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.
“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.”