To him they went,
asking leave to speak with him, whereon he halted the oxen and greeted
them courteously, but, like the man in the village, turned his eyes away
from the faces of the women. Nehushta bade the nurse stand back out of
hearing, and, bearing the child in her arms, said:
"Sir, tell me, I pray you, if I speak to Ithiel, a priest of high rank
among this people of the Essenes, and brother to the dead lady Miriam,
wife of Benoni the Jew, a merchant of Tyre?"
At the mention of these names Ithiel's face saddened, then grew calm
again.
"I am so called," he answered; "and the lady Miriam is my sister, who
now dwells in the happy and eternal country beyond the ocean with all
the blessed"--for so the Essenes imagined that heaven to which they went
when the soul was freed from the vile body.
"The lady Miriam," continued Nehushta, "had a daughter Rachel, whose
servant I was."
"Was?" he interrupted, startled from his calm. "Has she then been put to
death by those fierce men and their king, as was as her husband Demas?"
"Nay, sir, but she died in childbirth, and this is the babe she bore";
and she held the sleeping little one towards him, at whom he gazed
earnestly, yes, and bent down and kissed it--since, although they saw so
few of them, the Essenes loved children.
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