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He turned without waiting to see the effect of this speech upon the Maccabee's courier and clapped his hands for an attendant. To the servitor who responded he said: "Send hither our party. It is time. Bring me my cloak." He looked then suddenly at Aquila. The Roman's face had cleared of its astonishment and discomfiture. "Well enough," the courier said bluntly and closed his lips.
It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed it was time to reconstruct the whole artistic attitude of the world. And that was why she waited impatiently at her doorway for death, which was a kinder thing than life. There was no incident in the Maccabee's long struggle through the inky blackness of the tunnel leading under Moriah.
"What," she exclaimed, "has she not laid her claim before you yet?" The Maccabee shook his head. "Know, then, that this pretty nameless creature claims to be the wife of this same Philadelphus." He sat up in his earnestness. "What!" he cried. "Even so! Insists upon it in the face of the lady princess' proofs and Philadelphus' denial!" The Maccabee's brows dropped while he gazed down at the Greek.
"There has been no one here but us," the boy said, hesitating at the symptoms of gratitude in the Maccabee's voice. "Us?" "You and me." After another silence, the Maccabee laughed weakly. "It requires two to constitute 'us' and I am, by all signs, not a whole one!" "But you will be in a few days," the boy declared admiringly. "You are an excellent sick man."
The smile died on the Maccabee's face. Reference to the girl in the hills seemed blasphemy on this man's lips. "And you do not recall your wife's face?" Julian persisted. The Maccabee's face hardened more. But he shook his head. "Fourteen years can change a woman from a beauty to a a Christian, ugly and old and cold," Julian augured.
To-morrow it will be four." "And Sabbath, it will be seven. A long time, a long time!" The Maccabee turned and went back to the khan. A gap in the hills had hidden the girl in the silver tissue, and the blitheness of the Maccabee's spirit had gone with her. By sunset, the Maccabee and Julian of Ephesus had taken the road to Jerusalem again.
The sight of it in a way collected Julian's purposes. He knew that by some misadventure he had missed Aquila whom he had hoped to meet in Emmaus, bearing treasure stolen from the daughter of Costobarus. By this time, then, the Maccabee's emissary had doubtless arrived in Jerusalem the last possible point for the two conspirators to meet.
In his search after cause for his cousin's attack upon him, he readily fixed upon Julian's rage at the Maccabee's preëmption of the beautiful girl in the hills. Instantly, the disgrace of violence committed in a quarrel between himself and his cousin over the possession of a woman, appealed to him. And even as instantly, his defiant heart accepted its shame and persisted in its fault.
"I go," she said after a silence, "to join my husband in Jerusalem." The Maccabee's lips parted and an expression of disappointment with an admixture of surprise and vexation came over his face. But what did it matter? Were she as free as air, he was a married man. The humor of the situation appealed to him. He dropped his head into the bend of his elbow and laughed.
He mounted the slight ridge that overlooked the depression in time to see Julian of Ephesus appear over the opposite side. Within, with her mantle laid off, her veil thrown back, the girl knelt over a bed of coals, baking one of the Maccabee's Milesian ducks. Julian had made a sound; the Maccabee had come silently.
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