[Ill.u.s.tration: Ornament]

V.

_THE BANQUET._

[Ill.u.s.tration: Initial]

I am too deeply impressed with the vanity of our worldly affairs in comparison with the verities of the spiritual life, to employ my own time or engage a reader's attention with a biography, however pleasing or romantic, unless there was a subtle connecting link, which I expect to reveal, between the facts narrated and those eternal truths which overshadow all others in importance.

I, alone of all mankind, have lived consciously in both worlds long enough to discover their relations to each other. What my fellow-men have seen only on the surface, I have examined interiorly. I have seen the secret springs of human pride, ambition, pa.s.sion and folly. I have seen the souls of men as they appear in the sight of angels. And my instructions in that world were all based upon my experiences in this.

It is now necessary to drop for a while my personal narrative, and to go back and relate, from the evidence of others, what happened in Bethany during my absence.

My sisters had been left with our atrocious uncle, like two lambs under the guardianship of a wolf. One capable of a.s.sa.s.sinating his nephew, a mere youth, would not hesitate at any wickedness against his beautiful nieces. This man's character was so cruel and wicked, that some explanation is needed of the singular maturity of diabolism to which he had attained.

Magistus had neither religion nor honor. Honor binds us in duty to our neighbor, as religion binds us both to G.o.d and the neighbor. It is a moon which shines brilliantly in the absence of the sun. The light of honor is also but the reflected light of religion. When both shine together, honor is absorbed and swallowed up in the more effulgent blaze of religion. The soul without religion or honor, is like the earth without sun or moon-cold, dark, desolate, hideous.

Such was the soul of Magistus.

Irreligion, like drunkenness, is sometimes inherited. The father of Magistus was a scoffer and sensualist. Fatal incubus of moral deformity descending from father to son! In this he was typical of the age. The hereditary pressure toward h.e.l.l was so great, that a few more centuries of transmission would have brought the world into perfect sympathy with the lower regions. The advent of the Lord arrested that for a while.

Without religion or honor man is very close to h.e.l.l. The veriest barbarian has some faint idea of natural religion, and some feeble impulse of natural honor, which distinguish him from the beasts and unite him to his kind. These are barriers against the influx of infernal life. He is ignorant of the devils within him, and the devils within him are ignorant of him. Wise and blessed provision! Were he brought into conscious rapport with his own attendant evil spirits, he would soon be one with them. Their life in h.e.l.l and his life on earth would be animated by the same breath.

This had happened to Magistus.

Not that he was a barbarian. He was an educated, cultivated man, accustomed to the luxuries and full of the suavities of civilized life.

Civilization and religion are not synonymous. h.e.l.l itself has a stupendous civilization. Magistus was a Pharisee by profession: a ritualist, and a strict observer of feast-days and ordinances and ceremonies. That, however, was not the man, but only his outer garment-his cloak. Supposed by the world to be virtuous and honest, this wealthy and reputable Pharisee was spiritually a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

He was a spiritualist, a sorcerer, a necromancer, a magician. He at first sought and became familiar with these people, with their studies and arts, from natural curiosity. It was very pleasant to call up his dead father and various dead friends, and converse with them. It was agreeable to know that they were all happy, and advancing in various degrees toward the infinite divine perfection. They showed him wonderful things. They performed miracles in his sight greater than those which the magicians of Egypt performed before Pharaoh.

Then they told him that the Jewish Scriptures were not divinely inspired, but a medley of fables, pa.s.sable poetry and childish philosophy. He had already suspected this; and he congratulated the spirits on possessing a critical genius so similar to his own. He finally acquired, from these supernatural instructors, a grand system of philosophy, revealing the divinity of nature and the laws of progress.

Having become convinced that there are great and subtile powers emanating from the spiritual world, unknown to most men, he determined to avail himself of those powers for his own private ends. He became a secret pupil and disciple of magicians and wizards. He communicated with spirits and permitted them to take possession of him, soul and body, so that they spoke through his mouth and wrote through his hand and came at his call.

He learned all the tricks and spells of legerdemain, the arts and formulas and incantations of magic, and the rites and ceremonies of the black art in its broadest sense. He obtained means of seeing objects at any distance, of producing hallucinations or optical illusions, of personating the dead, of finding hidden treasures, of reading men's thoughts, of sowing enmity between friends, of discovering secrets, and a thousand other astounding and almost incredible things.

The soul is not destroyed in a moment: it is the work of years. The evil spirits and demons with whom he was thus brought into contact, slowly poisoned the fountain-head of character; extinguished his reverence, his modesty, his respect for marriage; undermined his conscience; swept away all religious and even social and civil scruples; and fired and sustained all his evil propensities; so that, externally a faithful disciple of Moses, he was interiorly a devil, governed only by the love of self and the world.

This formidable hypocrite, the most of whose wealth had been obtained by secret frauds, and was not unstained with blood, had his dwelling in the centre of an immense area surrounded by lofty walls and concealed by a dense grove of trees. He received no visitors but those who came to him at night, and for no good purpose. He had the character of a recluse, devoted to sacrifice and prayer. He thus indulged his secret vices and carried on his diabolical incantations unsuspected. The dark shadows of his princely mansion enveloped a degree of a.s.syrian luxury scarcely exceeded by the Caprean court of the emperor Tiberius.

Caiaphas, the priest, was his best friend, who shared his private pleasures and maintained by constant applause his public reputation for sanct.i.ty and honor.

The influence of evil spirits who possess us is at first gentle and subtile, coinciding with our own inclination. Thinking to lead, we are led. When a man is chained so that he can no longer resist, they urge him headlong to a crisis. They fire his evil pa.s.sions; they blind his perverted intellect; they inflate his pride and self-conceit; they make him scornful and regardless of others, impatient of all barriers to his self-gratification, and a.s.sure him of boundless immunity and protection.

In this state of horrible fantasy and inflamed pa.s.sion, he is ready to trample upon all laws human and divine.

To this fearful point in his spiritual life had Magistus arrived.

When my father was driven into the wilderness, Caiaphas and my uncle plotted together how to get speedy and sole possession of his great wealth. To get rid of or destroy his children was the first, and, indeed, the only thing necessary. But they resolved to allow some months to elapse-to let our misfortunes die out from the public memory, and even ourselves be quite forgotten. Hence the seclusion, the solitude, the systematic neglect to which we were subjected.

The plan was finally matured. The boy was to be decoyed into the wilderness and murdered by Barabbas. It was to be given out that he was a wild, incorrigible lad, who had run away from home and joined a band of robbers. After a few months a letter was to be received from Barabbas, whose fame as an outlaw was widespread, giving the particulars of his death in an attack of the party upon some caravan. This was to settle the matter for ever in the public mind.

It was more difficult to dispose of my sisters than of myself. A hundred schemes were suggested by the inventive villains, but all rejected or suspended. It was finally agreed to draw them out and test their characters, to make experiments upon them, to see what could be done with them. It was a delicate task; but Magistus had boldness and cruelty for anything, and Caiaphas was to back him incessantly with his private counsel and his public support. He had already begun his insidious work, by lamenting to sundry influential persons, with sanctimonious regrets, that the daughters of his old and dear friend exhibited so early a singular perverseness of character and disregard of their social and religious obligations. The result, he added, of that laxity of discipline and pa.s.sion for individual liberty, which characterized the unhappy leper.

The first and best instrument of evil is always a woman. Mary Magdalen, left an orphan without relatives at a very early age, had fallen into the hands of a strolling showman, who taught her to sing and dance, accompanying herself on the timbrel. Her extraordinary beauty attracted attention in the streets of Jerusalem, and she soon pa.s.sed into the possession of one of those connoisseurs who study the anatomy as well as the philosophy of art. She quickly disappeared from sight; and it was rumored that she had been sent to Ashkelon to serve in the gorgeous temple of Ashtoreth, the Venus of a.s.syria. She had gone one dark night no further than Bethany, and had buried her talents and her shame in the princely mansion of Magistus.

On the morning of my departure this serpent was introduced into the dove-cote. Magistus represented her as a distant relative whom he had invited to spend several weeks with his nieces, hoping that her gayety of spirits would lighten the constant gloom of his little charges. The children, dazzled by her great beauty and won by her free and affectionate manner, were delighted with their new companion. She entertained them with curious stories of what she had seen and heard, refraining from any allusion which might reveal her true life and character.

But the plot of the two arch-demons did not work as they had calculated.

Indeed, it worked in a way quite opposite to their expectations. They had counted on the corrupting influence of a bold, fascinating woman on the gentle and unsophisticated thoughts and feelings of innocent girls. They had not counted, cunning and sagacious as they were, on the possible influence of the girls upon Mary Magdalen.

That influence was astonishing. When she felt the pure and innocent sphere which surrounded the lovely sisters, a change came over the subtle emissary of Magistus. She forgot the instructions of her masters. The memories of her old life seemed to die out, and the unseen angels of her better nature to wake into strange activity. Young herself, more sinned against than sinning, her pity was awakened for these young creatures against whom such wicked ones were conspiring.

She made them tell her all about their poor father, and wept with them at the story. She took them into the garden and played over the green knolls, and ran in the graveled walks, and gathered flowers, and sang little childish songs, as if she were a child again. She asked a thousand questions about our mother and little Samuel, and about the babyish sayings and doings of my little sisters and myself. She frequently exclaimed "Oh, I am so happy! This is the happiest day of my life! Oh that I could live for ever so!"

Pausing before the tomb of my mother, and looking at a little vase of fresh flowers which stood before it, she suddenly fell upon her knees, exclaiming wildly:

"O G.o.d! if I could have offered flowers, also, at the tomb of a mother, it might have been different!"

She burst into a flood of tears; and the sisters endeavored to console her-not knowing the true nature of her wound-by kissing her cheeks and mingling their tears with hers.

They were interrupted in these sweet offices of mutual sympathy, by the voice of a servant asking Mary Magdalen if she had forgotten that she had to prepare herself and her companions for the grand supper at the house of Magistus.

She arose from the ground, and slowly recovering her composure, led the astonished children through the gate in the garden wall toward the house of our uncle. On the way she told them that Magistus had prepared a handsome entertainment for herself and them, and as a charming surprise to their brother, who was expected to return with good news from the father just about the hour of the feast. They need not be frightened, for Caiaphas alone was to be present.

We had never entered any portion of our uncle's great mansion except the small wing which contained the reception-room and the long pa.s.sage which led to the private chamber of our invalid aunt. The three women now pa.s.sed up a flight of marble steps into a portico leading into a vast hall, ornamented with statues and with vases filled with flowers. Hurrying through this hall, Mary lead them up another flight of stairs which had a gilded bal.u.s.trade, into two exquisite bed-chambers which opened into each other.

The bedsteads were of carved ivory, exceedingly beautiful; the canopies, of blue silk fringed with gold; the coverlets, of fine linen and purple, curiously embroidered. The divans, the couches, the chairs, the tables, were all gems of graceful art. The floor was of polished cedar, with gilded moulding around the wall. The ceiling was a splendid stucco-work on which scenes were painted in brilliant colors; in one room, Actaeon peeping from behind the trees at Diana and her nymphs in their crystal bath; and in the other, Venus beating her breast and tearing her hair at sight of the blood-stained thigh of Adonis.

The whole atmosphere was freighted with the most delicious and exhilarating perfumes. There were chests of drawers full of the richest female clothing, the fruit of the rarest material and the finest needlework. There were caskets lying open and revealing ear-rings and necklaces and bracelets of the most dazzling beauty. The sisters were overwhelmed with wonder and delight. They had never seen such things before; for our father, rich as he was, was plain, frugal and unostentatious in his tastes and habits.

"These are all ours," said Mary Magdalen, "the gifts of our good uncle who delights to make us happy. Come, let us dress for the supper."

Domestics came at her call, and the ladies were attired in robes of the greatest magnificence. Their hair was dressed in the most graceful manner, sparkling with alternate flowers and gems. "All this is for Lazarus," said the sisters to each other, as they followed Mary Magdalen, blushing at themselves, down into the supper-room in a deep bas.e.m.e.nt almost under ground.

The supper-room was as gorgeously furnished as the bed-chambers. The table was placed on a raised platform at one end of the room, leaving a great s.p.a.ce for which our bewildered visitors could not imagine the use. The ceiling had a splendid painting of Aurora driving the chariot of the sun, attended by the Muses and the flying Hours. The walls were adorned with solid upright mirrors of polished bra.s.s. In every niche and corner was some exquisite marble, some nude figure from the Grecian mythology; the most beautiful of which was Leda caressing the swan, concealing within its white form the pa.s.sionate soul of Jove.

Caiaphas and Magistus reclined upon silken couches at a table which was loaded with savory viands and vessels of gold and silver containing delicious wines, and ornamented with brilliant vases of fruits and flowers. The scene was lighted by hundreds of wax candles of as many colors as the rainbow.

As soon as the women were handed to their places at the table, Martha exclaimed:

"And why could not poor aunt Ulema be brought down to enjoy this charming feast?"

And Mary added:

"And Lazarus, where is he?"