Let him be told it with reference to the Law of that time, only a little modified in this.
“These four are accounted as dead— the blind, the leper, the poor, and the childless.”
Thus the Talmud.
That is, to be a leper was to be treated as dead— to be excluded from the city as a corpse; to be spoken to by the best beloved and most loving only at a distance; to dwell with none but lepers; to be utterly unprivileged; to be denied the rites of the Temple and the synagogue; to go about in rent garments and with covered mouth, except when crying,
“Unclean, unclean!” to find home in the wilderness or in abandoned tombs; to become a materialized specter of Hinnom and Gehenna; to be at all times less a living offence to others than a breathing torment to self; afraid to die, yet without hope except in death.
Once— she might not tell the day or the year, for down in the haunted hell even time was lost— once the mother felt a dry scurf in the palm of her right hand, a trifle which she tried to wash away.
It clung to the member pertinaciously; yet she thought but little of the sign till Tirzah complained that she, too, was attacked in the same way.
The supply of water was scant, and they denied themselves drink that they might use it as a curative.
At length the whole hand was attacked; the skin cracked open, the fingernails loosened from the flesh.
There was not much pain withal, chiefly a steadily increasing discomfort.
Later their lips began to parch and seam.
One day the mother, who was cleanly to godliness, and struggled against the impurities of the dungeon with all ingenuity, thinking the enemy was taking hold on Tirzah’s face, led her to the light, and, looking with the inspiration of a terrible dread, lo! the young girl’s eyebrows were white as snow.
Oh, the anguish of that assurance!
The mother sat awhile speechless, motionless, paralyzed of soul, and capable of but one thought— leprosy, leprosy!
When she began to think, mother-like, it was not of herself, but her child, and, mother-like, her natural tenderness turned to courage, and she made ready for the last sacrifice of perfect heroism.
She buried her knowledge in her heart; hopeless herself, she redoubled her devotion to Tirzah, and with wonderful ingenuity—wonderful chiefly in its very inexhaustibility— continued to keep the daughter ignorant of what they were beset with, and even hopeful that it was nothing.
She repeated her little games, and retold her stories, and invented new ones, and listened with ever so much pleasure to the songs she would have from Tirzah, while on her own wasting lips the psalms of the singing king and their race served to bring soothing of forgetfulness, and keep alive in them both the recollection of the God who would seem to have abandoned them— the world not more lightly or utterly.
Slowly, steadily, with horrible certainty, the disease spread, after a while bleaching their heads white, eating holes in their lips and eyelids, and covering their bodies with scales; then it fell to their throats shrilling their voices, and to their joints, hardening the tissues and cartilages— slowly, and, as the mother well knew, past remedy, it was affecting their lungs and arteries and bones, at each advance making the sufferers more and more loathsome; and so it would continue till death, which might be years before them.
Another day of dread at length came— the day the mother, under impulsion of duty, at last told Tirzah the name of their ailment; and the two, in agony of despair, prayed that the end might come quickly.
Still, as is the force of habit, these so afflicted grew in time not merely to speak composedly of their disease; they beheld the hideous transformation of their persons as of course, and in despite clung to existence.
One tie to earth remained to them; unmindful of their own loneliness, they kept up a certain spirit by talking and dreaming of Ben-Hur.
The mother promised reunion with him to the sister, and she to the mother, not doubting, either of them, that he was equally faithful to them, and would be equally happy of the meeting.
And with the spinning and respinning of this slender thread they found pleasure, and excused their not dying.
In such manner as we have seen, they were solacing themselves the moment Gesius called them, at the end of twelve hours’ fasting and thirst.
The torches flashed redly through the dungeon, and liberty was come.
“God is good,” the widow cried— not for what had been, O reader, but for what was.
In thankfulness for present mercy, nothing so becomes us as losing sight of past ills.
The tribune came directly; then in the corner to which she had fled, suddenly a sense of duty smote the elder of the women, and straightway the awful warning—
“Unclean, unclean!”
Ah, the pang the effort to acquit herself of that duty cost the mother!
Not all the selfishness of joy over the prospect could keep her blind to the consequences of release, now that it was at hand.
The old happy life could never be again.
If she went near the house called home, it would be to stop at the gate and cry,
“Unclean, unclean!” She must go about with the yearnings of love alive in her breast strong as ever, and more sensitive even, because return in kind could not be.
The boy of whom she had so constantly thought, and with all sweet promises such as mothers find their purest delight in, must, at meeting her, stand afar off.
If he held out his hands to her, and called “Mother, mother,” for very love of him she must answer,
“Unclean, unclean!” And this other child, before whom, in want of other covering, she was spreading her long tangled locks, bleached unnaturally white— ah! that she was she must continue, sole partner of her blasted remainder of life.
Yet, O reader, the brave woman accepted the lot, and took up the cry which had been its sign immemorially, and which thenceforward was to be her salutation without change—
“Unclean, unclean!”
The tribune heard it with a tremor, but kept his place.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Two women dying of hunger and thirst.
Yet”— the mother did not falter— “come not near us, nor touch the floor or the wall.
Unclean, unclean!”
“Give me thy story, woman— thy name, and when thou wert put here, and by whom, and for what.”
“There was once in this city of Jerusalem a Prince Ben-Hur, the friend of all generous Romans, and who had C?sar for his friend.
I am his widow, and this one with me is his child.
How may I tell you for what we were sunk here, when I do not know, unless it was because we were rich?
Valerius Gratus can tell you who our enemy was, and when our imprisonment began.
I cannot.