The Bertrams (11 page)

"Mrs. Rose, are we going to have a picnic on Monday in the Valley of Jehoshaphat; will you and your young ladies join us? We shall send the hampers to the tomb of Zachariah."

"Thank you, Miss Todd; we should have been so happy, but we have only three days to do Bethlehem, the Dead Sea, and Jericho. We must be off tomorrow."

"Mamma, I lost my parasol somewhere coming down the Mount of Offence. Those nasty Arab children must have stolen it."

"They say the people in Siloam are the greatest thieves in Syria; and nobody dares to meddle with them."

"But I saw it in your hand, my dear, at the Well of Enrogel."

"What, no potatoes! there were potatoes yesterday. Waiter, waiter; who ever heard of setting people down to dinner without potatoes?"

"Well, I didn't know what to say to it. If that is the tomb of Nicodemus, that seems to settle the question. May I trouble you for the salt?"

"Mr. Pott, I won't have anything more to say to you; you have no faith. I believe it all."

"What, all? from Calvary upstairs in the gallery down to the dark corner where the cock crew?"

"Yes, all, Mr. Pott. Why should not a cock crow there as well as anywhere else? It is so beautiful to believe."

George Bertram found himself seated next to a lady-like, well-dressed Englishwoman of middle age, whom he heard called Miss Baker;
and next to her again sat—an angel! whom Miss Baker called Caroline, and whom an odious man sitting on the other side of her called Miss Waddington.

All my readers will probably at different times have made part of a table d'hôte assemblage, and most of them, especially those who have travelled with small parties, will know how essential it is to one's comfort to get near to pleasant neighbours. The young man's idea of a pleasant neighbour is of course a pretty girl. What the young ladies' idea may be I don't pretend to say. But it certainly does seem to be happily arranged by Providence that the musty fusty people, and the nicy spicy people, and the witty pretty people do severally assemble and get together as they ought to do.

Bertram's next-door neighbour was certainly of the nicy spicy order; but this did not satisfy him. He would have been very well pleased to talk to Miss Baker had it not been for the close contiguity of Miss Waddington; and even her once-removed vicinity would not have made him unhappy had not that odious man on her left had so much to say about the village of Emmaus and the Valley of Ajalon.

Now, be it known to all men that Caroline Waddington is our
donna primissima
—the personage of most importance in these pages. It is for her that you are to weep, with her that you are to sympathize, and at her that you are to wonder. I would that I could find it compatible with my duty to introduce her to this circle without any minute details of her bodily and mental charms; but I have already been
idle in the case of Adela Gauntlet, and I feel that a
donna primissima
has claims to description which I cannot get over. Only not exactly now; in a few chapters hence we shall have Miss Waddington actively engaged upon the scene, and then she shall be described.

It must suffice now to say that she was an orphan; that since her father's death she had lived with her aunt, Miss Baker, chiefly at Littlebath; that Miss Baker had, at her niece's instance, been to Egypt, up the Nile, across the short desert—(short!) having travelled from Cairo to Jerusalem—and that now, thoroughly sick of the oriental world, she was anxious only to get back to Littlebath; while Caroline, more enthusiastic, and much younger, urged her to go on to Damascus and Lebanon, to Beyrout and Smyrna, and thence home, merely visiting Constantinople and Athens on the way.

Had Bertram heard the terms in which Miss Waddington spoke of the youth who was so great about Ajalon when she and her aunt were in their own room, and also the words in which that aunt spoke of him, perhaps he might have been less provoked.

"Aunt, that Mr. M'Gabbery is an ass. I am sure he has ears if one could only see them. I am so tired of him. Don't you think we could get on to Damascus tomorrow?"

"If we did I have no doubt he'd come too." Mr. M'Gabbery had been one of the party who crossed the desert with them from Cairo.

"Impossible, aunt. The Hunters are ready to start tomorrow, or, if not, the day after, and I know they would not have him."

"But, my dear, I really am not equal to Damascus. A few more days on a camel——"

"But, aunt, you'll have a horse."

"That's worse, I'm sure. And, moreover, I've found an old friend, and one that you will like very much."

"What, that exceedingly ugly young man that sat next to you?"

"Yes. That exceedingly ugly young man I remember as the prettiest baby in the world—not that I think he is ugly. He is, however, no other than the nephew of Mr. Bertram."

"What, papa's Mr. Bertram?"

"Yes; your father's Mr. Bertram. Therefore, if old Mr. Bertram should die, and this young man should be his heir, he would have the charge of all your money. You'd better be gracious to him."

"How odd! But what is he like?"

"He is one of the cleverest young men of the day. I had heard that he had distinguished himself very much at Oxford; and he certainly is a most agreeable companion." And so it was arranged between them that they would not start to Damascus as yet, in spite of any evil that Mr. M'Gabbery might inflict on them.

On the next morning at breakfast, Bertram managed to separate the aunt from the niece by sitting between them. It was long, however, before Mr. M'Gabbery gave up the battle. When he found that an interloper was interfering with his peculiar property, he began to tax his conversational powers to the utmost. He was greater than ever about Ajalon, and propounded some very startling theories with
reference to Emmaus. He recalled over and over again the interesting bits of their past journey; how tired they had been at Gaza, where he had worked for the ladies like a slave—how terribly Miss Baker had been frightened in the neighbourhood of Arimathea, where he, Mr. M'Gabbery, had specially looked to his pistols with the view of waging war on three or four supposed Bedouins who were seen to be hovering on the hill-sides. But all would not do. Miss Waddington was almost tired of Gaza and Arimathea, and Miss Baker seemed to have a decided preference for London news. So at last Mr. M'Gabbery became silent and grand, and betook himself to his associations and a map of Palestine in a corner.

Bertram, when fortified with a night's rest and a good breakfast, was able to recover his high-toned feeling, and, thus armed, proceeded alone to make his first visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was a Sunday, the last Sunday in Lent; and he determined to hear mass in the Greek Church, and ascertain for himself how much devotion an English Protestant could experience in the midst of this foreign worship. But one mass was over and another not begun when he reached the building, and he had thus time to follow his dragoman to the various wonders of that very wonderful building.

It is now generally known in England of what the church of the holy places consists; but no one who has not seen it, and none, indeed, who have not seen it at Easter-time, can fully realize all the absurdity which it contains
and all the devotion which it occasions. Bertram was first carried to the five different churches which have crowded themselves together under the same roof. The Greeks have by far the best of it. Their shrine is gaudy and glittering, and their temple is large and in some degree imposing. The Latins, whom we call Roman Catholics, are much less handsomely lodged, and their tinsel is by far more dingy. The Greeks, too, possess the hole in which stood—so they say—the cross of Our Saviour; while the Latins are obliged to put up with the sites on which the two thieves were crucified. Then the church of the Armenians, for which you have to descend almost into the bowels of the earth, is still less grand in its pretensions, is more sombre, more dark, more dirty; but it is as the nave of St. Peter's when compared to the poor wooden-cased altar of the Abyssinians, or the dark unfurnished gloomy cave in which the Syrian Christians worship, so dark that the eye cannot at first discover its only ornament—a small ill-made figure of the crucified Redeemer.

We, who are accustomed to Roman Catholic gorgeousness in Italy and France, can hardly at first understand why the Pope here should play so decidedly a second fiddle. But as he is held to be God's vice-gerent among the people of south-western Europe, so is the Russian emperor among the Christians of the East. He, the Russian, is still by far the greatest pope in Jerusalem, and is treated with a much greater respect, a much truer belief, than is his brother of Rome, even among Romans.

Five or six times Bertram had attempted to get into the Tabernacle of the Holy Sepulchre, but so great had been the rush of pilgrims, that he had hitherto failed. At last his dragoman espied a lull, and went again to the battle. To get into the little outside chapel, which forms, as it were, a vestibule to the cell of the Sepulchre, and from which on Easter Saturday issue the miraculous flames, was a thing to be achieved by moderate patience. His close contiguity to Candiotes and Copts, to Armenians and Abyssinians, was not agreeable to our hero, for the contiguity was very close, and Christians of these nations are not very cleanly. But this was nothing to the task of entering the
sanctum sanctorum.
To this there is but one aperture, and that is but four feet high; men entering it go in head foremost, and those retreating come out in the other direction; and as it is impossible that two should pass, and as two or three are always trying to come out, and ten or twelve equally anxious to get in, the struggle to an Englishman is disagreeably warm, though to an Oriental it is probably matter of interesting excitement.

But for his dragoman, Bertram would never have succeeded. He, however, so pulled and hauled these anxious devotees, so thrust in those who endeavoured to come out, and clawed back those who strove to get in, that the passage became for a moment clear, and our hero, having bent low his head, found himself standing with his hand on the marble slab of the tomb.

Those who were there around him seemed to
be the outcasts of the world, exactly those whom he would have objected to meet, unarmed, on the roads of Greece or among the hills of Armenia; cutthroat-looking wretches, with close-shaven heads, dirty beards, and angry eyes; men clothed in skins, or huge skin-like-looking cloaks, filthy, foul, alive with vermin, reeking with garlic,—abominable to an Englishman. There was about them a certain dignity of demeanour, a natural aptitude to carry themselves with ease, and even a not impure taste for colour among their dirt. But these Christians of the Russian Church hardly appeared to him to be brothers of his own creed.

But he did put his hand on the slab of the tomb; and as he did so, two young Greeks, brothers by blood—Greeks by their creed, though of what actual nation Bertram was quite unable to say—pressed their lips vehemently to the marble. They were dirty, shorn about the head, dangerous looking, and skin-clothed, as we have described; men very low in the scale of humanity when compared with their fellow-pilgrim; but, nevertheless, they were to him, at that moment, objects of envy. They believed: so much at any rate was clear to him. By whatever code of morals they might be able to govern their lives, whether by any, or as, alas! might be too likely, by none, at least they possessed a faith. Christ, to them, was an actual living truth, though they knew how to worship him no better than by thus kissing a stone, which had in fact no closer reference to the Saviour than any other stone they might have kissed in their own country.
They believed; and as they reverently pressed their foreheads, lips, and hands to the top and sides and edges of the sepulchre, their faith became ecstatic. It was thus that Bertram would fain have entered that little chapel, thus that he would have felt, thus that he would have acted had he been able. So had he thought to feel—in such an agony of faith had he been minded there to kneel. But he did not kneel at all. He remarked to himself that the place was inordinately close, that his contiguity to his religious neighbours was disagreeable; and then, stooping low his head, not in reverence, but with a view to backing himself out from the small enclosure, with some delay and much precaution, and, to speak truth, with various expressions of anger against those who with their heads continued to push him the way he did not wish to go, he retreated from the chapel. Nor while he was at Jerusalem did he feel sufficient interest in the matter again to enter it. He had done that deed, he had killed that lion, and, ticking it off from his list of celebrities as one celebrity disposed of, he thought but little more about it. Such, we believe, are the visits of most English Christians to the so-called Holy Sepulchre.

And then he killed the other lions there: Calvary up in the gallery; the garden, so called, in which the risen Saviour addressed the women running from the sepulchre; the place where Peter's cock crew; the tomb of Nicodemus—all within the same church, all under the one roof—all at least under what should be a roof, only now it has fallen into ruin, so that these
sacred places are open to the rain of heaven, and, Greeks and Latins having quarrelled about the repairs, the Turks, now lords of the Holy Sepulchre, have taken the matter into their own hands, and declared that no repairs shall be done by any of them.

And then he attended the Greek mass—at least, he partly believed that he did so, somewhat doubting, for the mass was not said as are those of the Romans, out at an open altar before the people, but in a holy of holies; very holy, it may be imagined, from the manner in which the worshippers rubbed their foreheads against certain gratings, through which a tantalizing glimpse might be had of the fine things that were going on within. Had they but known it, it might all have been seen, holy of holies, head-wagging priest, idle yawning assistant, with legs stretched out, half asleep, mumblement, jumblement and all, from a little back window in a passage opening from that Calvary gallery upstairs. From thence at least did these profane eyes look down and see all the mumblement and jumblement, which after all was little enough; but saw especially the idle clerical apprentice who, had that screen been down, and had he been called on to do his altar work before the public eye, would not have been so nearly asleep, as may perhaps be said of other clerical performers nearer home.