“Speak low, thou, last dying vestige of a wan faith! Thou mightst make my solemn followers yell with ridiculing laughter! I tell thee of life and of a faith as natural as nature herself. Listen; there is for the brave and faithful a Paradise whose rivers are white as milk as odoriferous as musk. There are sights for the eye, fetes most delicious and music never ceasing to ravish; these lure the brilliantly-robed faithful to the black-eyed daughters of Pleasure. One look at them would reward such as we for a world-life of pain; and the children of the prophet’s faith are given the eternities to companion these splendid creatures whose forms created of musk know no infirmity, but survive, always, as adolescent fountains. The heaven of Islamism is eternal youth, eternally luxurious.”
“It befits the Angel of Death to gild a deformed hell with bedazzling words. Thou and thine glorify lust, and thy heaven, like thy harem, is but a brothel after all. Now let me blast thy gorgeous charnel-house with the lightning of God’s Word: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God!’ ”
Sir Charleroy had raised himself up as he was speaking; now he fell back, exhausted. He again felt the glow in his heart that he felt on the quay when the English bishop blessed him; but it seemed more real now than then, and the approvings of conscience some way came with rebukes that caused tears to flow. He felt something akin to real penitence for a life that had not been always up to the ideal that this debate had caused him to exalt. As he fell back he closed his eyes and turned his face from his captor; the act was a prayer to be helped to shut out of his mind the picture of gilded lust depicted by the false teacher that stood by. For a few moments the wounded man was left to his own thoughts, and then his heart went out toward home crying like a sick or lost child in the night, for “Mother!” Once more he returned to that duality of existence which comes when one enters into personal introspections. There seemed to be two Sir Charleroys, one writing the history of the other, and the writer was recording such estimates as these: “As he lay there, nigh death, he drew near to God. He had once been a rover, seeking the wildest pleasures of the European capitals; but meeting passion, presented as the ultimate of life, for all eternity, his soul recoiled from it and he became the herald of purity. Once he had friends, wealth and physical prowess; but he squandered them as a prodigal; when he lay bleeding, powerless in body, amid strangers, a slave, he rose to the majesty of a moral giant.” The Sir Charleroy that was thus reviewed was comforted, and he stood off from the picture in imagination to admire it, as one standing before a mirror. Just then he thought of his mother and Mary, his ideal, standing on either side of him, before the same presentment. It might have been a dream; but he believed they smiled through tears, pressed their beating hearts to his and upheld him by their arms with tenderness and strength. His captor left him for a few moments only, undisturbed. At a sign from Azrael, he was soon carried away by a guard; the parley was ended and he that had so bravely spoken doomed to confront that that is to the vigorous mind the worst of happenings, uncertainty. For months the captive mechanically submitted to the fortunes of the Sheik’s caravan; in health improving; in spirit depressed, numbed. The knight had constantly before him three grim certainties, escape impossible; rebellion useless; each day hope darkened by further departure from the sea. The captive’s treatment from the Sheik was not unkind. The latter met him by times with a sort of courtly condescension, varied only by an occasional penetrating, questioning glance. They had little conversation, yet the Sheik’s looks plainly said: “When thou art subdued, sue for favors; they’ll be granted.” De Griffin nursed his pride and firmness and prevented all familiarity on Azrael’s part. The latter was puzzled sometimes, sometimes angered; but he was too polite to show his feelings. For months the only conversation between the two alert, strong men might be summed up in these words on the Sheik’s part: “Slave, freedom and heaven are sweet.” “Knight, Allah knows only the followers of the Prophet as friends.” On the knight’s part a look of scorn or an expression of disgust was the sole reply.
In the Sheik’s retinue was another captive, a Jew. He was constantly near the knight; for being more fully trusted than the latter, the Sheik had made the Israelite in part the custodian of the Christian. The knight discerned the relationship very quickly; though both Jew and chief endeavored to conceal it. Sir Charleroy, at the first, treated his companion captive with loathing and resentment, as a spy. After a time, the “sphinx, eyes open, mouth shut,” as Azrael described Sir Charleroy, deemed it wise and politic to make the Jew his ally. The resolution once formed, he found many circumstances to aid in bridging the gulf that separated the captive and his guard; the cultured Teutonic leader and the wandering Israelite. They both hated the same man, their captor; both loathed the religion he was covertly aiming to lure them to; both were anxious for freedom. They gave voice to these feelings when together, alone, and ere long sympathy made them friends. The next step was natural and easy; the stronger mind took the leadership of the two, and Sir Charleroy became teacher; his keeper became his pupil and protégé.
The twain one day, after this change of relation, walked together conversing, on a hill overlooking Jericho, by which place the Sheik’s caravan was encamped.
“Ichabod, thou wearest a fitting name.”
“I suppose so, since my mother gave it. But why say so now?”
“Ichabod, ‘glory departed,’ thou art like thy people—despoiled.”
“Oh, Lord! how long?” piously exclaimed the Jew.
“Till Shiloh comes!”
“Verily it is so written,” was the Jew’s reply.
“But He has come, Israelite!”
“Where?” the startled Jew questioned, drawing back as if he expected his, to him mysterious, companion to throw back his tunic and declare: “I am he!”
“In the world and in my heart.”
“Ah, Sir Knight, Israel’s desolation refutes all that.”
“Jew, thine eyes are veiled. I’ll teach thee to see Him yet.”
The Jew was puzzled.
The twain fell into prolonged converse, and then in that lone place the Crusader waxed eloquent, preaching Christ and Him crucified to one of Abraham’s seed.
When the two captives descended to their tents, each was conscious of a new, peculiar joy. One had the joy of having proclaimed exalted truth, faithfully, to the almost persuading of his hearer; the other was moving about in the growing delight and wonder of a new dawning faith.
At frequent intervals Ichabod besought the knight to take him “to the mountain.”
Each visit thither was a delight to the new inquirer.
On such a journey one day spoke Ichabod: “Christian, I am consumed with anxiety to hear thy words and another anxiety lest they do me harm. I am thinking, thinking, by day, and, what little time my thoughts permit sleep, I’m filled with wondrous dreams! I fear to lose my old faith, and yet it becomes like Dead Sea apples under the light of this new way. So new, so infatuating. None I’ve met, and I’ve met many, ever so moved me. Why, knight, I’ve traversed half the world; sometimes as wealth’s favorite, sometimes of necessity in misfortune; I’ve seen the faiths of Egypt and India in their homes, and walked amid the temples of great Rome, but with abiding contempt for all not Israelitish. Not so this creed of the knight affects me.”
“And for good reason; I offer thee the true, new, refined and final Judaism!”
“It seems so, and yet I tremble. I dare not doubt; that’s sin; but here’s the puzzle that harasses me: What if, in doubting these things I’m now told, I be doubting the very truth, the Jewish faith!”
“Ichabod, thy heart has been a buried seed awaiting the spring. It has come.”
“Oh, knight, I’m trusting my dear soul to thee. As a dog his master, a maid her lover, so blindly I follow thee. I can not go back: I can not pause nor can I go onward alone. I’m in the misery of a