FullReads

Her look changed again; her eyes filled with pain and sorrow; she shrank back and turned away her face.

“I have no husband,” she said. “Ah, boy, innocent boy, you do not understand. I eat the bread of shame and live in the house of wickedness. I am a sinner, a sinner of the city. How could I pray?”

With that she fell a-sobbing, rocking herself to and fro, and the tears ran through her fingers like rain. The Boy looked at her, astonished and pitiful. He moved nearer to her, after a moment, and spoke softly.

“I am very sorry, sister,” he said; and as he spoke he felt her tears falling on his feet. “I am more sorry than I ever was in my life. It must be dreadful to be a sinner. But sinners can pray, for God is our Father, and fathers know how to forgive. I will stay with you and teach you some of the things my mother has taught me.”

She looked up and caught his hand and kissed it. She wiped away her tears, and rose, pushing back her hair.

“No, dear little master,” she said, “you shall not stay in this house–not an hour. It is not fit for you. My Nubian shall lead you back to the gate, and you will return to your friends outside of the city, and you will forget one whom you comforted for a moment.”

The Boy turned back as he stood in the doorway. “No,” he said. “I will not forget you. I will always remember your love and kindness. Will you learn to pray, and give up being a sinner?”

“I will try,” she answered; “you have made me want to try. Go in peace. God knows what will become of me.”

“God knows, sister,” replied the Boy gravely. “Abide in peace.”

So he went out into the dusk with the Nubian and found the camp on the hillside and a shelter in one of the friendly tents, where he slept soundly and woke refreshed in the morning.

This day he would not spend in playing and wandering. He would go straight to the Temple, to find some of the learned teachers who gave instruction there, and learn from them the wisdom that he needed in order to do his work for his Father.

As he went he thought about the things that had befallen him yesterday. Why had the man dressed in white despised him? Why had the city children mocked him and chased him away with stones? Why was the strange woman who had been so kind to him afterward so unhappy and so hopeless?

There must be something in the world that he did not understand, something evil and hateful and miserable that he had never felt in himself. But he felt it in the others, and it made him so sorry, so distressed for them, that it seemed like a heavy weight, a burden on his own heart. It was like the work of those demons, of whom his mother had told him, who entered into people and lived inside of them, like worms eating away a fruit.

Only these people of whom he was thinking did not seem to have a demon that took hold of them and drove them mad and made them foam at the mouth and cut themselves with stones, like a man he once saw in Galilee. This was something larger and more mysterious-like the hot wind that sometimes blew from the south and made people gloomy and angry–like the rank weeds that grew in certain fields, and if the sheep fed there they dropped and died.

The Boy felt that he hated this unknown, wicked, unhappy thing more than anything else in the world. He would like to save people from it. He wanted to fight against it, to drive it away. It seemed as if there were a spirit in his heart saying to him, “This is what you must do, you must fight against this evil, you must drive out the darkness, you must be a light, you must save the people–this is your Father’s work for you to do.”

But how? He did not know. That was what he wanted to find out. And he went into the Temple hoping that the teachers there would tell him.