Tancred - Benjamin Disraeli (little readers txt) 📗

looked at her with deep interest as her eye flashed fire, and her beautiful cheek was for a moment suffused with the crimson cloud of indignant passion; and then he said, 'You speak of things that deeply interest me, or I should not be in this land. But tell me: it cannot be denied that, whatever the cause, the miracle exists; and that the Hebrews, alone of the ancient races, remain, and are found in every country, a memorial of the mysterious and mighty past.'

'Their state may be miraculous without being penal. But why miraculous? Is it a miracle that Jehovah should guard his people? And can He guard them better than by endowing them with faculties superior to those of the nations among whom they dwell?'

'I cannot believe that merely human agencies could have sustained a career of such duration and such vicissitudes.'

'As for human agencies, we have a proverb: "The will of man is the servant of God." But if you wish to make a race endure, rely upon it you should expatriate them. Conquer them, and they may blend with their conquerors; exile them, and they will live apart and for ever. To expatriate is purely oriental, quite unknown to the modern world. We were speaking of the Armenians, they are Christians, and good ones, I believe.'

'I have understood very orthodox.' 'Go to Armenia, and you will not find an Armenian. They, too, are an expatriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: "In every city of the East I find a home." They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races, and little degenerated: with all our industry, and much of our energy; I would say, with all our human virtues, though it cannot be expected that they should possess our divine qualities; they have not produced Gods and prophets, and are proud that they can trace up their faith to one of the obscurest of the Hebrew apostles, and who never knew his great master.'

'But the Armenians are found only in the East,' said Tancred.

'Ah!' said the lady, with a sarcastic smile; 'it is exile to Europe, then, that is the curse: well, I think you have some reason. I do not know much of your quarter of the globe: Europe is to Asia what America is to Europe. But I have felt the winds of the Exuine blowing up the Bosphorus; and, when the Sultan was once going to cut off our heads for helping the Egyptians, I passed some months at Vienna. Oh! how I sighed for my beautiful Damascus!'

'And for your garden at Bethany?' said Tancred.

'It did not exist then. This is a recent creation,' said the lady. 'I have built a nest in the chink of the hills, that I might look upon Arabia; and the palm tree that invited you to honour my domain was the contribution of my Arab grandfather to the only garden near Jerusalem. But I want to ask you another question. What, on the whole, is the thing most valued in Europe?'

Tancred pondered; and, after a slight pause, said, 'I think I know what ought to be most valued in Europe; it is something very different from what I fear I must confess is most valued there. My cheek burns while I say it; but I think, in Europe, what is most valued is money.'

'On the whole,' said the lady, 'he that has most money there is most honoured?'

'Practically, I apprehend so.'

'Which is the greatest city in Europe?'

'Without doubt, the capital of my country, London.'

'Greater I know it is than Vienna; but is it greater than Paris?'

'Perhaps double the size of Paris.'

'And four times that of Stamboul! What a city! Why 'tis Babylon! How rich the most honoured man must be there! Tell me, is he a Christian?'

'I believe he is one of your race and faith.' 'And in Paris; who is the richest man in Paris?' 'The brother, I believe, of the richest man in London.'

'I know all about Vienna,' said the lady, smiling. 'Caesar makes my countrymen barons of the empire, and rightly, for it would fall to pieces in a week without their support. Well, you must admit that the European part of the curse has not worked very fatally.'

'I do not see,' said Tancred thoughtfully, after a short pause, 'that the penal dispersion of the Hebrew nation is at all essential to the great object of the Christian scheme. If a Jew did not exist, that would equally have been obtained.'

'And what do you hold to be the essential object of the Christian scheme?' 'The Expiation.'

'Ah!' said the lady, in a tone of much solemnity, 'that is a great idea; in harmony with our instincts, with our traditions, our customs. It is deeply impressed upon the convictions of this land. Shaped as you Christians offer the doctrine, it loses none of its sublimity; or its associations, full at the same time of mystery, power, and solace. A sacrificial Mediator with Jehovah, that expiatory intercessor born from the chosen house of the chosen people, yet blending in his inexplicable nature the divine essence with the human elements, appointed before all time, and purifying, by his atoning blood, the myriads that preceded and the myriads that will follow us, without distinction of creed or clime, this is what you believe. I acknowledge the vast conception, dimly as my brain can partially embrace it. I understand thus much: the human race is saved; and, without the apparent agency of a Hebrew prince, it could not have been saved. Now tell me: suppose the Jews had not prevailed upon the Romans to crucify Jesus, what would have become of the Atonement?'

'I cannot permit myself to contemplate such contingencies,' said Tancred. 'The subject is too high for me to touch with speculation. I must not even consider an event that had been pre-ordained by the Creator of the world for countless ages.'

'Ah!' said the lady; 'pre-ordained by the Creator of the world for countless ages! Where, then, was the inexpiable crime of those who fulfilled the beneficent intention? The holy race supplied the victim and the immolators. What other race could have been entrusted with such a consummation? Was not Abraham prepared to sacrifice even his son? And with such a doctrine, that embraces all space and time; nay more, chaos and eternity; with divine persons for the agents, and the redemption of the whole family of man for the subject; you can mix up the miserable persecution of a single race! And this is practical, not doctrinal Christianity. It is not found in your Christian books, which were all written by Jews; it must have been made by some of those Churches to which you have referred me. Persecute us! Why, if you believe what you profess, you should kneel to us! You raise statues to the hero who saves a country. We have saved the human race, and you persecute us for doing it.'

'I am no persecutor,' said Tancred, with emotion; 'and, had I been so, my visit to Bethany would have cleansed my heart of such dark thoughts.'

'We have some conclusions in common,' said his companion, rising. 'We agree that half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. Now let me ask one more question. Which is the superior race, the worshipped or the worshippers?'

Tancred looked up to reply, but the lady had disappeared.


CHAPTER XXVII.


Fakredeen and the Rose of Sharon


BEFORE Tancred could recover from his surprise, the kiosk was invaded by a crowd of little grinning negro pages, dressed in white tunics, with red caps and slippers. They bore a number of diminutive trays of ebony inlaid with tortoiseshell, and the mother-o'-pearl of Joppa, and covered with a great variety of dishes. It was in vain that he would have signified to them that he had no wish to partake of the banquet, and that he attempted to rise from his mat. They understood nothing that he said, but always grinning and moving about him with wonderful quickness, they fastened a napkin of the finest linen, fringed with gold, round his neck, covered the mats and the border of the fountain with their dishes and vases of differently-coloured sherbets, and proceeded, notwithstanding all his attempts at refusal, to hand him their dainties in due order. Notwithstanding his present tone of mind, which was ill-adapted to any carnal gratification, Tancred had nevertheless been an unusual number of hours without food. He had made during the period no inconsiderable exertion, and was still some distance from the city. Though he resigned himself perforce to the care of his little attendants, their solicitude therefore was not inappropriate. He partook of some of their dishes, and when he had at length succeeded in conveying to them his resolution to taste no more, they cleared the kiosk with as marvellous a celerity as they had stored it, and then two of them advanced with a nargileh and a chibouque, to offer their choice to their guest. Tan-cred placed the latter for a moment to his mouth, and then rising, and making signs to the pages that he would now return, they danced before him in the path till he had reached the other side of the area of roses, and then, with a hundred bows, bending, they took their leave of him.

The sun had just sunk as Tancred quitted the garden: a crimson glow, shifting, as he proceeded, into rich tints of purple and of gold, suffused the stern Judaean hills, and lent an almost supernatural lustre to the landscape; lighting up the wild gorges, gilding the distant glens, and still kindling the superior elevations with its living blaze. The air, yet fervid, was freshened by a slight breeze that came over the wilderness from the Jordan, and the big round stars that were already floating in the skies were the brilliant heralds of the splendour of a Syrian night. The beauteous hour and the sacred scene were alike in unison with the heart of Tancred, softened and serious. He mused in fascinated reverie over the dazzling incident of the day. Who was this lady of Bethany, who seemed not unworthy to have followed Him who had made her abiding place so memorable? Her beauty might have baffled the most ideal painter of the fair Hebrew saints. Raffaelle himself could not have designed a brow of more delicate supremacy. Her lofty but gracious bearing, the vigour of her clear, frank mind, her earnestness, free from all ecstasy and flimsy enthusiasm, but founded in knowledge and deep thought, and ever sustained by exact expression and ready argument, her sweet witty voice, the great and all-engaging theme on which she was so content to discourse, and which seemed by right to belong to her: all these were circumstances which wonderfully affected the imagination of Tancred.

He was lost in the empyrean of high abstraction, his gaze apparently fixed on the purple mountains, and the golden skies, and the glittering orbs of coming night, which yet in truth he never saw, when a repeated shout at length roused him. It bade him stand aside on the narrow path that winds round the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem to Bethany, and let a coming horseman pass. The horseman was the young Emir who was a guest the night before in the divan of Besso. Though habited in the Mamlouk dress, as if only the attendant of some great man, huge trousers and jacket of crimson cloth, a