IT is one of the paradoxes of divine operation that dishonest and
unworthy men should so often be set in the positions of rulers of other
men. Yet it is so. Integrity and honesty are not necessarily a passport
to political preferment.
Everybody knew Herod's character. His moral delinquencies were public
to the gaze of all men--the unsavory property of the entire community.
The shame of his marriage with the divorced wife of his own brother
stank in the nostrils of all the decent world. He was a man seemingly
without any principle or aim in life except to gratify himself. Yet for
years he had occupied high public position and was supported, not only
by the small, dominant class who found him useful, but by the masses as
well.
But, though the rulers and those in authority had set Herod up as their
representative in power, they were not fond of him. So, when John the
Baptist began to fulminate against him and his moral obliquities,
and when the public journals began to publish these fulminations
for general reading, Herod's political friends rather enjoyed the
situation. They laughed at him, and even jested with him about it.
They knew that he was powerless to punish the preacher, for he did not
dare to alienate the lower class that so largely helped to uphold him
in power. His political friends knew that he must submit to whatever
attacks were made against him, and they enjoyed his helplessness and
his probable sufferings.
When he would drop into his club on his way home, he would perhaps be
hailed with an inquiry as to whether he had seen the evening paper,
and that there was lively reading in it. Another advised him to take
the sheet home with him to his wife, and that she would be interested
to see what was being said of her. A third opined the sauce would
do instead of tobasco with her oysters. At these jocularities Herod
would maybe laugh. Probably he did not much mind these attacks, nor
the pseudo-witticisms with which he was favored, for he did not care a
great deal about public opinion one way or the other.
But it was not so with the woman whom he called his wife. She writhed
under the lash of the spoken words and the printed paragraphs with a
feeling sometimes almost as of physical nausea.
She was writhing now, but silently, over the evening paper which she
had brought in from the library and which she was just then reading.
The butler came in and lit the lamp, but she did not look up from her
paper; she was too intently absorbed with the pain she was inflicting
upon herself to notice anything else.
Her daughter, Salome, sat at the window looking out into the dull
twilight of the street. She sat with one foot on a hassock, her elbow
upon her knee, and her chin resting upon the palm of her hand. She
looked listless and bored as she sat staring out into the falling
twilight. The two women were singularly alike, only that the dark,
heavy beauty of the mother was merely brunette in the daughter; that
the somewhat square face of the elder woman was oval in the younger;
that the rouge of the woman's face was the dusky red of nature in the
girl's cheeks.
The words Herodias was reading must have cut suddenly to a deeper
nerve, for she drew a sharp breath that was almost articulate. Her
white teeth clicked together. She made a sudden motion as though to
crush the paper she held; then she went on reading again. The girl
nodded and smiled recognition to some one passing along the gray
twilight of the street. Then the smile slowly faded, and the listless
look settled back upon her face again.
There was a sound of footsteps crossing the hall, and Herod himself
came into the room. He was a rather stout, thick-set man of about forty
or forty-five. He wore a long mustache, the beard beneath being closely
clipped and trimmed to a point. The cut of the beard and hair gave his
countenance an air of quality that was belied by his puffy, mottled
cheeks and the thick, red, sensual lips. Herodias looked up at him
as he came within the circle of light. "Did you see this?" she said,
hoarsely, holding the paper out towards him. She pointed to the column
she had been reading, and her fingers trembled with the intensity of
her self-repression. The paper rustled nervously as she held it out.
"See what?" said Herod. "Oh, that! Yes, I saw that down at the club.
What do you read it for if you don't like it?"
"And do you mean to say you aren't going to do anything to this cursed
Baptist? What are the laws good for, anyhow?"
Herod grinned. "They're good for nothing when an election's only six
months off."
The woman tried to speak; she could not. "It's a damned shame," she
cried out, at last, still in the same hoarse voice.