And Mary, with the strength of anger, brushed through the encircling officials and towered before him, robed in wrath.
“Ah, permit me,” he answered; “you are singularly unjust.”
“Prove me so, and countermand the order that you gave.”
As she spoke she adjusted her mantle, which had become disarranged, and looked him from head to foot, measuring him as it were, and finding him, visibly, very small.
Already the prisoner had been led away, and beyond, in the barracks, was the whiz of jagged leather that lacerated, rebounded, and lacerated again.
“I will not,” he answered. “What I have ordered, I have ordered. As for you—”
There had come to her that look which sibyls have. “Pilate,” she interrupted, “you are powerful here, I know, but”—and her hand shot out like an arrow from a bow—“over there vultures are circling; in your power is a corpse. What the vultures scent, I see.”
So abrupt and earnest was the gesture that unconsciously Pilate found himself looking to where she seemed to point. He lowered his eyes in vexation. Wrangling with a woman was not to his taste.
“There, there,” he said, much as one might to a fretful child; “don’t throw stones.”
“I have but one; it is Justice, and that I keep to hurl at you.”
The procurator’s mouth twitched ominously. “My dear,” he said, “you are too pretty to talk that way; it spoils the looks. Besides, I have no time to listen.”
“Tiberius has and will.”
Pilate nodded; it was the third time he had heard the threat that day.
“There are many rooms in his palace,” he answered, with covert significance.
“Yes, I know it. There are many, as you say. But there is one I will enter. On the door stands written The Future, and behind it, Pilate, is your death.”
The Roman, goaded to exasperation, sprang to his feet. An expression which Antipas had used occurred to him. “Away with the hetaira,” he cried; and he was about, it may be, to order her to be tossed to the fierce wild swine in the paddocks of the park when the prisoner and his guards reappeared on the tessellated pavement, and Mary, already dragged from him, was instantly forgot.
A tattered sagum, which had once been scarlet, but which had faded since, hung, detained at the shoulder by a rusty buckle, and bordered by a laticlave, loosely about his form. In his hand a bulrush swayed; on his head was a twisted coil of bear’s-breech, in which, among the ruffled leaves, one bud remained; it was white, the opening edges flecked with pink, perhaps with blood, for from the temples and about the ear a rill ran down and mixed with the purple of the laticlave below. And in this red parody of kingship the Christ stood, unmoved as a phantom, but in his face and eyes there was a projecting light so luminous, so intangible, and yet so real, that the skeptical procurator started, the staff of office pendent in his grasp.
“Ecce homo!” he exclaimed. Instinctively he drew back, and, wonderingly, half to himself, half to the Christ, “Who are you?” he asked.
“A flame below, a soul above,” Jesus answered, yet so inaudibly that the guards beside him did not catch the words.
To Pilate his lips had barely moved, and his wonderment increased. “Why do you not answer?” he said. “You must know that I have the power to condemn and to acquit.”
With that gentleness that was the flower of his parables Jesus raised his voice. “No,” he replied, “you can have no power against me unless it come from above.”
Again Pilate drew back. Unsummoned to his lips had sprung the words, “Behold the man!” and now he exclaimed, “Behold the king!”
But to the mob the vision he intercepted was lost. They saw the jest merely, and with it the stains that torture leaves. The sight of blood is heady; it inebriates more surely than wine. The mob, trained by the elders, and used by them as a bodyguard, fanatic before, were intoxicated now. With one accord they shrieked the liturgy again.
“Sekaph! Sekaph! Let him be crucified.”
In that gust of hatred Pilate recovered. He turned to Caiaphas:
“I have released one prisoner; I will release another too.”
“My lord, be warned by one who is your elder.”
“One whom I can remove.”
“No doubt, my lord; but suffer him while he may to warn you not to cause a revolution on the day of the Paschal feast. You hear that multitude. Then be warned.”
“But your feast is one of mercy.”
The high-priest gazed curiously at his silk-gloved hands. You would have said they were objects he had never seen before. Then he returned the procurator’s stare.
“We know of no such god.”
“Ah!” And the procurator drew a long breath of understanding. “It is that, I believe, he preaches.”
“And it is for that,” Caiaphas echoed, “that he must die. Yes, Pilate, it is for that. There is no such doctrine in the Pentateuch. We have done our duty. We have convicted a rebel of his guilt. We have brought him to you, and we demand his sentence. Pilate, it is not so very long ago you had hundreds massacred without judgment, without trial either, and for what?—for one rebellious cry. You must have a reason for the favor you show this man. It would interest me to learn it; it would interest Tiberius as well. Listen to that multitude. If you pay no heed to our accusation nor yet to their demand, on you the consequences rest. We are absolved.”
“He is your king,” the procurator objected, meditatively.
Caiaphas wheeled like a feather a breeze has caught. One hand outstretched he held to the mob, with the other he pointed to the Christ.
“Our king!” he cried. “The procurator says he is our king!”
As the thunder peals, a roar surged back:
“We have no other king than Caesar.”
“Think of Sejanus,” the high-priest suggested. The thrust was so well
