friend and lover. Tell me, I pray thee, if I bring rescue, wilt thou accept it?”

  The Nazarene never so much as looked up or allowed the slightest sign of recognition; yet the something which when we are suffering is always telling it to such as look at us, though they be strangers, failed not now. “Let him alone,” it seemed to say; “he has been abandoned by his friends; the world has denied him; in bitterness of spirit, he has taken farewell of men; he is going he knows not where, and he cares not. Let him alone.”

  And to that Ben-Hur was now driven. A dozen hands were upon him, and from all sides there was shouting, “He is one of them. Bring him along; club him—kill him!”

  With a gust of passion which gave him many times his ordinary force, Ben-Hur raised himself, turned once about with his arms outstretched, shook the hands off, and rushed through the circle which was fast hemming him in. The hands snatching at him as he passed tore his garments from his back, so he ran off the road naked; and the gorge, in keeping of the friendl
y darkness, darker there than elsewhere, received him safe.

  Reclaiming his handkerchief and outer garments from the orchard wall, he followed back to the city gate; thence he went to the khan, and on the good horse rode to the tents of his people out by the Tombs of the Kings.

  As he rode, he promised himself to see the Nazarene on the morrow—promised it, not knowing that the unfriended man was taken straightway to the house of Hannas to be tried that night.

  The heart the young man carried to his couch beat so heavily he could not sleep; for now clearly his renewed Judean kingdom resolved itself into what it was—only a dream. It is bad enough to see our castles overthrown one after another with an interval between in which to recover from the shock, or at least let the echoes of the fall die away; but when they go altogether—go as ships sink, as houses tumble in earthquakes—the spirits which endure it calmly are made of stuffs sterner than common, and Ben-Hur’s was not of them. Through vistas in the future, he began to catch glimpses of a life serenely beautiful, with a home instead of a palace of state, and Esther its mistress. Again and again through the leaden-footed hours of the night he saw the villa by Misenum, and with his little countrywoman strolled through the garden, and rested in the panelled atrium; overhead the Neapolitan sky, at their feet the sunniest of sun-lands and the bluest of bays.

  In plainest speech, he was entering upon a crisis with which to-morrow and the Nazarene will have everything to do.

  CHAPTER IX

  NEXT morning, about the second hour, two men rode full speed to the doors of Ben-Hur’s tents, and, dismounting, asked to see him. He was not yet risen, but gave directions for their admission.

  “Peace to you, brethren,” he said, for they were of his Galileans, and trusted officers. “Will you be seated?”

  “Nay,” the senior replied bluntly, “to sit and be at ease is to let the Nazarene die. Rise, son of Judah, and go with us. The judgment has been given. The tree of the cross is already at Golgotha.”

  Ben-Hur stared at them.

  “The cross!” was all he could for the moment say.

  “They took him last night, and tried him,” the man continued. “At dawn they led him before Pilate. Twice the Roman denied his guilt; twice he refused to give him over. At last he washed his hands, and said, ‘Be it upon you then;’ and they answered—”

  “Who answered?”

  “They—the priests and people—‘His blood be upon us and our children.’ ”

  “Holy father Abraham!” cried Ben-Hur; “a Roman kinder to an Israelite than his own kin! And if—ah, if he should indeed be the son of God, what shall ever wash his blood from their children? It must not be—’tis time to fight!”

  His face brightened with resolution, and he clapped his hands.

  “The horses—and quickly!” he said to the Arab who answered the signal. “And bid Amrah send me fresh garments, and bring my sword! It is time to die for Israel, my friends. Tarry without till I come.”

  He ate a crust, drank a cup of wine, and was soon upon the road.

  “Whither would you go first?” asked the Galilean.

  “To collect the legions.”

  “Alas!” the man replied, throwing up his hands.

  “Why alas?”

  “Master”—the man spoke with shame—“master, I and my friend here are all that are faithful. The rest do follow the priests.”

  “Seeking what?” and Ben-Hur drew rein.

  “To kill him.”

  “Not the Nazarene?”

  “You have said it.”

  Ben-Hur looked slowly from one man to the other. He was hearing again the question of the night before: “The cup my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” In the ear of the Nazarene he was putting his own question, “If I bring thee rescue, wilt thou accept it?” He was saying to himself, “This death may not be averted. The man has been travelling towards it with full knowledge from the day he began his mission: it is imposed by a will higher than his; whose but the Lord’s! If he is consenting, if he goes to it voluntarily, what shall another do?” Nor less did Ben-Hur see the failure of the scheme he had built upon the fidelity of the Galileans; their desertion, in fact, left nothing more of it. But how singular it should happen that morning of all others! A dread seized him. It was possible his scheming, and labor, and expenditure of treasure might have been but blasphemous contention with God. When he picked up the reins and said, “Let us go, brethren,” all before him was uncertainty. The faculty of resolving quickly, without which one cannot be a hero in the midst of stirring scenes, was numb within him.

  “Let us go, brethren; let us to Golgotha.”

  They passed through excited crowds of people going south, like themselves. All the country north of the city seemed aroused and in motion.

  Hearing that the procession with the condemned might be met with somewhere near the great white towers left by Herod, the three friends rode thither, passing round southeast of Akra. In the valley below the Pool of Hezekiah, passage-way against the multitude became impossible, and they were compelled to dismount, and take shelter behind the corner of a house and wait.

  The waiting was as if they were on a river bank, watching a flood go by, for such the people seemed.

  There are certain chapters in the First Book of this story which were written to give the reader an idea of the composition of the Jewish nationality as it was in the time of Christ. They were also written in anticipation of this hour and scene; so that he who has read them with attention can now see all Ben-Hur saw of the going to the crucifixion—a rare and wonderful sight!

  Half an hour—an hour—the flood surged by Ben-Hur and his companions, within arm’s reach, incessant, undiminished. At the end of that time he could have said, “I have seen all the castes of Jerusalem, all the sects of Judea, all the tribes of Israel, and all the nationalities of earth represented by them.” The Libyan Jew went by, and the Jew of Egypt, and the Jew from the Rhine; in short, Jews from all East countries and all West countries, and all islands within commercial connection; they went by on foot, on horseback, on camels, in litters and chariots, and with an infinite variety of costumes, yet with the same marvelous similitude of features which to day particularizes the children of Israel, tried as they have been by climates and modes of life; they went by speaking all known tongues, for by that means only were they distinguishable group from group; they went by in haste—eager, anxious, crowding—all to behold one poor Nazarene die, a felon between felons.

  These were the many, but they were not all.

  Borne along with the stream were thousands not Jews—thousands hating and despising them—Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Syrians, Africans, Egyptians, Easterns. So that, studying the mass, it seemed the whole world was to be represented, and, in that sense, present at the crucifixion.

  The going was singularly quiet. A hoof-stroke upon a rock, the glide and rattle of revolving wheels, voices in conversation, and now and then a calling voice, were all the sounds heard above the rustle of the mighty movement. Yet was there upon every countenance the look with which men make haste to see some dreadful sight, some sudden wreck, or ruin, or calamity of war. And by such signs Ben-Hur judged that these were the strangers in the city come up to the Passover, who had had no part in the trial of the Nazarene, and might be his friends.

  At length, from the direction of the great towers, Ben-Hur heard, at first faint in the distance, a shouting of many men.

  “Hark! they are coming now,” said one of his friends.

  The people in the street halted to hear; but as the cry rang on over their heads, they looked at each other, and in shuddering silence moved along.

  The shouting drew nearer each moment; and the air was already full of it and trembling, when Ben-Hur saw the servants of Simonides coming with their master in his chair, and Esther walking by his side; a covered litter was next behind them.

  “Peace to you, O Simonides—and to you, Esther,” said Ben-Hur, meeting them. “If you are
for Golgotha, stay until the procession passes; I will then go with you. There is room to turn in by the house here.”

  The merchant’s large head rested heavily upon his breast; rousing himself, he answered, “Speak to Balthasar; his pleasure will be mine. He is in the litter.”

  Ben-Hur hastened to draw aside the curtain. The Egyptian was lying within, his wan face so pinched as to appear like a dead man’s. The proposal was submitted to him.

  “Can we see him?” he inquired, faintly.

  “The Nazarene? yes; he must pass within a few feet of us.”

  “Dear Lord!” the old man cried, fervently. “Once more, once more! Oh, it is a dreadful day for the world!”

  Shortly the whole party were in waiting under shelter of the house. They said but little, afraid, probably, to trust their thoughts to each other; everything was uncertain, and nothing so much so as opinions. Balthasar drew himself feebly from the litter, and stood supported by a servant; Esther and Ben-Hur kept Simonides company.

  Meantime the flood poured along, if anything, more densely than before; and the shouting came nearer, shrill up in the air, hoarse along the earth, and cruel. At last the procession was up.

  “See!” said Ben-Hur, bitterly; “that which cometh now is Jerusalem.”

  The advance was in possession of an army of boys, hooting and screaming, “The King of the Jews! Room, room for the King of the Jews!”

  Simonides watched them as they whirled and danced along, like a cloud of summer insects, and said, gravely, “When these come to their inheritance, son of Hur, alas for the city of Solomon!”