CHAPTER VI
Ben-Hur entered the woods with the processions. He had not interestenough at first to ask where they were going; yet, to relieve himfrom absolute indifference, he had a vague impression that theywere in movement to the temples, which were the central objectsof 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 onthe mulberries of Daphne, than a king's guest." Then of the muchrepetition arose questions importunate of answer. Was life inthe Grove so very sweet? Wherein was the charm? Did it lie insome 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 toservice here. Did they find the charm? And was it sufficient,when found, to induce forgetfulness profound enough to shut outof mind the infinitely diverse things of life? those that sweetenand those that embitter? hopes hovering in the near future as wellas 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 thatthe 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 ofhis 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 pouredacross the road, splashing him with a wave of sweet smells, blent ofroses and consuming spices. He stopped, as did others, looking theway 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 asurprised 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 surgedforward, 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 strongJudean face to avouch the garments of honest right, remained inthe 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 availedhimself of the offer.
He walked first into a thicket which, from the road, appeared ina state of nature, close, impenetrable, a nesting-place for wildbirds. A few steps, however, gave him to see the master's hand eventhere. The shrubs were flowering or fruit-bearing; under the bendingbranches the ground was pranked with brightest blooms; over themthe jasmine stretched its delicate bonds. From lilac and rose,and lily and tulip, from oleander and strawberry-tree, all oldfriends in the gardens of the valleys about the city of David,the air, lingering or in haste, loaded itself with exhalations dayand night; and that nothing might be wanting to the happiness ofthe nymphs and naiads, down through the flower-lighted shadows ofthe 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 thecry of the pigeon and the cooing of turtle-doves; blackbirds waitedfor him, and bided his coming close; a nightingale kept its placefearless, though he passed in arm's-length; a quail ran beforehim at his feet, whistling to the brood she was leading, and ashe paused for them to get out of his way, a figure crawled froma bed of honeyed musk brilliant with balls of golden blossoms.Ben-Hur was startled. Had he, indeed, been permitted to see asatyr at home? The creature looked up at him, and showed in itsteeth a hooked pruning-knife; he smiled at his own scare, and,lo! the charm was evolved! Peace without fear--peace a universalcondition--that it was!
He sat upon the ground beneath a citron-tree, which spread itsgray roots sprawling to receive a branch of the brook. The nest ofa titmouse hung close to the bubbling water, and the tiny creaturelooked out of the door of the nest into his eyes. "Verily, the birdis interpreting to me," he thought. "It says, 'I am not afraid ofyou, for the law of this happy place is Love.'"
The charm of the Grove seemed plain to him; he was glad, anddetermined to render himself one of the lost in Daphne. In chargeof the flowers and shrubs, and watching the growth of all the dumbexcellences everywhere to be seen, could not he, like the man withthe pruning-knife in his mouth, forego the days of his troubledlife--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 werethey?
Love is delightful--ah! how pleasant as a successor to wretchednesslike his. But was it all there was of life? All?
There was an unlikeness between him and those who buried themselvescontentedly here. They had no duties--they could not have had;but he--
"God of Israel!" he cried aloud, springing to his feet, with burningcheeks--"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 flowingwith the volume of a river between banks of masonry, broken atintervals by gated sluiceways. A bridge carried the path he wastraversing across the stream; and, standing upon it, he saw otherbridges, no two of them alike. Under him the water was lying in adeep pool, clear as a shadow; down a little way it tumbled with aroar over rocks; then there was another pool, and another cascade;and so on, out of view; and bridges and pools and resoundingcascades said, plainly as inarticulate things can tell a story,the river was running by permission of a master, exactly as themaster would have it, tractable as became a servant of the gods.
Forward from the bridge he beheld a landscape of wide valleys andirregular heights, with groves and lakes and fanciful houses linkedtogether by white paths and shining streams. The valleys were spreadbelow, that the river might be poured upon them for refreshment indays of drought, and they were as green carpets figured with bedsand fields of flowers, and flecked with flocks of sheep white asballs of snow; and the voices of shepherds following the flockswere heard afar. As if to tell him of the pious inscription ofall he beheld, the altars out under the open sky seemed countless,each with a white-gowned figure attending it, while processions inwhite went slowly hither and thither between them; and the smokeof the altars half-risen hung collected in pale clouds over thedevoted places.
Here, there, happy in flight, intoxicated in pause, from objectto 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 trendedmazily into dim perspectives to end finally in-- Ah, what mightbe a fitting end to scene so beautiful! What adequate mysterieswere hidden behind an introduction so marvellous! Here and there,the speech was beginning, his gaze wandered, so he could not helpthe conviction, forced by the view, and as the sum of it all,that there was peace in the air and on the earth, and invitationeverywhere 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 soughtto materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature--art cango no further. So the cunning son of Jupiter and Callisto builtthe 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 shebeckoned him, "Come!"
Farther on, the path was divided by an altar--a pedestal of blackgneiss, capped with a slab of white marble deftly foliated, and onthat 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 passionateyouth.
On yet further, he met one of the processions; at its head atroop of little girls, nude except as they were covered withgarlands, piped their shrill voices into a song; then a troopof boys, also nude, their bodies deeply sun-browned, came dancingto the song of the girls; behind them the procession, all women,bearing baskets of spices and sweets to the altars--women clad insimple robes, careless of exposure. As he went by they held theirhands to him, and said, "Stay, and go with us." One, a Greek, sang averse 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 attractiveto 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 caughtthe 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 withstrangers adopted from far quarters; here grouped in exclusivecompanionship palm-trees plumed like queens; there sycamores,overtopping laurels of darker foliage; and evergreen oaksrising verdantly, with cedars vast enough to be kings on Lebanon;and mulberries; and terebinths so beautiful it is not hyperbole tospeak 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 baseof the pedestal a girl and a youth were lying upon a tiger's skinasleep in each other's arms; close by them the implements of theirservice--his axe and sickle, her basket--flung carelessly upon aheap of fading roses.
The exposure startled him. Back in the hush of the perfumed thickethe discovered, as he thought, that the charm of the great Grove waspeace without fear, and almost yielded to it; now, in this sleep inthe day's broad glare--this sleep at the feet of Daphne--he read afurther 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 andbrooks and lilies, the river, the labor of many hands, the sanctityof altars, the fertile power of the sun!
It would be pleasant now to record that as Ben-Hur pursued his walkassailed by such reflections, he yielded somewhat to sorrow for thevotaries 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; themotive, the influence, the inducement, were before him. Some therewere, no doubt, caught by the promise held out to their troubledspirits of endless peace in a consecrated abode, to the beauty ofwhich, 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 mayone tell what all his fishermen landed: this less for that theycannot be described than because they ought not to be. Enough thatthe mass were of the sybarites of the world, and of the herdsin number vaster and in degree lower--devotees of the unmixedsensualism to which the East was almost wholly given. Not toany of the exaltations--not to the singing-god, or his unhappymistress; not to any philosophy requiring for its enjoyment thecalm of retirement, nor to any service for the comfort there isin religion, nor to love in its holier sense--were they abidingtheir vows. Good reader, why shall not the truth be told here?Why not learn that, at this age, there were in all earth but twopeoples capable of exaltations of the kind referred to--thosewho lived by the law of Moses, and those who lived by the lawof Brahma. They alone could have cried you, Better a law withoutlove than a love without law.
Besides that, sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood weare 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 absoluteself-satisfaction. Ben-Hur walked with a quicker step, holding hishead higher; and, while not less sensitive to the delightfulnessof all about him, he made his survey with calmer spirit, thoughsometimes with curling lip; that is to say, he could not so soonforget how nearly he himself had been imposed upon.