The Pharaoh And The Priest Part 20

"Thou speakest justly, but where are the guilty?" answered Rameses.

"Where there are no guilty there must at least be men who are punished. Not the guilt of a man, but the punishment which follows a crime, teaches others that they are not to commit the crime in question."

"I see," interrupted the heir, "that your worthiness will not support my prayer."

"Wisdom flows from thy lips, erpatr," answered the priest. "Never shall I give my lord a counsel which would expose the dignity of power to a blow."

The prince returned home pained and astonished. He felt that an injury had been done to some hundreds of people, and he saw that he could not save them any more than he could rescue a man on whom an obelisk or the column of a temple had fallen.

"My hands are too weak to rear this edifice," thought the prince, with anguish of spirit.

For the first time he felt that there was a power infinitely greater than his will,--the interest of the state, which even the all-powerful pharaoh acknowledges and before which he the erpatr must bend himself.

Night had fallen. Rameses commanded his servants to admit no one, and walked in loneliness on the terrace of his villa, thinking,--

"A wonderful thing! Down there at Pi-Bailos the invincible regiments of Nitager opened before me, while in Memphis an overseer of prisons, an investigating official, and a scribe bar the way to me. What are they? Mere servants of my father,--may he live through eternity!--who can cast them down to the rank of slaves at any moment and send them to the quarries. But why should not my father pardon the innocent? The state does not wish him to do so. And what is the state? Does it eat?

where does it sleep? where are its hands and its sword, of which all are in terror?"

He looked into the garden, and among the trees on the summit of an eminence he saw two immense silhouettes of pylons, on which sentry lights were burning. The thought came to him that that watch never slept, those pylons never ate, but still they existed. Those pylons had existed for ages, mighty, like Rameses the Great, that potentate who had reared them.

Could he lift those edifices and hundreds of similar grandeur; could he escape those guards and thousands of others who watch over the safety of Egypt; could he disobey laws established by Rameses the Great and other preceding pharaohs still greater, laws which twenty dynasties had consecrated by their reverence?

In the soul of the prince for the first time in life a certain idea, dim but gigantic, began to fix itself in outline,--the idea of the state. The state is something more magnificent than the temple in Thebes, something grander than the pyramid of Cheops, something more ancient than the subterranean temple of the Sphinx, something more enduring than granite--in that immense though invisible edifice people are like ants in some cranny of a cliff, and the pharaoh a mere travelling architect who is barely able to lay one stone in the wall of the edifice and then go on farther. But the walls increase from generation to generation and the edifice continues.

He, the son of the pharaoh, had never felt yet his littleness as in that moment, when his glance in the midst of the night was wandering beyond the Nile among pylons of the pharaoh's palace, and the indefinite but imposing outlines of the Memphis temples.

At that moment from among the trees whose branches touched the terrace, he heard a voice.

"I know thy anxiety and I bless thee. The court will not free the prisoners. But the case will drop, and they may return to their houses if the overseer of thy land does not support the complaint of attack."

"Then did my overseer make the charge?" asked the astonished prince.

"Thou hast spoken truth. He made the charge in thy name. But if he does not go to the court, there will be no injured person; and there is no offence if there is no injured person."

The thicket rustled.

"Stop!" cried Rameses; "who art thou?"

No one gave answer. But it seemed to the prince that in a streak of light from a torch burning on the lower floor a naked head was visible for an instant, and also a panther skin.

"A priest," whispered the heir. "Why does he hide himself?"

But at that moment it occurred to him that the priest might answer grievously for giving counsel which stopped the dispensation of justice.

CHAPTER XII

Rameses pa.s.sed most of the night in feverish imaginings. Once the vision of the state appeared to him as an immense labyrinth with strong walls through which no one could force a way, then again he saw the shadow of a priest who with one wise opinion had indicated to him the method of escape from that labyrinth. And now appeared unexpectedly before him two powers,--the interest of the state, which he had not felt thus far, though he was heir to the throne; and the priesthood, which he wished to debase and then make his servant.

That was a burdensome night. The prince turned on his bed repeatedly, and asked himself whether he had not been blind, and if he had not received sight that day for the first time in order to convince himself of his folly and nothingness. How differently during those night hours did the warnings of his mother appear to him, and the restraint of his father in enouncing the supreme will, and even the stern conduct of the minister, Herhor.

"The state and the priesthood!" repeated the prince, half asleep, and covered with cold perspiration.

The heavenly deities alone know what would have happened had there been time to develop and ripen those thoughts which were circling that night in the soul of Rameses. Perhaps if he had become pharaoh he would have been one of the most fortunate and longest-lived rulers.

Perhaps his name, carved in temples above ground and underground, would have come down to posterity surrounded with the highest glory.

Perhaps he and his dynasty would not have lost the throne, and Egypt would have avoided great disturbance and the bitterest days of her history.

But the serenity of morning scattered the visions which circled above the heated head of the heir, and the succeeding days changed greatly his ideas of the inflexible interests of Egypt.

The visit of the prince to the prison was not fruitless. The investigating official made a report to the supreme judge immediately, the judge looked over the case again, examined some of the accused himself, and in the course of some days liberated the greater number; the remainder he brought to trial as quickly as possible.

When he who had complained of the damage done the prince's property did not appear, though summoned in the hall of the court and on the market-place, the case was dropped, and the rest of the accused were set at liberty.

One of the judges remarked, it is true, that according to law the prince's overseer should be prosecuted for false complaint, and, in case of conviction, suffer the punishment which threatened the defendants. This question too they pa.s.sed over in silence.

The overseer disappeared from the eyes of justice, he was sent by the heir to the province of Takens, and soon the whole box of doc.u.ments in the case vanished it was unknown whither.

On hearing this, Prince Rameses went to the grand secretary and asked with a smile,--

"Well, worthy lord, the innocent are liberated, the doc.u.ments concerning them have been destroyed sacrilegiously, and still the dignity of the government has not been exposed to danger."

"My prince," answered the grand secretary, with his usual coolness, "I did not understand that thou offerest complaints with one hand and wishest to withdraw them with the other. Worthiness, thou wert offended by the rabble; hence it was thy affair to punish it. If thou hast forgiven it, the state has nothing to answer."

"The state!--the state!" repeated the prince. "We are the state,"

added he, blinking.

"Yes, the state is the pharaoh and--his most faithful servants," added the secretary.

This conversation with such a high official sufficed to obliterate in the prince's soul those ideas of state dignity which were growing and powerful, though indistinct yet. "The state, then, is not that immovable, ancient edifice to which each pharaoh is bound to add one stone of glory, but rather a sand-heap, which each ruler reshapes as he pleases. In the state there are no narrow doors, known as laws, in pa.s.sing through which each must bow his head, whoever he be, erpatr or earth-worker. In this edifice are various entrances and exits, narrow for the weak and small, very wide, nay, commodious for the powerful."

"If this be so," thought the prince, as the idea flashed on him, "I will make the order which shall please me."

At that moment Rameses remembered two people,--the liberated black who without waiting for command had been ready to die for him, and that unknown priest.

"If I had more like them, my will would have meaning in Egypt and beyond it," said he to himself, and he felt an inextinguishable desire to find that priest.

"He is, in all likelihood, the man who restrained the crowd from attacking my house. On the one hand he knows law to perfection, on the other he knows how to manage mult.i.tudes."

"A man beyond price! I must have him."

From that time Rameses, in a small boat managed by one oarsman, began to visit the cottages in the neighborhood of his villa. Dressed in a tunic and a great wig, in his hand a staff on which a measure was cut out, the prince looked like an engineer studying the Nile and its overflows.

Earth-tillers gave him willingly all explanations concerning changes in the form of land because of inundations, and at the same time they begged that the government might think out some easier way of raising water than by sweeps and buckets. They told too of the attack on the house of Prince Rameses, and said that they knew not who threw the stones. Finally they mentioned the priest who had sent the crowd away so successfully; but who he was they knew not.

"There is," said one man, "a priest in our neighborhood who cures sore eyes; there is one who heals wounds and sets broken arms and legs.