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Laeta Acilia
by
Mary, with arms outstretched, barred her way.
“Beware, lady,” she cried, “of worshipping vain idols. Do not demand of images of stone words of hope and life. There is only one God, and with my hair I have wiped His feet.”
At these words the flashing of her eyes, dark as the sky in a storm, mingled with tears, and Laeta Acilia said to herself:
“I am pious, and I faithfully perform the ceremonies religion demands, but in this woman there is a strange feeling of a love divine.”
Mary Magdalen continued in ecstasy: “He was the God of Heaven and earth, and He uttered His parables seated on the bench by the threshold, under the shade of the old fig-tree. He was young and beautiful. He would have been glad to be loved. When he came to supper in my sister’s house I sat at His feet, and the words flowed from His lips like the waters of a torrent. And when my sister complained of my sloth, saying: ‘Master, tell her it is but right that she should aid me to prepare the supper,’ He smiled and made excuse for me, and permitted me to remain seated at His feet, and said that I had chosen the good part.
“One would have thought to see Him that He was but a young shepherd from the mountains, and yet His eyes flashed flames like those that issued from the brow of Moses. His gentleness was like the peace of night and His anger was more terrible than a thunderbolt. He loved the humble and the little ones. Along the roadside the children ran towards Him and clung to His garments. He was the God of Abraham and Jacob, and with the same hands that had created the sun and the stars, He caressed the cheeks of the newly born whom their happy mothers held out to Him from the thresholds of their cottages. He was himself as simple as a child, and He raised the dead to life. Here among my companions you see my brother whom He raised from the dead. Behold, lady! Lazarus bears on his face the pallor of death, and in his eyes is the horror of one who has seen hell.”
But for some moments past Laeta Acilia had ceased to listen.
She raised towards the Jewess her candid eyes and her small, smooth forehead.
“Mary,” she said, “I am a pious woman, attached to the faith of my fathers. Unbelief is evil for our sex. And it does not beseem the wife of a Roman noble to accept new fashions in religions. And yet I must confess that there are some charming gods in the East. Your God, Mary, seems one of these. You have told me that He loves little children, and that He kisses them as they lie in the arms of their young mothers. By that I see that He is a God who is favourable to women, and I regret that He is not held in esteem among the aristocracy and the official classes, or I would gladly bring him offerings of honey-cakes. But, listen, Mary the Jewess, appeal to Him, you whom He loves, and demand of Him for me that which I dare not demand myself, and which my goddesses have refused.”
Laeta Acilia uttered these words with hesitation. She paused and blushed.
“What is it,” Mary Magdalen asked eagerly, “and what desire, lady, has your unsatisfied soul?”
Gaining courage little by little, Laeta Acilia replied:
“Mary, you are a woman, and though I know you not, I yet may confide to you a woman’s secret. During the six years that I have been married I have not had a child, and that is a great sorrow to me; I need a child to love; the love in my heart for the little creature I am awaiting, and who yet may never come, is stifling me. If your God, Mary Magdalen, grants me through your intercession what my goddesses have denied me, I shall say that He is a good God, and I will love Him and I will make my friends love Him. And like us they are young and rich, and they belong to the first families of the town.”