CHAPTER XII.
THE CHURCH MILITANT AND ORTHODOX.
IT was at a newly-established colony of Scythian Jews in the neighbourhood of Hebron that the travellers found Herschel Rubenssohn, roughly clad and labouring with his own hands like one of the fellahin. He had turned his back deliberately upon the days when English hearts had thrilled in response to his rehearsal of the tragedy of his race, and the Anti-Semites of the Continent had been lashed to frenzy by his cutting sarcasm. The pen was laid aside, and the poet was intent on the best methods of cultivating olives, and on finding new species of vines unaffected by the diseases which attacked those native to the country. Even these lowly tasks could not be performed in peace, for he was called upon incessantly to quell the disputes which arose among the pale-faced, gaberdined and ringleted denizens of the Ghetto who were his fellow-colonists. It was his duty, also, to act as interpreter for them with the Roumi authorities, and to mediate in the many misunderstandings that broke out between them and the peasants who worked for them. Cyril’s invitation to dinner he accepted with unfeigned pleasure, confessing that when he left London he had little expected ever to regard an opportunity of donning evening dress as an occasion of rejoicing. The momentary return to the old life, which he had so often contemned, after the manner of poets, as false and hollow, was a keen delight to him, and Mansfield found it hard to believe that the vague-eyed man of the world, who knew his London so thoroughly, could be one and the same with the industrious toiler of the morning. Presently, however, the curious effect produced by the contrast of the sunburnt face with the whiteness of the forehead where the hat had shaded it attracted his attention. Looking more closely at the guest, he saw that his delicate hands were roughened and blistered within, and he conceived a growing admiration for the man who had voluntarily left a life of ease for one of toil, purely in the hope of setting an example to his nation.
But this admiration was not fated to endure very long. As Rubenssohn grew accustomed to the company in which he found himself, the vagueness left his eyes. In Cyril he discovered one who appealed to a different side of his nature, and a mocking spirit took possession of him. Mansfield and the melancholy Paschics listened with bated breath while the guest embarked upon a career of destruction, sparing neither the beliefs common to mankind generally nor those of his own people. He ridiculed with the utmost impartiality the ideas of love and immortality, the tyranny of the Law, and the Messianic hopes of Rabbi Schaul. The keen arrows of his wit played round each subject in turn, disclosing with cruel certainty the weak spot or the flaw. He made no attempt to deny the degradation of his people, and in Mansfield’s view he proposed no remedy for it. He believed in the Jewish race, it seemed, and he accorded a qualified toleration to Judaism on account of its services in the preservation of the race, but his Judaism possessed neither prophecies nor the hope of a Messiah, and existed independently of any religious sanctions. Its ecclesiastical system had been evolved naturally enough during the progress of the race, and ascribed, as other nations ascribed their religions, to the guidance of a higher power. Freedom, toleration, a more natural mode of life, these things would in his view raise the Jews far above the level of other nations, and then the old fetters which had held the race together might safely be shaken off. Mansfield thought of the prosperous Jews whom he had met at Alexandria, and who enjoyed all these blessings already, and his heart rose in revolt against Rubenssohn’s philosophy. If this was to be the end, if the Jews had remained a separate people merely that in the end of the ages they might be better fed, clothed, housed, than the nations, throwing aside callously the prophecies which had cheered them and the faith that had sustained them in their sorrows, if they were to be bereft at once of hope and of religion, then the heaviest of their former woes would be a lighter curse than their new prosperity.
“I had rather be in the wrong with Lady Phil and Princess Soudaroff than in the right with Rubenssohn,” he decided, remembering how often he had listened to the old lady as she expounded her views on the Jewish question and her interpretation of prophecy, Philippa at her side concurring enthusiastically in all that was said. This time, however, he did not confide his feelings to Cyril.
Jerusalem was the next place of interest to be reached, and Mansfield had mapped out for himself a very definite plan for occupying his leisure hours here. He intended to visit all the missionary establishments in and around the city in which Lady Caerleon was interested, and to photograph them and their inmates. Any spare time was to be devoted to views of Jerusalem itself, and by dint of these labours Mansfield hoped to provide a peace-offering which would not be unacceptable to Philippa’s mother, and might even tend to soften her heart towards him. But his plans were interrupted, and his fair project brought to a premature conclusion, owing to the greed of human nature. No sooner was it known that Cyril had arrived in Jerusalem than his lodgings were fairly besieged. Jews, Mohammedans and Christians, Syrians, Levantines, Greeks, Albanians, European adventurers of all nations, crowded to wait upon him. Since the famous revelations of Dr Texelius, so promptly contradicted by the Pannonian official papers, nothing had been said of Count Mortimer as a candidate for the governorship of Palestine, but there appeared to be a general feeling that the future of the country lay in the hands of this unpretending traveller, and the time-servers would not lose their opportunity. Some of them wanted concessions and some contracts, some Government offices and some commissions in the Jewish army or police, some wished merely to gain the general goodwill of the possible ruler, and some were anxious to confer benefits on him, in the shape of invitations to their houses, or gifts of horses, carpets, and works of art, without, of course, the slightest ulterior design. Cyril disappointed them grievously by refusing alike their favours and their requests, assuring them that he was simply an agent of the Syndicate, and Mansfield developed a prickly suspiciousness that made him distrust any one who addressed him civilly. This was the result of an adventure of his own. Pausing in a back street one day to photograph a picturesque archway, he was accosted by a respectable citizen, who invited him into his garden, where was to be seen a piece of ruined wall on which no tourist’s eye had ever lighted. Mansfield accepted the invitation, took two or three photographs, and submitted to be regaled with coffee and sweetmeats, all before he discovered that his host had recognised him, and was anxious to obtain the contract for clothing the army of the Jewish State. Then he rose up and fled, with his faith in humanity sorely shattered, and kept rigidly to the beaten track until he was rejoiced by Cyril’s decision to leave the city for a short time. Business was impossible while the envoy was so persistently mobbed, and it was advisable to pay a flying visit to Jericho, since a sheikh in the neighbourhood of that place had threatened to make himself disagreeable with regard to the fords of the Jordan.
It was clear that Cyril’s movements must be kept to some extent a secret, if he was to conduct the negotiations with the Roumi authorities, for which he had come, without being pursued into the very audience-chamber by the greedy throng of privilege-hunters. Accordingly, he put the matter into the hands of the Chevalier Goldberg’s agent, who secured him quarters for the night at Jericho, in the house of a wealthy Jew, and despatched beforehand all that was necessary for comfort. In this way Mansfield and his employer were able to leave Jerusalem as if for a morning ride, and meeting, when out of sight of the city, the guide and escort provided for them, ride on at once to Jericho. The sight of the huge Scythian hospice, constructed of late years for the accommodation of pilgrims, suggested to Mansfield that their visit might have excited less remark in the place if they had sought a lodging there, but Cyril laughed at the idea.
“I didn’t know you were so anxious to see the last of me,” he said. “The monks would indeed think that their enemy was delivered into their hand, and it would be sheer ingratitude not to prepare a special cup of coffee for his benefit.”
The sheikh proved more easy to deal with than had been expected, and Cyril and Mansfield spent the evening at his village, discussing in the most friendly spirit the various matters in dispute. As the guests rode back to their quarters, passing the great fountain called Ain-es-Sultan, Mansfield directed Cyril’s attention to several lights which dotted the side of a precipitous mountain about a mile away.
“What can those be?” he said. “I didn’t see any houses there by daylight.”
“That must be Jebel Karantal, the Mount of Temptation,” said Cyril, “and the lights come from the hermits’ caves. We might ride over there in the morning, if you are anxious to see the holy men in their native dirt.”
As Mansfield reflected that the picture of a real live hermit might help to console Philippa for all the photographs he had not had time to take at Jerusalem, he accepted the offer gratefully, and did not fail to remind Cyril of it the next morning. They rode at an easy pace across the plain, with its thickets of tamarisk and thorn, starting so many partridges and other birds that the hunter’s instinct awoke in Mansfield, and he lamented more than once that they were not spending several days at Jericho, so as to get a little shooting. Arrived at the foot of the path which led up the mountain, they found standing there a horse with a European saddle, in the charge of a native servant, who told their grooms that his master, a Frank gentleman, had started about half an hour ago to make the ascent.
“We are a little late,” said Cyril. “Evidently this place is becoming popular as a tourist resort. I see a whole horde of Scythian pilgrims in the distance,” and he pointed to a dingy mass of people, bearing banners and sacred pictures, and headed by two priests in shining vestments, that was approaching from the direction of Jericho. “But they are not likely to have brought cameras with them, and we must only hope for your sake, Mansfield, that our fellow-countryman has been equally forgetful.”
Leaving their horses with the grooms, they began to make the ascent of the mountain, finding the only path that offered itself alarmingly narrow and steep. It grew worse instead of better higher up, and when they were between three and four hundred feet above the plain, Cyril wiped his heated brow and sat down upon a large stone which lay temptingly in the shadow of the rock, on a ledge into which the path widened at this point.
“I draw the line here, Mansfield. I may be getting old, but my life is valuable to me, and I don’t feel justified in endangering it by any further breakneck feats. If you are conscious of a yearning to risk your neck on that giddy ascent in front, by way of emulating a fly walking up a wall, pray go on, and I will sit here and await developments. It will be some consolation to your afflicted relatives that I am at hand to give your scattered remains decent burial.”
Mansfield had been carrying his camera under his arm, but now he slung it over his shoulder by its strap, so as to leave his hands free, laughing as he did so, and applied himself to the further climb with heroic determination, steadfastly avoiding the temptation to look downwards. If his glance strayed for a moment from the almost perpendicular path to the sheer precipice below, he felt sure that nothing could save him from making personal acquaintance with its depths. Presently he came to another ledge, which formed the approach to the mouth of a cave, but glancing into the semi-darkness within the dwelling, he caught sight of a pith helmet. It was clear that the tourist whose horse they had seen below was talking to the hermit, and Mansfield seized joyfully the opportunity of outstripping him and reaching the summit first. Another terrific climb brought him to the foot of an unsafe-looking flight of wooden steps, at the top of which an elderly monk, very fat and very dirty, stood smiling hospitably. Mansfield unstrapped his camera and photographed him in the act, then accepted his beaming invitation to mount the steps to his cave. Here he took one or two more photographs, making gallant attempts the while to talk to his host in classical Greek pronounced in the modern fashion, and smiling broadly, by way of making his goodwill evident. His conversation or his smiles, or both, seemed to win the heart of the hermit, for he found himself invited, partly by signs, to sling the camera over his shoulder again, preparatory to climbing another dizzy ascent, at the summit of which was situated the rock-hewn chapel of which his host was the guardian. This was exactly what Mansfield was most anxious to see, and he accepted the invitation with alacrity, but stepped first to the edge of the little rock platform, in order to estimate its distance from the plain.
To his surprise the greater part of the way he had traversed was clearly visible, and he could see Cyril peacefully smoking a cigar where he had left him. Receiving a wave of the hand in answer to his shout, he was about to follow his guide up the face of the rock, which at this point justified Cyril’s comparison by appearing quite perpendicular, when his attention was attracted by the sight of a crowd of people gathered round the horses and their grooms at the foot of the hill. They were the Scythian pilgrims whom Cyril had pointed out to him, and they were buzzing round the horses like a swarm of angry bees. For a moment he thought they must be intending to steal them, then he told himself that the presence of the grooms would prevent that: the pilgrims were merely examining the novel English saddles. He began the ascent, but, before passing round a projecting rock which would cut off his view, he looked down again at the plain. The pilgrims had quitted the horses, and were rushing up the path in a confused mass, priests and people mixed together, one man only being a little in advance. Mansfield’s heart misgave him, and he pointed out the crowd to the hermit; but it did not need the old man’s raised hands and look of shocked surprise to tell him that the pilgrims should have mounted the hill in slow procession, singing solemn litanies, and not with this indecorous haste. Cyril’s allusion of the day before to the monks of the Scythian hospice recurred to him, and, explaining hastily to the hermit that he must go back at once, he turned to retrace his steps. He tried to shout a warning from the platform in front of the cave; but it was evident that Cyril regarded his frenzied gestures merely as the result of an ebullition of animal spirits, for he waved his hand with the same placidity as before. Giving up the attempt to make himself understood, Mansfield addressed his energies afresh to the task of descending, which proved to be even more difficult and dangerous than that of ascending had been. He was out of sight of Cyril now; but before he had covered half the distance that separated them, a sound mounted to his ear which made him hurl away his camera and dash headlong down the path, regardless of his own safety. It was the crack of a revolver, the sound of which travelled far in the clear air.
In the meantime, Cyril, smoking quietly on his fragment of rock, and all unconscious of danger, was disturbed by the noise of angry voices. Almost as they reached his ear, a haggard man, in the flat cap and long, dull-grey coat of the Scythian peasant, rushed round the corner of the path, and recoiled precipitately on catching sight of him.
“Odd!” said Cyril to himself. “Mad, perhaps,” and mechanically his hand sought his revolver in its accustomed pocket. His fingers had scarcely closed upon it when the throng of pilgrims burst upon him with furious shouts, and he had barely time to set his back against the rocky wall before he found himself confronted by a semicircle of angry faces, clenched fists, and menacing clubs.
“Kill him! kill the renegade!” was the cry. “Kill the traitor, and save the Holy Places from the Jewish dogs!”
“You had better go on your way quietly,” shouted Cyril in his best Scythian. “I am armed,” and he drew out the revolver.
“There are stones enough!” cried a voice, and a man who had found a point of vantage flung a jagged piece of rock which struck Cyril on the temple. The sight of the flowing blood appeared to stimulate the ferocity of the mob, and deprive its members of such hesitation as they may have felt in throwing themselves upon a solitary man, for they sprang forward with a howl. Cyril had only time to fire one shot into the air, in the hope partly of attracting Mansfield’s notice and partly of frightening his assailants, before his right arm was broken by a blow from a club as he raised the revolver, which dropped from his hand. Hustled, beaten, and knocked about, the blood streaming from his face, he had one thing, and only one, in his favour, and this was that the pilgrims were so closely pressed together on the narrow ledge as to be unable to get him down and trample upon him. Presently he became aware that one of them, who must have caught it as it fell, was holding the revolver to his head. Before the trigger could be pulled, however, the voice of a priest, who had mounted upon the fragment of rock upon which the victim had been sitting, rang like a trumpet across the din.
“No shots! no shots! Will you give the heathen Roumis cause to accuse us of murder? Throw the apostate over the precipice, so that it may not be known whose hand executed judgment upon him.”
The man who held the revolver tossed it away reluctantly, and joined with the rest in attempting to hustle Cyril to the edge of the path. Crippled as he was, he fought savagely, contesting every inch of ground, determined not to give his assailants the opportunity of seizing him and hurling him down headlong. “If I go over, I won’t go alone,” was the thought in his mind; and he fixed on a huge fellow, whose efforts to catch him up bodily he had successfully foiled, as the companion whom he would clutch with his last strength and drag to destruction in his company. The unequal struggle was approaching its only possible end as Cyril was driven farther and farther from the rock. The pilgrims nearest the brink were beginning to edge away to the right and left in order to secure their own safety, thereby lessening the pressure on that side and adding to the force arrayed against the doomed man, when a bullet whizzed past Cyril’s ear and buried itself in the shoulder of the giant on whom he had decided as his comrade in the fatal plunge.
“Bravo, Mansfield!” Cyril gathered breath to shout; but before the words were out of his mouth there was another shot, and the club fell from an uplifted hand which was brandishing it over his head. Crack! crack! crack! came the sharp whip-like reports, and man after man pushed his way, cursing, out of the mass, each effectually disabled for the time, but not one mortally wounded so far as Cyril could see.
“Mansfield never fired those shots!” was his mental comment, as the number of his assailants continued to diminish, until only a few remained on the ledge, making no attempt to molest him, but looking about in bewilderment to see where the shots came from.
“Git!” said a stentorian voice which seemed to resound from overhead, and the crestfallen pilgrims, grasping the meaning of the monosyllable, embraced with thankfulness the permission accorded them to retire. Once safely round the corner of the rock, they collected their wounded and made their way down the hill. The speaker—a lean, elderly man in white clothes and a pith helmet—kept them covered with his revolver until they were out of sight, then let himself lightly down to the path, and approached Cyril, who had sunk on the ground in perilous proximity to the edge of the precipice.
“Well, sir?” he asked slowly.
“I am infinitely indebted to you,” said Cyril, looking up with difficulty as his rescuer reached him.
“Not you, sir,” was the prompt reply. “When I saw those Scythian cusses preparing a new Holy Place for themselves by conducting a Christian martyrdom on this spot, it struck me that Scythia had quite as many Holy Places in this territory as was healthy for her, so I just started in with my six-shooter right away. You bet it went to my heart not to lay out two or three of the fellows, and specially the reverend gentleman that took the rock for a pulpit; but I know the ways of the Roumi authorities, and I didn’t want my business interrupted by a judicial inquiry any more than you would. But I guess there’s a dozen or so that will carry about with ’em for some time a pleasing little souvenir of me, any way.”
While the stranger spoke, he had been helping Cyril gently back to his former seat on the stone, and now began to bind up the wound in his head with a handkerchief.
“Surely I know your voice?” said Cyril faintly. “It seems quite familiar, and yet I can’t recall where I have heard it.”
The rescuer ceased his work, and stepped back for a moment. “The same as ever!” he exclaimed in admiration. “Sir, I have many a time heard you called the first gentleman in Europe, but I never expected you would remember me, when the last deal we did together was over twenty years ago.”
“Mr Hicks of the ‘Crier’?” asked Cyril, with an uncertain smile.
“Sir, you are correct. Elkanah B. Hicks, of the ‘Empire City Crier,’ who would be sitting in the head office of that paper as news editor at this moment if he was not a fool. But he has got the wandering strain in his blood, and threw up his berth to come out here, with the excuse that it needed the best man the paper had got to fathom you, Count.”
“I am flattered. Then it was not Turkish you spoke just now?”
“No, sir. I dispersed that crowd by means of the beautiful language which is the common heritage of your nation and mine. Do you find yourself comfortably fixed now, Count?”
He stepped back again to look critically at his work, just as Mansfield, with blazing eyes and panting breath, charged down upon the ledge, revolver in hand.
“Thank God you’re safe, sir!” he cried, with something like a sob. “Where are the villains?”
“Hold him, Hicks!” cried Cyril feebly, as his secretary dashed past him in the direction taken by the fugitives. “He is suffering from the usual British malady, and yearns to go and kill something. He isn’t safe.”
“Young man,” said Mr Hicks, flinging his sinewy arms round the intending avenger, and holding him fast, “the bugle has sounded the ‘cease fire,’ and I guess you had better obey. Here’s your boss with a broken arm and pretty near bleeding to death, and no doctor in this forsaken locality but the one at the Scythian hospice. I reckon we won’t requisition his services, but I shall want your help if I am to fix things myself, old campaigner though I am. Give me that shooting-iron for the present. Those things have a nasty trick of going off of themselves when a young fellow is seeing red.”
Sobered by Mr Hicks’s speech, and very much ashamed of his temporary madness, Mansfield surrendered his revolver, and returned to Cyril’s side, feeling an irresistible inclination to choke.
“My dear youth, don’t be an idiot,” said Cyril, and the lump in Mansfield’s throat vanished instantly. He even laughed, in a husky and shame-faced manner.
“That’s better,” said Mr Hicks. “Take this chunk of wood, my young friend, and split it in two, if you have a knife about you.” He handed him one of the broken clubs with which the pilgrims had been armed instead of the regulation staves, and Mansfield succeeded in obtaining two fairly suitable pieces of wood, rounded on one side and flat on the other. The surgeon continued to improve the occasion even while the operation of setting the broken arm was proceeding, talking meditatively as he worked, perhaps with the benevolent intention of diverting the patient’s thoughts from what was going on.
“Yes, young man, I like your face, and I guess I don’t object to your grit; but you’ll have to learn how to take things. A week as a special in war time would teach you a thing or two. What’s happened to that kodak of yours, now? I saw you figuring around with it while I was interviewing the old nigger who calls himself a saint up there. You hurled it away, did you, just as if it was a rock? and all the pictures with it that you had concluded to take home to your best girl? Now what a wicked waste! Pull, pull harder; that’s right. Keep cool, young man; the frozen deep is not a circumstance to the coolness you want before you’ll make a good man at a pinch.”
With such cheerful counsels as these Mr Hicks lightened the gloom of the painful process he had in hand, but Mansfield scarcely heard them, in his anxiety for Cyril. At last the patient opened his eyes and said, “Don’t be too hard on him, Hicks. He’s a good chap all round.” The busy surgeon nodded.
“I guess I’d turn him out a better if I had him on the ‘Crier’ staff,” he said; but when the work was over, and Mansfield had gone to fetch the servants, that they might lend their aid in carrying Cyril down the path, Mr Hicks smiled confidentially at his patient.
“That young man has a heart of gold, sir, and worships your very shadow. It’s not his fault that he hasn’t enjoyed my experience, though it might have been awkward for you if I hadn’t chanced to be wandering around in these parts. I guess, if you’ll allow me, that I’ll fix my camp next to yours while you stay at Jericho. The wily Scythian will find that it’s another story when he has to do business with Elkanah B. Hicks.”