Ben-Hur entered the woods with the processions. He had not interest
enough at first to ask where they were going; yet, to relieve him from
absolute indifference, he had a vague impression that they were in
movement to the temples, which were the central objects of the Grove,
supreme in attractions.
Presently, as singers dreamfully play with a flitting chorus, he began
repeating to himself, “Better be a worm, and feed on the mulberries of
Daphne, than a king’s guest.” Then of the much repetition arose
questions importunate of answer. Was life in the Grove so very sweet?
Wherein was the charm? Did it lie in some tangled depth of philosophy?
Or was it something in fact, something on the surface, discernible to
every-day wakeful senses? Every year thousands, forswearing the world,
gave themselves to service here. Did they find the charm? And was it
sufficient, when found, to induce forgetfulness profound enough to shut
out of mind the infinitely diverse things of life? those that sweeten
and those that embitter? hopes hovering in the near future as well as
sorrows born of the past? If the Grove were so good for them, why
should it not be good for him? He was a Jew; could it be that the
excellences were for all the world but children of Abraham? Forthwith
he bent all his faculties to the task of discovery, unmindful of the
singing of the gift-bringers and the quips of his associates.
In the quest, the sky yielded him nothing; it was blue, very blue, and
full of twittering swallows—so was the sky over the city.
Further on, out of the woods at his right hand, a breeze poured across
the road, splashing him with a wave of sweet smells, blent of roses and
consuming spices. He stopped, as did others, looking the way the breeze
came.
“A garden over there?” he said, to a man at his elbow.
“Rather some priestly ceremony in performance—something to Diana, or
Pan, or a deity of the woods.”
The answer was in his mother tongue. Ben-Hur gave the speaker a
surprised look.
“A Hebrew?” he asked him.
The man replied with a deferential smile,
“I was born within a stone’s-throw of the market-place in Jerusalem.”
Ben-Hur was proceeding to further speech, when the crowd surged
forward, thrusting him out on the side of the walk next the woods, and
carrying the stranger away. The customary gown and staff, a brown cloth
on the head tied by a yellow rope, and a strong Judean face to avouch
the garments of honest right, remained in the young man’s mind, a kind
of summary of the man.
This took place at a point where a path into the woods began, offering
a happy escape from the noisy processions. Ben-Hur availed himself of
the offer.
He walked first into a thicket which, from the road, appeared in a
state of nature, close, impenetrable, a nesting-place for wild birds. A
few steps, however, gave him to see the master’s hand even there. The
shrubs were flowering or fruit-bearing; under the bending branches the
ground was pranked with brightest blooms; over them the jasmine
stretched its delicate bonds. From lilac and rose, and lily and tulip,
from oleander and strawberry-tree, all old friends in the gardens of
the valleys about the city of David, the air, lingering or in haste,
loaded itself with exhalations day and night; and that nothing might be
wanting to the happiness of the nymphs and naiads, down through the
flower-lighted shadows of the mass a brook went its course gently, and
by many winding ways.
Out of the thicket, as he proceeded, on his right and left, issued the
cry of the pigeon and the cooing of turtle-doves; blackbirds waited for
him, and bided his coming close; a nightingale kept its place fearless,
though he passed in arm’s-length; a quail ran before him at his feet,
whistling to the brood she was leading, and as he paused for them to
get out of his way, a figure crawled from a bed of honeyed musk
brilliant with balls of golden blossoms. Ben-Hur was startled. Had he,
indeed, been permitted to see a satyr at home? The creature looked up
at him, and showed in its teeth a hooked pruning-knife; he smiled at
his own scare, and, lo! the charm was evolved! Peace without fear—peace
a universal condition—that it was!
He sat upon the ground beneath a citron-tree, which spread its gray
roots sprawling to receive a branch of the brook. The nest of a
titmouse hung close to the bubbling water, and the tiny creature looked
out of the door of the nest into his eyes. “Verily, the bird is
interpreting to me,” he thought. “It says, ‘I am not afraid of you, for
the law of this happy place is Love.’”
The charm of the Grove seemed plain to him; he was glad, and determined
to render himself one of the lost in Daphne. In charge of the flowers
and shrubs, and watching the growth of all the dumb excellences
everywhere to be seen, could not he, like the man with the
pruning-knife in his mouth, forego the days of his troubled life—forego
them forgetting and forgotten?
But by-and-by his Jewish nature began to stir within him.
The charm might be sufficient for some people. Of what kind were they?
Love is delightful—ah! how pleasant as a successor to wretchedness like
his. But was it all there was of life? All?
There was an unlikeness between him and those who buried themselves
contentedly here. They had no duties—they could not have had; but he—
“God of Israel!” he cried aloud, springing to his feet, with burning
cheeks—“Mother! Tirzah! Cursed be the moment, cursed the place, in
which I yield myself happy in your loss!”
He hurried away through the thicket, and came to a stream flowing with
the volume of a river between banks of masonry, broken at intervals by
gated sluiceways. A bridge carried the path he was traversing across
the stream; and, standing upon it, he saw other bridges, no two of them
alike. Under him the water was lying in a deep pool, clear as a shadow;
down a little way it tumbled with a roar over rocks; then there was
another pool, and another cascade; and so on, out of view; and bridges
and pools and resounding cascades said, plainly as inarticulate things
can tell a story, the river was running by permission of a master,
exactly as the master would have it, tractable as became a servant of
the gods.
Forward from the bridge he beheld a landscape of wide valleys and
irregular heights, with groves and lakes and fanciful houses linked
together by white paths and shining streams. The valleys were spread
below, that the river might be poured upon them for refreshment in days
of drought, and they were as green carpets figured with beds and fields
of flowers, and flecked with flocks of sheep white as balls of snow;
and the voices of shepherds following the flocks were heard afar. As if
to tell him of the pious inscription of all he beheld, the altars out
under the open sky seemed countless, each with a white-gowned figure
attending it, while processions in white went slowly hither and thither
between them; and the smoke of the altars half-risen hung collected in
pale clouds over the devoted places.
Here, there, happy in flight, intoxicated in pause, from object to
object, point to point, now in the meadow, now on the heights, now
lingering to penetrate the groves and observe the processions, then
lost in efforts to pursue the paths and streams which trended mazily
into dim perspectives to end finally in— Ah, what might be a fitting
end to scene so beautiful! What adequate mysteries were hidden behind
an introduction so marvellous! Here and there, the speech was
beginning, his gaze wandered, so he could not help the conviction,
forced by the view, and as the sum of it all, that there was peace in
the air and on the earth, and invitation everywhere to come and lie
down here and be at rest.
Suddenly a revelation dawned upon him—the Grove was, in fact, a
temple—one far-reaching, wall-less temple!
Never anything like it!
The architect had not stopped to pother about columns and porticos,
proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to
materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature—art can go no
further. So the cunning son of Jupiter and Callisto built the old
Arcadia; and in this, as in that, the genius was Greek.
From the bridge Ben-Hur went forward into the nearest valley.
He came to a flock of sheep. The shepherd was a girl, and she beckoned
him, “Come!”
Farther on, the path was divided by an altar—a pedestal of black
gneiss, capped with a slab of white marble deftly foliated, and on that
a brazier of bronze holding a fire. Close by it, a woman, seeing him,
waved a wand of willow, and as he passed called him, “Stay!” And the
temptation in her smile was that of passionate youth.
On yet further, he met one of the processions; at its head a troop of
little girls, nude except as they were covered with garlands, piped
their shrill voices into a song; then a troop of boys, also nude, their
bodies deeply sun-browned, came dancing to the song of the girls;
behind them the procession, all women, bearing baskets of spices and
sweets to the altars—women clad in simple robes, careless of exposure.
As he went by they held their hands to him, and said, “Stay, and go
with us.” One, a Greek, sang a verse from Anacreon:
“For to-day I take or give;
For to-day I drink and live;
For to-day I beg or borrow;
Who knows about the silent morrow?”
But he pursued his way indifferent, and came next to a grove luxuriant,
in the heart of the vale at the point where it would be most attractive
to the observing eye. As it came close to the path he was travelling,
there was a seduction in its shade, and through the foliage he caught
the shining of what appeared a pretentious statue; so he turned aside,
and entered the cool retreat.
The grass was fresh and clean. The trees did not crowd each other; and
they were of every kind native to the East, blended well with strangers
adopted from far quarters; here grouped in exclusive companionship
palm-trees plumed like queens; there sycamores, overtopping laurels of
darker foliage; and evergreen oaks rising verdantly, with cedars vast
enough to be kings on Lebanon; and mulberries; and terebinths so
beautiful it is not hyperbole to speak of them as blown from the
orchards of Paradise.
The statue proved to be a Daphne of wondrous beauty. Hardly, however,
had he time to more than glance at her face: at the base of the
pedestal a girl and a youth were lying upon a tiger’s skin asleep in
each other’s arms; close by them the implements of their service—his
axe and sickle, her basket—flung carelessly upon a heap of fading
roses.
The exposure startled him. Back in the hush of the perfumed thicket he
discovered, as he thought, that the charm of the great Grove was peace
without fear, and almost yielded to it; now, in this sleep in the day’s
broad glare—this sleep at the feet of Daphne—he read a further chapter
to which only the vaguest allusion is sufferable. The law of the place
was Love, but Love without Law.
And this was the sweet peace of Daphne!
This the life’s end of her ministers!
For this kings and princes gave of their revenues!
For this a crafty priesthood subordinated nature—her birds and brooks
and lilies, the river, the labor of many hands, the sanctity of altars,
the fertile power of the sun!
It would be pleasant now to record that as Ben-Hur pursued his walk
assailed by such reflections, he yielded somewhat to sorrow for the
votaries of the great outdoor temple; especially for those who, by
personal service, kept it in a state so surpassingly lovely. How they
came to the condition was not any longer a mystery; the motive, the
influence, the inducement, were before him. Some there were, no doubt,
caught by the promise held out to their troubled spirits of endless
peace in a consecrated abode, to the beauty of which, if they had not
money, they could contribute their labor; this class implied intellect
peculiarly subject to hope and fear; but the great body of the faithful
could not be classed with such. Apollo’s nets were wide, and their
meshes small; and hardly may one tell what all his fishermen landed:
this less for that they cannot be described than because they ought not
to be. Enough that the mass were of the sybarites of the world, and of
the herds in number vaster and in degree lower—devotees of the unmixed
sensualism to which the East was almost wholly given. Not to any of the
exaltations—not to the singing-god, or his unhappy mistress; not to any
philosophy requiring for its enjoyment the calm of retirement, nor to
any service for the comfort there is in religion, nor to love in its
holier sense—were they abiding their vows. Good reader, why shall not
the truth be told here? Why not learn that, at this age, there were in
all earth but two peoples capable of exaltations of the kind referred
to—those who lived by the law of Moses, and those who lived by the law
of Brahma. They alone could have cried you, Better a law without love
than a love without law.
Besides that, sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are
in at the moment: anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is
easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute
self-satisfaction. Ben-Hur walked with a quicker step, holding his head
higher; and, while not less sensitive to the delightfulness of all
about him, he made his survey with calmer spirit, though sometimes with
curling lip; that is to say, he could not so soon forget how nearly he
himself had been imposed upon.