"Thou yieldest me invaluable aid," he said in a lowered tone, "and since I am not an elected Essene, but a ward of the brotherhood and a postulant, I am free and most glad to have thy help. Be thou blessed."
The magistrate acknowledged the young man's acceptance by a wave of a withered white hand and the slaves made the camels ready to proceed.
At midnight, the rocking camels sped without apparent weariness up the uneven streets of Nazareth, white under the stars. At the lewen of the single khan, the drivers drew up and Marsyas alighted to go forward and thank his host, but the magistrate slept, even while his servants lifted him down from the howdah. As he turned away, regretfully, he confronted the veiled girl, almost childlike in stature under the protection of her tall handmaiden. She dropped her head modestly and moved aside to let him pass, but he hesitated, and stopped. Few indeed had been the words he had addressed to women in his lifetime, and now his speech was more than ever unready.
"Thy father sleeps, yet I would not depart with my thanks unsaid. Be thou the messenger and give him my gratitude when he waketh."
"It shall be my pleasure," she answered softly, "and may thy hopes come to pass. Farewell."
"Thou hast my thanks. The peace of the Lord God attend thee. Farewell."
Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds. Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompassed Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur. Above it the leaning cedars, newly-tipped with verdure, spread their peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over the soil. Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were scarlet and gold in shallows of green. Almond orchards snowed in the valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear cold water. The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with undulating vapors, smoky and illusory.
The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers. Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun.