CHAPTER II
I
At twenty-three o'clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watchfor the coming of the messenger from Tiberias. Nearly two hourspreviously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied fromDamascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was themessenger was a little late.
These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of theworld--a slip of useless country--and it was necessary for a man to ridefrom Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkranto the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertookit by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope's personalattention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within thetwenty-four hours.
It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was ridinghigh above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the longslopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before thehouse-door--casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far moreconcrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs oreven than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here andthere sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight inhis dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness tobathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out toit.
This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him therewere neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was animmense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God'sIncarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movementsof the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving ofthe waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he halfperceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restlessuntil they found their rest in God. _Quare fremuerunt gentes?...Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!_ As to the end--he was notgreatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all thingsearthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the worldfalls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. Forhimself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had namedMegiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed naturalthat at the consummation of all things Christ's Vicar should dwell atNazareth where His King had come on earth--and that the Armageddon ofthe Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ hadfirst taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again. After all, itwould not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen. Israel and Amalekhad met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here andSennacherib. Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael andSatan, over the place where God's Body had lain. As to the exact methodof that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind,and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than thishuge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficientto hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace? To his view oncemore, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was dividedinto two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed themvery much of a size. Something would happen, troops would land atKhaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remoteAsia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards fromEurope; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas. And, surely,the time could not be far away, for here was Christ's Vicar; and, as HeHimself had said in His gospel of the Advent, _Ubicumque fuerit corpus,illie congregabuntur et aquilae._ Of more subtle interpretations ofprophecy he had no knowledge. For him words were things, not merelylabels upon ideas. What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said--thesethings were so. He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from theworld, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the lastcentury had been responsible for the desertion by so many of anyintelligible creed. For others this had been the supreme struggle--thedifficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, andyet that the things they represented were in themselves objective. Butto this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tapof hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was assimple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide featheredwings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost hadbreathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Maryfolded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. Andhere once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess--yet hethought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible--thetumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints--hethought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lipsthe trumpet of doom and heaven was astir. He might be wrong at thistime, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor theycould be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patienceof God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of Hisnature. He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards awaycame a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to hisgirdle.
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