Chapter XXV: What Had Happened

Pontius Pilate fulfilled his promise; and I told him my whole story from the time of my resurrection until my happy release by his good centurion. When I was speaking about the invisible friend, the flower let down in the basket, and the parchment with its rude letters, his face grew sad. When I finished by asking him to inform me how and from whom he learned my condition, so that I could discover, reward and love my deliverer as he deserved, he drew a deep sigh and said:

“I fear I have done a very hasty and cruel thing!

“The man who informed me of your condition was the African who accompanied you to Rome, and who endeavored to rescue the slave from the fish-pond of Hortensius.”

“My brave and good Anthony!” I exclaimed eagerly.

“He eluded my guards; and although wounded by one of them for his temerity, he rushed into my presence as I was finishing my morning meal. The words he spoke were substantially these:

“‘Lazarus, whom you brought from Rome, is confined in a dungeon underneath the house of Magistus, in Bethany. They have starved him nearly to death, and he has been without water for a day and a night. Send help to him speedily, or it will be too late.’”

“Noble, courageous Anthony!” I exclaimed. “He shall have half of my possessions!” but I was disquieted by the darkening brow of Pilate.

“I asked him,” continued the Roman governor, “if he had been in your employ since our return from Rome.

“‘No!’ he replied, ‘I have seen him but once, and that was in prison.’”

“He spoke the truth,” said I; “he always spoke the truth!”

“I thought he was a messenger sent by some friend of yours. I remembered him immediately, and I remembered also my promise to Hortensius. I saw in him only an audacious criminal, returning without leave from an exile which had been decreed perpetual.”

“And you threw him into prison?”

“If I had known of his beautiful and heroic devotion to you, his fate would have been different.”

The evident remorse of Pilate startled me.

“And his fate? What was his fate? He is not dead,” said I, elevating my voice.

“He was beheaded immediately.”

“O cruel, cruel, cruel fate!” I exclaimed; and regardless of ceremony, I mourned for my dead friend with bitter tears and bitter words in the presence of his august murderer.

“I feel,” said Pilate, when he bade me a friendly adieu—“I feel that I have discharged a severe duty in this matter; but the generous conduct of this African,—for he certainly must have known that he endangered his own life by appearing before me,—would have entitled him to a full pardon, which I would have given with pleasure for his own merits as well as for your sake.”

As soon as my Christian friends heard of my reappearance, they crowded to see me. From them I learned the sorrows and trials my sisters had undergone, as well as the strange events which preceded, accompanied and followed the crucifixion of Jesus.

Magistus and Caiaphas had set afloat the story that I was engaged in the raid upon the city of Jerusalem, made for the double purpose of robbery and murder, by Barabbas and his party; many of whom were deluded into the enterprise under the idea that it was a patriotic rebellion against the Roman yoke. They also suborned witnesses to prove that I was killed in the night attack, and was buried by them with a crowd of other rioters who fell by the Roman arms.

This led to the confiscation of our estates; and as Mary and Martha were helpless and beautiful young women without relatives to protect them, they were assigned to the special guardianship of Magistus. Caiaphas approved in strong terms this decree of the Sanhedrim, eulogized Magistus for his generous character and patriarchal virtues, and congratulated the sisters of a vile robber, themselves the disciples of a base impostor, on their extraordinary good fortune in being placed under the enviable protection of one of the shining lights of Israel.

The wickedness and duplicity of this high priest will be almost incredible to future times. But the age was evil; the church was corrupt; and public and private morality reduced to the lowest ebb. The priesthood was a matter of bargain and sale. The office of high priest, the holiest and highest in the Jewish theocracy, was obtained by bribery and fraud and in more than one instance by murder. Caiaphas was one of the most consummate hypocrites that ever entered the holy of holies. He might have changed places with Barabbas, and justice and religion would not have fared the worse for it.

My sisters, terrified at the thought of falling into the power of Magistus, their remembrance of whom was anything but pleasant, fled from our house and concealed themselves with some of the disciples of Jesus. The two chief miscreants of the Sanhedrim seemed determined to get possession of these unhappy and forlorn women; and they instituted the most rigorous search through the houses of all persons who were suspected of harboring them. Their evil passions seemed only half gratified by my destruction and the seizure of our property. Fearful would have been the fate of these angelic friends of Jesus, had they fallen at that time into the hands of his fiercest enemies.

Spies and detectives fully authorized to search, arrest, bribe, intimidate and even kill, were set upon their track in every direction. The country became so unsafe for them, that they were conveyed by stealthy night marches to the hut of some friendly fishermen away down on the sea of Galilee. Even there they were pursued; and Peter the apostle rowed them across the sea on a dark and stormy night, and concealed them in the very tombs whence issued the maniac out of whom Jesus cast a legion of devils.

After many sufferings and hair-breadth escapes, they were conveyed out of the country, and at that moment were living concealed in the city of Antioch, at the house of a poor but worthy man—himself a Christian, for Christ had cured him and nine others of the leprosy; and he alone of the ten had turned back to give thanks.

I wept when I thought of the unhappiness of my poor sisters; and I felt an urgent desire to regain my shattered strength and rejoin them.

The story of the crucifixion of the Lord struck me with wonder and awe. I was not surprised that Judas Iscariot had betrayed him. But the pathetic incidents of his last supper, his betrayal, his trial, his crucifixion, his resurrection, his appearance to his disciples, and his ascension, affected me to tears, and filled me with a spirit of humility, love and prayer.

“Those are pictures,” said I, to my friends, “which will be painted on the heart of the Christian Church in the colors of heaven, and which the powers of death and hell can never efface.

“If such,” thought I to myself—“if such is the effect of this divine history as it appears in the literal form to man, what must be the power and glory of the spiritual signification of these great and holy things, when they are studied by angels in the light of heaven!”

Barabbas and his bravest lieutenants, including the Son of the Desert, had fallen into the hands of the rulers. Barabbas conveyed to Magistus a threat, that if he were not released he would expose to the Sanhedrim his attempt to murder his nephew. Whether Magistus and Caiaphas, who acted always in concert, feared an exposure of this kind, which is not probable, considering the source whence the charge would come, or whether they followed spontaneously the wicked instincts of their own souls, they procured the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Christ.

The mercy extended to Barabbas was not given to his followers; and two of them were selected to be crucified with Jesus, to increase the ignominy of his execution. And so Christ was crucified between two thieves—or men so reputed.

One of these was the Son of the Desert.

This brave, wild man, strangely compounded of good and evil, was heavily ironed and cast into the deepest dungeon. Magistus had a habit, consistent with his cruel disposition, of visiting prisoners condemned to death, and enjoying the terrors with which they contemplated their approaching fate.

The Son of the Desert did not gratify his passion for witnessing the sufferings of abject misery. He was singularly cheerful and buoyant. He declared himself not only willing but anxious to die. He had nothing to contemplate with pleasure when he looked back; and as to the future, if the soul were really immortal and a second life were given him, he was determined to start upon it with new principles and motives.

Magistus was astonished at the calm, philosophic spirit of this poor wretch, who had never heard of philosophy.

When Magistus was leaving, the Son of the Desert took a ring from his finger and said:

“You are not too proud to do one little favor for a condemned criminal. Give this ring to Martha, the sister of Lazarus. Tell her it has accomplished the mission upon which she sent it. She can touch it without shame. It has been an angel of light to me. Since I have worn it, I have seized no man’s goods, I have taken no man’s life except in lawful battle. If I have adhered to my band, it was to moderate their passions, to stay the hand of violence, to plead for mercy, to assist the captive, and where possible to make restitution. It found me a slave, it has made me a freeman. It found me a robber, it has made me a patriot.”

He was about to say more, but suddenly checking some rising emotion, he clenched one hand upon his heart, and waving the other, exclaimed:

“Adieu! adieu!”

Neither the message nor the ring was delivered to Martha. The story was told to members of the Sanhedrim, in whom it awakened no generous sentiment, but only excited their amusement or mockery. The ring was taken to Ulema, my poor aunt, who still retained her wonderful clairvoyant power, which indeed seemed to increase as her general health declined. Magistus expected by the ring to obtain knowledge of all the movements and actions of the formidable band of Barabbas; for the clairvoyant can see the past as well as the present, and with the proper clue, can go far back, on the stream of time, to the very origin of things. Rumor says that the ring made strange and unexpected revelations, not only about the band of Barabbas, but about the early history of the Son of the Desert. Ulema found in the last possessor of the ring her own only and lost child, who had been stolen from the court-yard by one of a prowling party of Egyptians, when he was a very little boy. No discovery was ever made of his whereabouts, and her grief at the event was one cause of her after seclusion and ill health.

Magistus was astounded, and perhaps pained, on finding that his own child had been crucified with Jesus. It was too late to do aught but bury the whole matter with the other painful things in his memory. He said nothing to Ulema on the subject, who was of course unconscious of it all in her waking state.

A strange thing, however, now took place. The moment she passed into her trance state, she began to weep and wail over her lost child. Her clairvoyance put her in full possession of all the facts of his life and death. The mother’s heart broke under the immense sorrow. She pined rapidly, and her white hands were soon folded in that sweet sleep which precedes the celestial waking.

We have a life within our life, like a wheel within a wheel!

With no knowledge of his parentage, no friend in whom to confide, no heart to receive and give a last adieu, the Son of the Desert bore his own cross up Calvary, and was nailed upon it by the Roman soldiers.

He had never seen Jesus before. He had heard of him only through enemies. He supposed him to be some fanatic or impostor, or perhaps some political maniac who aspired to the crown of Judea. At first he joined his fellow-sufferer on the other side of Christ in railing against the king and miracle-worker, whose sceptre and miraculous powers seemed so useless to himself and others in his last extremity.

But the conduct and words of Jesus smote him to the heart. Through that secret affiliation and sympathy by which one brave and good man recognizes another in the hour of sternest trial, the Son of the Desert, educated only in heart, perceived with the heart that the kingdom of Christ was a spiritual kingdom. Divining intuitively the mission of infinite love in which the Lord was engaged, he confesses his own sin, rebukes and silences his fellow-sinner, and pleads for remembrance in the hour of triumph which he sees is approaching for the King of kings.

Brave, repentant soul! Jesus is everywhere; in heaven; in earth; in hell. And shortly thou wast with Him and He with thee, in that paradise or garden of the soul, in which the new life, forgetful of the old, begins to bud and blossom!

The great tragedy was enacted. The disciples at first stood afar off. But as the death-scenes drew nearer, and the curiosity of the crowd increased, military discipline was somewhat relaxed, and the people were permitted to press closer, and those who had special claims were allowed to come up and stand very near the dying sufferers. It was thus that the Apostle John, and Mary the mother of the Lord, were in speaking distance in his last moments. It was then that He gave each of them so tenderly to the other.

Aside from this awful central scene, which will shine in all history as the pivotal event of the world, a pathetic side-scene was enacted, of which there is no historian but myself; and even I was not present, but relate it at second-hand. My authority, however, was a man of truth, John the Apostle, the exile of Patmos.

Far off in the crowd was a solitary being whose eyes were fixed continually on the Son of the Desert. He stood with his brawny arms folded spasmodically across his chest. Great tears ran slowly down his cheeks. That man was poor and ignorant and ragged and black, but he had a noble soul. It was Anthony, the Ethiopian, who, exiled by Pilate into the desert, had there met Barabbas and his band. He soon attached himself by a certain instinct to the only noble spirit in the party. He followed the fortunes of this man; and, true to his African genius, he imitated his character. The Son of the Desert was not ashamed of his humble disciple.

Anthony escaped death and capture on the terrible night of the riot. But his master was taken; and the faithful servant prowled about the suburbs and the prisons, risking detection and arrest in order to catch a glimpse, if possible, of him whom his soul loved. It was all in vain. He followed the vast crowd which went out to the crucifixion, pushed aside by the spears of the soldiers, and found himself on Calvary a witness of the last act in the great drama—an act which disclosed the mighty power of Love, and foreshadowed and meant the redemption of the world.

When the people were permitted to approach nearer to the crosses, Anthony came very close to that whereon his master, the Zebra of the Desert, hung in agony. No one noticed the ragged black man. He at last caught the eye of the poor sufferer, who smiled a sweet recognition. He was cheered. He felt happy to have one follower, one soul that loved and pitied him. Poor Anthony wept as if his heart would break.

He procured a large goat-skin bottle full of water, and stood at the cross bathing his master’s wounded feet with the cooling stream. The guards wearied, sickened with the prolonged sufferings of the victims, did not prevent him. He listened to the conversation between Christ and the repentant sinner; and for the first time he seemed aware that there was another great tragedy going on besides the one in which he was especially interested.

He sat or squatted upon the ground in front of these dying men, looking first at one and then at the other; studying also the faces of the group of holy women, who with the good John stood near the central cross. A great idea was dawning on the benighted soul of the Ethiopian, a great light, a great glory.

Why is it that the beams of celestial light pass by the palace and illumine the hut?—pass by the cultivated and learned and gladden the hearts of the simple and child-like?

When the Divine Man, praying for his enemies, gave up the ghost; when the great shadows came over the sun; when the bereaved women raised their wail of sorrow; when the centurion exclaimed, “Truly this was the Son of God;” another convert—humbler, lowlier than they all—was kneeling at the foot of the cross, praying to Him who hung upon it: “Lord, remember me also when thou comest into thy kingdom.” Anthony assisted the disciples in taking down the body of Jesus from the cross. That night, aided by John and two other disciples who had witnessed his tender devotion to the Son of the Desert, he took down the body of his master, wrapped it in a new winding-sheet, and buried it in a corner of the Potter’s Field.

When washing the body for this lowly burial, they discovered some beautiful red letters pricked or burned into the skin immediately over the heart. They were these:

“Martha, sister of Lazarus.”

Anthony followed John to his home and became his servant. He soon learned the anxieties and conjectures which prevailed about my sudden disappearance. Remembering my face at the prison window, he became convinced that I was still a prisoner. He determined, with John’s approval, to devote himself to finding and delivering me. He had no adviser, for John was busy in saving my sisters from the cruel Magistus, and was at Ephesus when I was delivered from the dungeon.

How well he executed his trust, the reader already knows. But how he did it; how he discovered my whereabouts; how he got into Magistus’ employ; how he obtained the post whence he could aid me; his difficulties, his hopes, his fears, his emotions—all were buried with him—alas!

He will tell the whole story to me when I meet him in heaven, as I most assuredly shall.

Poor Anthony! brave to impetuosity, extravagantly generous, meek to the deepest humility, faithful to the last degree! In his short, obscure life is concentrated a glory superior to all Greek or Roman fame.

One more piece of news occasioned me as much surprise as anything already narrated. This, however, unlike the rest, was joyful. About a week before my deliverance, my good uncle Beltrezzor had arrived in Jerusalem from Persia. He had heard, through his correspondent in the Holy City, of my supposed death, of the crucifixion of Jesus, and the mysterious disappearance of my sisters. He at once suspected some evil, and determined to hasten to their assistance. He found considerable difficulty in converting all his property into jewels and precious stones; and still more in bringing everything safely through countries which were at war and infested by prowling bands of deserters and thieves.

He had started for Antioch only the day before, having heard that John had conducted my sisters safely to that city.

Pilate was not slow in bringing Magistus to justice. Finding that an exposure of his infamously cruel character was already made, and that the Roman governor himself had taken part against him, hundreds of people whom he had injured in person or property came forward to assist in the prosecution. He was convicted of many crimes, his estates confiscated; he was exiled the country and forbidden to return under penalty of death.

It was ten days before I was able to travel. I chid the tardy hours that kept me from my beloved sisters and my dear old uncle, the disciple of Zoroaster.

At last the word came:

“To Antioch!”