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Page 3
[Illustration with caption: "'Perhaps when he is a man he will be a
great soothsayer and reader of the stars'"]
that the old woman had spoken falsely when she had said that evil
spirits looked forth hideously from his eyes. People often said that
they were beautiful, and gave him money because something in his gaze
drew them near to him. But this was not all. At times there were those
who spoke under their breath to one another of some wonder of light in
them, some strange luminousness which was not earthly.
"He surely sees that which we cannot. Perhaps when he is a man he will
be a great soothsayer and reader of the stars," he heard a woman whisper
to a companion one day.
Those who were evil were afraid to meet his gaze, and hated it as old
Judith did, though, as he was not their servant, they dared not strike
him when he lifted his soft, heavy eyelids.
But Zia could not understand what people meant when they whispered about
him or turned away fiercely. A weight was lifted from his soul when he
realized that he was not as revolting as he had believed. And when
people spoke kindly to him he began to know something like happiness for
the first time in his life. He brought home so much in his alms-bag that
the old woman ceased to beat him and gave him more liberty. He was
allowed to go out at night and sleep under the stars. At such times he
used to lie and look up at the jeweled myriads until he felt himself
drawn upward and floating nearer and nearer to that unknown something
which he felt also in the high blueness of the day.
When he first began to feel as if some mysterious ailment was creeping
upon him he kept himself out of Judith's way as much as possible. He
dared not tell her that sometimes he could scarcely crawl from one place
to another. A miserable fevered weakness became his secret. As the old
woman took no notice of him except when he brought back his day's
earnings, it was easy to evade her. One morning, however, she fixed her
eyes on him suddenly and keenly.
"Why art thou so white?" she said, and caught him by the arm, whirling
him toward the light. "Art thou ailing?"
"No! no!" cried Zia.
She held him still for a few seconds, still staring.
"Thou art too white," she said. "I will have no such whiteness. It is
the whiteness of--of an accursed thing. Get thee gone!"
He went away, feeling cold and shaken. He knew he was white. One or two
almsgivers had spoken of it, and had looked at him a little fearfully.
He himself could see that the flesh of his thin body was becoming an
unearthly color. Now and then he had shuddered as he looked at it
because--because--There was one curse so horrible beyond all others that
the strongest man would have quailed in his dread of its drawing near
him. And he was a child, a twelve-year-old boy, a helpless little
hunchback mendicant.
When he saw the first white-and-red spot upon his flesh he stood still
and stared at it, gasping, and the sweat started out upon him and rolled
down in great drops.
"Jehovah!" he whispered, "God of Israel! Thy servant is but a child!"
But there broke out upon him other spots, and every time he found a new
one his flesh quaked, and he could not help looking at it in secret
again and again. Every time he looked it was because he hoped it might
have faded away. But no spot faded away, and the skin on the palms of
his hands began to be rough and cracked and to show spots also.
In a cave on a hillside near the road where he sat and begged there
lived a deathly being who, with face swathed in linen and with bandaged
stumps of limbs, hobbled forth now and then, and came down to beg also,
but always keeping at a distance from all human creatures, and, as he
approached the pitiful, rattled loudly his wooden clappers, wailing out:
"Unclean! Unclean!"
It was the leper Berias, whose hopeless tale of awful days was almost
done. Zia himself had sometimes limped up the hillside and laid some of
his own poor food upon a stone near his cave so that he might find it.
One day he had also taken a branch of almond-blossom in full flower, and
had laid it by the food. And when he had gone away and stood at some
distance watching to see the poor ghost come forth to take what he had
given, he had seen him first clutch at the blossoming branch and fall
upon his face, holding it to his breast, a white, bound, shapeless
thing, sobbing, and uttering hoarse, croaking, unhuman cries. No
almsgiver but Zia had ever dreamed of bringing a flower to him who was
forever cut off from all bloom and loveliness.
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