Page:Lazarus, a tale of the world's great miracle.djvu/30

18 the politicians and great rulers of the day, she had become a personage of some importance in Jerusalem, and young lawyers and rulers, anxious to ingratiate themselves with Caiaphas, and young Romans, and even Greeks, were included in the no small group of her admirers.

Her mother, Annas's daughter, was an invalid, a poor weak woman, whom dread of Caiaphas's outbursts of bad temper had reduced almost to imbecility.

Rebekah was no mean linguist, too; she could converse in Greek and Latin, and was often of great assistance to her father; but this was more from the pleasure of the importance she derived from it than from any wish to help, for Rebekah loved no one like herself.

To-day she lay across her couch, gazing moodily from the window, while her maidens played to her on the cithern, an instrument the Greeks had lately introduced. But its notes seemed but to irritate her.

"Stop, stop, stop!" she cried. "Ye do play such mournful tunes, 't is like the wailing at a burial. Come tell me, when ye passed the market place, were there great multitudes listening to this this carpenter. Saw ye any rulers there?" she asked, with scathing irony; "or did only the foul, the blind, the beggars, and the leprous assemble? For I hear this Man doth, above all, love sinners, and the beautiful Magdalene they say hath become a saint. Oh, the world must be upside down when the Magdalene doth become a penitent." And while she spoke and laughed there was something fraught with scorn and malice that reminded one of Caiaphas. "But