The child of Abraham, with a sudden movement, flung his arms with all vehemence about Sir Charleroy. The East and the West embracing, truth leading, love triumphant.
“Poor Ichabod, if thou hadst no soul, thy clingings and yearnings would bind me to thee faithfully. Thou hast tried to give me charge over that that is immortal. A Higher Being has it in loving trust; were it not so, I’d turn in dread from thy confiding!”
“Is mine so bad a soul, master?”
“Indeed, no. Its preciousness to Him that created it, is what would make me dread its partial custody.”
“Thou’lt help me, master, now?”
“For three objects I’ll willingly die; my mother; our lady, and the soul of one who abandons himself, as thou, to my poor pilotage.”
“Then, thou strangely lovest me. Oh, this but more persuades me that thy faith is right; it makes thee so good to a stranger, a slave, a hated Jew!”
“But then we are so apart and so unlike each other!”
“No, Jew, I want to show that humanity is one. The very creed I’m trying to teach thee and would fain have all thy race, ay, all mankind fully understand, is full of love, joy, peace. These follow it as naturally as the flower the stem, the humming the flying wing made to fly and be musical.”
“Oh, my dear light, with thee I’m in joy and wilderment. Thy presence seems to bring me hosts of crowned truths, all seeking to enter my being. I feel like a tired runner ready to faint when thou’rt absent, but when thou talkest the tired runner is plunged into a cooling ocean, whose circling waves, as it were charged with the stimulus of tempered lightnings, glowing with a million rainbows, overwhelm, lift up and rest him. I’m floating thereon now!”
“Thy strange fancies make me wonder, Ichabod.”
“Wonder; why my strength dies from over wonder. I was ill for hours yesterday. Light to my sweat-blinded, feverish eyes, all calm and healing, comes when I yield to thy will; but still all my joy is haunted by ghosts which rise in day-mare troops, pointing rebukingly to labyrinths into which I seem to be pushed. I sometimes wonder if I’m seeing real spirits or going mad.”
“Dost pray, Jew?”
“I dare not live without praying!”
“Then tell the All Pitiful what thou hast this day told to me. He loves the sincere, down to the deepest hell of doubt, and from it all, at last, will lead tumulted souls safely. An honest doubt is a real prayer, well winged; quickly it reaches heaven, at whose portal it dies to rise again all peace.”
CHAPTER VIII.
FROM JERICHO TO JORDAN.
“Through sins of sense, perversities of will,
Through doubt and pain, through guilt and shame and ill
Thy pitying Eye is on Thy creature still.”
“Wilt Thou not make, eternal Source and Goal,
In thy long years life’s broken circle whole,
And change to praise the cry of a lost soul?”
—Whittier.
Jew and Crusader came to love each other after the manner of David and Jonathan, and they were both made stronger and happier men on account of this loving.
“Sir Charleroy, a year gone to day, thou and I climbed to glory.”
“Thou hast a prolific imagination or I a poor memory. I have no remembrance of either climbing or glory of a year ago.”
“I may well remember the greatest day of my life; the day thou tookst me up yon hill over against Jericho; I saw, as Elisha, in the presence of his great master Elijah, the mountains, that day, full of the chariots and angels of God.”
“But, Jew, the chariot separated Elijah and Elisha; we were, in thy ‘great day,’ made one.”
“True, but I got the prophet’s insight and power. Oh now I see Shiloh coming in the redemption of Jew and Gentile.”
“Radiant proselyte, give God, not me the glory.”
“I’ll call thee, knight, Jordan—my Jordan.”
“The Jew rambles amid strange conceptions. Why am I like that mighty stream?”
“Its bed and banks, God’s cup; they nobly serve, catching the pure waters of mountain springs and heaven’s clouds, to bear them, mingled with sweet Galilee, to the black burning lips of Sodom’s plains below. I was a dead sea, alive alone to misery; nothing to me but my historic past, and that sin-stained. I’m now refreshed and purified; sometime there’ll be life growing about me!”
“The highlands of Galilee gather from heaven, oceans of sweet, pure water, which Jordan, year after year, night and day, hurries down to the Asphalt sea; but still that sea remains lifeless and bitter. Even so, the clean, white truth comes to some, life-long, yet vainly. I think I’m little like Jordan, but much like that sea.”
“And yet, knight, all is not vain that seems so. I learned this once, long ago, in the vale of Siddim, by the sea of Lot. As I entered that place of desolation I thought of Gehenna! The lime cliffs about, all barren and pitiless as the walls of a furnace, shut out the breezes, and intensified the sun’s scorching rays. A solemn stillness, unbroken by wind, wave or voice of life, was there; suffocating, plutonic odors ladened the air, and a fog hung over that watery winding sheet of the cities of the plain. I watched that overhanging cloud until my heated brain shaped it into a vast company of shades; the ghostly forms of the overwhelmed denizens of those accursed habitations, now in mute terror and confusion, holding to one another desperately; fearing to go to final judgment. Once I thought they were together trying to look down into the depths, perchance to seek for vestiges of their ancient, earthly habitations. These fancies grew and grew upon me, mad dreamer that I was, until I was nigh to desperate fright; but I found some little angels on the shore who comforted.”
“Angels at Sodom?”
“Even so. The first was light and liquid silver; it sang a bar of nature’s tireless, varied melody by my footsteps. Ah, the little, fresh spring that burst forth through the rim of the crystalline basin, was an angel to me. Then I found others here and there. At first I was glad, then I began to pity them, and to wish I could change their courses. They all wended their ways to the desolate sea, and their sweet currents were swallowed up in the yawning gulf of death. ‘Vainly,’ I said at first. Then I saw other angels in the forms of bending willows, and gorgeous oleanders. Just then it all came to me; the springs, though small and few, were not in vain. The oleanders and the willow, whose roots kissed their fresh life, were evidences that the springs had been for good. Aye, more, the flowers rejoiced me in those desolations more than could the rose gardens of the Temple in days of happiness. Yea, knight, thou hast been a rivulet to Ichabod in a day when he wandered as among arid mountains and dead seas.”
“Blest child of Abraham, thy faith is great, though I be but a pitiable guide; yet I’ll adopt thy similes. Be thou and I, to each other, Jordan, rivulet and flower by turn; the fresh current gives life to plant and blossom, while plant and blossom both shade and beautify the streams. With both it shall be well, if we well learn to seek deep for the hidden springs of the life that can never die. Already thou hast blessed me very greatly, gathering truths I failed to find. Thou return’st to me multiplied all I bestow.”
“Would I could gather for all; for my race, so