CHAPTER XIX.

THE QUEEN’S CHILDHOOD.

“Now raise thy view, Unto the vision most resembling Christ’s.”—DANTE.

“Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.”—GABRIEL.

Miriamne, all aglow with pleasurable excitement and filled with a curiosity which at times rose to very serious questioning as to her own faith, anxiously sought to compass an early meeting with the “Old Clock Man.” She could not content herself to wait a chance opportunity, and so, remembering that it was his custom at evening time to visit, alone, for meditation various old ruins like those of the Reservoir, she determined to seek him there; it being not very far from her home. With beating heart she repaired thither at sunset, the day after the Mameluke attack. Having traversed the Reservoir’s side some two or three hundred feet, she was on the point of returning, for the place was very lonely, when a voice startled her.

“Oh, Father Adolphus, how you frighten me! I’m so glad you came!”

“Looking for me, yet frightened at finding me. Glad I came, though I scared you?”

“Well, men and women when frightened are glad of the fellowship of any thing seemingly strong. It’s easy for the terrified to believe or trust.”

“There’s rare philosophy in thy head, little woman.”

“So? What were you saying when I startled so?”

“That the silvering of the moon brought out thy person beautifully. So she that sits above the moon, a queen in heaven, would beautify thy soul if thou shouldst elect to put on the character she ever wore.”

“I can’t do that, knowing so little of her.”

“A woman’s way of saying, tell me more.”

“You would not torment your Mary with such repartee.”

“Woman again. Art thou jealous already?”

“Fie.”

“Say that again! Once the foil of one of thy sex is penetrated, not having arguments, she can at least say ‘fie’! Well, even ducklings hiss when helplessly entangled.”

“Adolphus Von Gombard, I’ll not call you ‘father’ again, if you approach me any more in this courtier fashion.”

“Again, I say, an old head; but I’d plead privilege.”

“At least old enough to discern the sacred line that bounds all proper commerce between the sexes. You plead privilege; I grant you the noblest any woman can give, the privilege of guiding my immortal soul; but I remember to have heard that he who would shepherd such as I, must be to her as a woman. The relationship between us must be as that between the angels of heaven who neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

“Some young women receive teachings most willingly from fine-favored and patronizing instructors.”

“I know it; but let none patronize me so. I’ve begun to adore the Sacrist of Bozrah, but if a breath or word passes that makes me think of him chiefly as being a man, then I shall sit in his presence in fright, or flee as I would were I to find the place changed into a lonely night-draped waddy, my only company an image of some leering, giant Bacchus. But this unequal defence is painful.”

“Then desist and tell me what I’m to do.”

“You have been my ideal man, for heaven’s sake rob me not by changing!”

“Right nobly spoken, daughter. Now pardon me, for I was putting thee to a test.”

“A test?”

“Yes. It’s forbidden, by customs hereabout, for man and woman, as we, alone to converse face to face; perhaps wisely, if one be bad and the other weak. Yet the custom is heathenish—low moral tone engendering mighty suspicions!”

“Did my priest think me a heathen?”

“No, not that; but they say the moon makes lovers and others mad. I was wondering whether I was dealing with a bundle of romancings or an earnest girl?”

Delicately the maiden avoided the query with another:

“You loved Mary: why did you not wed her?”

“Woman again; doomed to make all vistas end in wedlock. With your sex love, beginning to give, gives all readily, and seems to find no rest until there’s conjugal union.”

“I have not desired to give all that way to those I’ve loved!”

“It is all or nothing. Ye women love only relatives, and never cease to desire to make all relatives whom ye want to love. Why, girl, my Mary is a saint; she died ages ago, after the flesh; but as a model for all womankind lives forever,”

“How was she your Mary, then?”

“She belongs to every noble minded man as his inspirer.”

“Mary—you call her Mary. I thought all the holy and the great had uncommon names?”

“In fiction they do; in reality the name is nothing.”

“Was she wise and beautiful?”

“One of our most holy teachers, Epiphanius, who lived less than four hundred years after Mary, spent many years at Bethlehem and gathered facts that caused him thus to write. ‘She was of middle stature, her face oval, her eyes brilliant and of an olive tint; her eyebrows arched and black, her hair a pale brown, her complexion fair as wheat. She spoke little, but she spoke freely and affably. She was grave, courteous, tranquil. In her deportment was nothing lax or feeble.’ Saint Denis, the Areopagite, who is said to have seen this queen of David’s house in her lifetime, declared that she was ‘a dazzling beauty,’ that he ‘would have adored her as a goddess had he not known that there was but one God!’ Of this much I’m certain, my Bozrah Miriamne, one so serene of character, and so pure, must have reflected her inner, imperishable beauties in her features.”

“Father Adolphus, you mention strange names. There are none that sound like those revered by my people. Do you ever hate my race? If you do you must not teach me any doctrine.”

“Hate? Why, I love all peoples, and by faith I am made a child of Abraham.”

“Then you are a proselyte?”

“Not by any forms. I believe in the God of Abraham and His Messiah. That makes me a perfect Jew.”

“This is strange. My mother never unfolded it to me.”

“Ah, she has not yet looked into these royal mysteries?”

“But, good father, is your name among our chronologies?”

“Thanks to the God of the Patriarchs, yes; it is with that of Moses, David, Elijah, and all the rest, in the Lamb’s Book of Life.”

“Where?”

“In Heaven.”

“How wonderful; yet I’m afraid to hear more.”

“Shall I take thee home?”

“No; tell me more of Mary. You say she made you lonely and a father?”

“I must then begin her history, and show thee how and why she lived?”

“Do you think it will tire me?”

“Fear not! Her story is a poem, a picture, a tragedy; it’s one long delight.”

“Then tell it to me, I pray you.”

So the priest proceeded:

“When the world was very wicked, and therefore very sad, God in His goodness was drawn to send from heaven a light-bearer—some one to tell man his duty and able to win back to the Great Father mankind’s straying affections. Thou dost know this much, and hast read in thy sacred Scriptures how God called to the universe, all chaotic and dark, to come forth into beautiful form; how he said to the darkness, ‘_Let there be light_.’ That history bears within it a fine sermon. It’s a picture of God’s. Out of sin, darkness, confusion, there emerged a perfect man in a Paradisiacal home, with a perfect, beautiful woman as a help-mate by his side. That was God’s ideal of perfection and happiness. It delighted the Father of Joys to make it. This is ever true; behind all clouds in God’s Providence is sunshine, and beyond all disorders somewhere at last will walk forth unalloyed pleasure, a Sabbath-like rest, and fullness of harmony.”

“Oh, can you make me believe and feel this?”

“Wait patiently.”

“I try to do so; but I’m discouraged by the present miseries in my family and in all our nation.”

“God mourns over all our sorrows before they or we are born, but His wisdom and power of cure are faultless. Wait. Times are mending, and the moral sphere is dipping into the rim of light’s oceans. I think the angels perceive the world now, as thou perceivest the new moon.”

“The poetry of the words I can not interpret.”

“The moon’s a dark globe, with a ribbon of silver across it.”

“And things have been worse; now are bettering?”

“Assuredly so. Believe there is a God, and thou’lt rest in hope. Go back a little in history to when Cæsar Augustus, of awful pagan Rome, ruled the world, having won dominion through desolating wars. The most educated Romans then believed in no hereafter, and sought openly, without restraint, the grossest pleasures. The ignorant believed in fabled monstrosities. Rome set the fashions of all the world. The Jews, thy people, God’s people, were lower, morally, then, than ever they had been before. They were divided into warring families and sects, holding a few forms and traditions, but having little heart in religion. The rest of mankind was barbarous. Thou hast heard how the Roman Titus overthrew Jerusalem, slaughtering thy people by thousands, defiling their holy Temple and seeming to blot out nearly the whole of thy race. That time of Titus was midnight; since that the day has been slowly advancing. Before that awful culmination of sorrows, the Divine Trinity held august council, and, as say the traditions of my church, determined to bring a holy sunrise to the earth’s midnight. The trouble of all creation was that man had fallen. The Divine Council decreed to confound the devil, who broke up the first home and ruined the first pure pair by causing to emerge from another home, another pair. They came, this time mother and Son, to be the moral patterns for the race, the beginning of a new, sin-conquering dispensation. The fathers hand down these sayings: ‘The august, regal Triune Council thus decreed: “Let us make a pure creature, dearer to us than all others.”’ They say she was begotten upon the Sabbath, the birth-day of the angels, whose queen she was to be. Then one thousand of the ministering spirits were commissioned to defend her; while Gabriel was sent to announce the glad tidings of the birth of a Saviour’s mother, in Hades. Her angels appeared as young men, of majestic mien, of marvelous beauty and pure as crystals. Their garments were like gold, richly colored, and could not be touched any more than could be the light of the sun.”

“How charming! But is this all true?” exclaimed the maiden.

Without reply, the priest continued: “They were crowned with diadems, exhaling celestial perfumes; in their hands they bore interwoven palms; on their arms and breasts were crosses and military devices. They were swift of flight, some of them six-winged, like the angels of Isaiah’s vision.”

“How dazzling! But is this all true?” Miriamne persisted.

“Well, it’s not in thy sacred books nor in mine so written.”

“Then you are giving me your imaginings?”

“Oh, no; but after the manner I have spoken, it is recorded in revered traditions of my church, and none can very well disprove the sayings.”

“I wonder if such honors made Mary proud?”

“A strange query.”

“I’d like to love one such as she, but could not if she were haughty or lofty, like the great of earth.”

“It would have made such as thou proud, perhaps; but there was none of the serpent in her whose Offspring was to crush the serpent’s head.”

“Is there any of the serpent in me?”

“I’m not thy judge.”

“Then she was immaculate?”

“Ah, that’s a question for the doctors. I’m too simple to know beyond what is written. I’m glad to know that she rejoiced in her son, as a God and a _Saviour_!”—“She was of noble family, though her parents were poor,” the priest continued. “Her mother was by name Anna, and worthy of the name, which is by interpretation ‘_gracious_.’ Traditions of her goodness are many, and the good and great have honored her memory. I paid Anna homage, that of a youth respectful of worthy motherhood, at Constantinople, in a church erected in the year 710 to commemorate that saint. Among others, also Justinian, the Emperor, in the year 550, dedicated a sacred place to Mary’s mother.”

“Then she had her meed of praise, at last?”

“Tradition, though tardy, has been just; but I trust not tradition alone. I easily reason that there must have been much of goodness and womanly beauty in the mother that bore such a woman as Mary. I know that God can bring forth angels from the offscourings, but that is not His way. He works by steps upward. I tell thee, girl, the mother gives her life to her offspring, and in spite of training, almost in spite of regeneration, the characteristics of this parent will reappear in the child. But to my story about Mary’s parents, Jehoikim and Anna.

“Blessed be God, Anna and Jehoikim were untainted by the pride of life, and, though living in a time of loose morals, walked lovingly, constantly with each other, through all their days. I talk to thee as to a prudent, but not prudish, young woman. Society is well rotted when divorce is about as common as marriage; it was that way in Anna and Jehoikim’s time. Why, even the exacting Pharisees then taught that a man might divorce a wife who had lost her personal beauty, or badly cooked her husband’s meat. Jehoikim might have left Anna, for she was childless; that was reason enough for divorcement to the average Jew, then. But their love was beautiful. The man, as was his duty, clung tenderly to his wife; her misfortune making her all the more in need of his tenderness. Dost thou not think so?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know.”

“Pardon my earnestness; it made me forget thy inexperience!

“Well, God rewarded their constancy, and they became the parents of my Mary. The father had a noble ancestry; but, what is better, within himself a royal heart. He bore by right the priestly office; but that was not much to such a man, in respect to worldly gain. Honest priests in his time were generally poor; the priestly preferments went, most richly laden, to those who dealt corruptly, and truckled to the ruling powers. Mary’s father was above sordidness and simony. He had little to give or to leave to his beloved, but he left his child a good name and the remembrance of the blessed. So while God chose the humble to confound the mighty, and serenely exalted those of low estate, He was mindful to choose His elect from the ranks of the morally great. Such are found in all places and times, and when surrounded, as were these pious parents, by the gross, low and selfish, they shine with transcendent splendor. In Tisri, the first month of the Jewish civic year, while the smoke of the holocausts were ascending, to invite heaven’s pardon, Mary, who was to bring forth the world’s greatest offering for sin, was born at Nazareth. Her career was fore-ordained, and she was soon walking her course of piety and sorrow. Though inexperienced and tender-hearted, sorrows in heaviest, grimmest forms fell upon her. Her father died when she was, it is said, only nine years of age; not long after, the girl knelt, a mourner, by the bier of her mother; the golden hairs of youth mingling, in the disheveling of utter grief, with the gray, which crowned the queen and guide of her heart, her mother. On the threshold of her life Mary’s parents were called away from her, leaving her no heritage but their precepts and example. They say that Jehoikim’s hands were stretched out, as in benediction, when he died, and so remained until his burial, reminding all that his last act was a commendation of his little daughter to Him who carries the lambs in his bosom! The picture of these outstretched hands, and of the girl embracing the aged dead mother, are often in my mind; they never fail to deeply move me. Poor orphaned lamb!”

Miriamne brushed away a tear, a sort of self-pitying tear. She ran forward in mind, to the day when she, herself, would be orphaned, without a benediction, or, perhaps, a cheering memory. Then she questioned:

“Did your Mary have other friends?”

“Yea, her Heavenly Father. It is said, also, that she was cared for by the elders of the people, and religiously trained under the very shadows of the Temple. We may readily believe this; for, in her after life, she evinced a self-possession in adversity that witnessed of a thorough religious culture. If there was no other evidence, her splendid poem, the ‘_Magnificat_,’ would convince any seeking proof, that Mary had had surpassing benefits and privileges in the study of God’s words, as well as in the best learning of her people, the Jews. But, Miriamne, I’ll weary thee; let us turn toward thy home.” Presently they stood not far from the old stone house of Rizpah; then Von Gombard drew from under his mantle a roll of writings. “Here, take and read. After its perusal I’ll see thee again.” So saying, the old priest lifted a hand in blessing, and then moved away toward his abode.