Great Lion of God Read Free Page B

Hillel’s. (At least, thought Hillel, it is not a cherry of a nose like a peasant’s.) But the startling impression of the eyes lay mostly in their color, a curiously metallic blue, like the glitter on a polished dagger. The blue was concentrated as well as intense, and the auburn lashes, long and shining, did not diminish it. There was a strenuousness and force in the eyes, not childlike, not wholly innocent, but aware and stern. Hillel, though a Pharisee, did not entirely believe in the transmigration of souls, but he wondered now, as he had often wondered lately. Saul’s eyes were not an infant’s eyes. They met his, he was certain, with conjecture and recognition. “Who are you, my son?” he whispered, with uneasiness. “From whence did you come? What is your fate?”
    The child stared at him, but not blankly. The mouth, the wide thin mouth like an exasperated man’s, stirred, but no sound came from it. Then it set itself tightly, and the child looked away from his father and contemplated the dance of vivid light and shadow between the columns of marble. He seemed to be reflecting. Hillel felt a little awed. What moved in that infant brain, what thoughts, what dreams, what determinations, what memories? The small chin, firm and dimpled and puissant, appeared to gather itself together with resolution. Saul withdrew himself.
    Gaia, the little Grecian nursemaid who was Deborah’s own servant, came briskly through the farther bronze door into the nursery, her sandals clattering quickly on the stone. She was hardly more than a child herself, but very competent, with her flowing light brown hair and pale eyes and merry face and lilting step. She wore a long thin tunic of a rosy cloth, bound with blue ribbons about her slender waist. She bowed to Hillel, who raised his hand in automatic blessing though the girl was a heathen, and he greeted her kindly.
    “The nurse awaits the child, Master,” she said. Hillel had had the vision of Deborah suckling her son, but Deborah had decided otherwise. No Greek or Roman lady suckled children any longer, nor did enlightened Jewish ladies who had duties and responsibilities beyond the mere demands of the body. Hillel had been extremely disappointed. He thought the picture of a mother nursing her infant the most beautiful in the world. Certainly his own mother had suckled her children and he remembered the warmth and tenderness in the nursery and the crooning and the evening light caught in his mother’s hair, and the round morning freshness of her body. He had raised no complaint to Deborah, who at this hour was furbishing her mind in the library, for he was too kind and gentle a man. He knew this, and deplored it. The old patriarchs had been held in awe by their wives and their daughters in the past, but alas, Hillel was no patriarch.
    So, without a word he watched little Gaia gather up the infant in her arms and he heard her remark about the condition of his napkin, which the other nursemaid had apparently neglected, and she rolled him deftly in the linen sheet and carried him out. As the girl reached the door the boy suddenly uttered a loud strange cry, not a childish wail or a whimper, but a humiliated and disgusted cry. He seemed almost to be saying, “I detest my present state and weakness, and I shall not long endure it!”
    I am fanciful, like all new and proud fathers, thought Hillel, and he went out into the outdoor portico and then stepped down into the gardens. It was time for his evening prayers in the warm and scented silence. As a pious Jew, he knew that these prayers should be prayed in a synagogue, but he and Deborah lived in the house her father had bought for them in the far suburbs of Tarsus. (“My daughter is of a delicate constitution.”) There was no synagogue under less than an hour’s energetic walking, and Hillel was just recovering from malaria which left his strong legs somewhat weak, and his heart palpitated on effort. He was not a horseman, and he