“And I was struck dumb,” the last sentence read. Her fear and her uneasiness grew. One did not contradict one’s husband; one did not argue with a priest of God. But she was unable to rid herself of the thought that he had been taken ill—visions often accompanied illnesses.
“Otherwise are you well?” she asked. He nodded and wrote, “I am happy. You?”
“Yes,” she said, untruthfully, “I am happy.” In truth she was puzzled, incredulous, miserable about her incredulity and worried about him. All that evening she fussed over him, treating him as she would treat a man who had had some severe physical shock. When, just before bedtime, she presented him with a steaming bowl of her famous herb brew which her neighbours had come to regard as a panacea for anything short of a broken limb he had broken into silent laughter, and reaching for his writing tablet, wrote:
“I am not sick. I am to be dumb until the child is born. Punishment for disbelief. Be warned!”
It was the first time in over forty years of married life that he had ever shown any sign of levity, and that, somehow, increased her uneasiness.
Long after he was asleep she lay by his side and thought it all over and asked herself—How shall I know? In her child-bearing days a woman’s life was ruled by the moon. A disturbance, an interruption could be noticed, interpreted with joy or with dismay. She knew; there was no woman in the world, she thought, who had more closely checked her reckonings. A day’s delay and she had hoped .. . But it was a full ten years since the moon’s courses and hers had ceased to be connected. Ten years ago since she had, at last, abandoned all hope. And Zacharias’ admonition to remember Sarah had a peculiar sting. For quite a few months she had remembered Sarah with whom it had ceased to be after the manner of women, and she envied that long dead woman very greatly. But ten years … Zacharias remained dumb and Elisabethremained dubious. But changes came, things the most realistic and incredulous of women could hardly overlook. Her skin regained its lost bloom, her hair its lustre; the early-morning made itself felt. And her body, like a ripening fruit, began to swell.
One day she could say to Zacharias, without any reserve at all, “It is true!”
And on his tablet he wrote, “I told you!”
She was unthinkably happy, but embarrassed, too—and there again, ashamed of her embarrassment as she had been of her disbelief. Women always pretended that they could not reckon, but they were sharp enough where another woman’s age was concerned. There wasn’t a woman at the well or in the market who wouldn’t know that Elisabeth, the wife of Zacharias, was fifty-seven years old, and even if she could bring herself to tell them the truth, was there one who would believe it? Not one. They’d look on her as a poor self-deluded creature,
afflictedwith one of those slowly killing growths in the womb, pretending to believe that she was with child. The herbs she grew and the draughts she made from them had brought her into contact with many people, sick of mind or body and she knew about life fantasies such people wove. She hated the thought of such a fantasy being attributed to her.
So he had refused to leave her house. Zacharias had written his protests and she had said, “When the child is born, I will go out with it in my arms, or ask them in to see.”
Everyone in the village knew that Zacharias had lost his power of speech and imagined that this fact had so upset Elisabeth that she was unable to go to the well or to market. A girl, extravagantly rewarded for such service, delivered water daily and Zacharias bought everything that was needed in the markets of Jerusalem. That Elisabeth’s distaste for going out and exposing her state was no mere whim had been proved to him by her attitude to her cousin Mary’s wedding. It was due to take place when Elisabeth was in her eighth month; a good time, really, all the early inconveniences and dangers over and done with, and a pregnant woman, moving slowly, commanding deference, could take, amongst friends and relatives, her rightful, proud place.
But Elisabeth had said, “I cannot go. I love my cousin Mary, and if I could see her alone I would gladly go. But there’s Anne—imagine how she would look at me; and there’ll be women of my age trying to arrange marriages for their granddaughters. Zacharias, I could not face it. Please, write and say that your duties at the Temple will prevent us from attending.” He had intended to write, but he had never been obliged to do so, for in Elisabeth’s sixth month, Mary’s wedding date still two months away, they had had word that Mary was already married. Rabbi had communicated with Rabbi, link by link, a chain that reached over the eighty intervening miles, and Zacharias and Elisabeth were “in due time informed that to suit Joseph’s convenience, the marriage had been put forward by two months. It had therefore been a small wedding, and had lasted only one day. Elisabeth was relieved, and yet concerned. It sounded as though Mary, that sweet, gentle creature, might have chosen a selfish man. After all, a girl’s wedding day was her one great day; and she shouldn’t be cheated of it to suit the bridegroom’s convenience. If a man had never given the woman he chose any consideration and meant never to give her any, he usually allowed her that one great day, thinking nothing of his own convenience.
“I hope she will be happy,” Elisabeth said, looking back over her own marriage which, apart from that one lack, had been so very happy.
“We must send her our gift.”
They’d spent time and thought on it; nothing of wood, Mary was marrying, they knew, a carpenter, so she would be well supplied with anything in that line; and Elisabeth, though she had not seen her Aunt Anne for some years, knew that anything practical, linen, blankets, bowls, could be counted upon to come from her.
“She’s very fond of lilies,” Elisabeth said.
“And I will send her a dozen good bulbs; but from us there should be something more.” ..”
She knew that with Zacharias in regular employment and—as in Nazareth they would still think—childless, something generous would be expected of them. And one day, without warning, Zacharias, setting down the stores he had carried, and smiling, showed her the exact thing. It was a coin, known as a rose jekkal, the rarest and most valuable Coin in the world. Not only for its worth, for its beauty. On one side, not imprinted but embossed, there was a full-blown rose, exact, even to a thorn; on the other there were symbols, words! perhaps, in a language nobody could read. For the rose jekkals came from far, far away and if four of them reached Jerusalem in a single year, that was the most. They were eagerly sought after and the woman who could hang a rose jekkal amongst the coins of her head-dress was a proud woman indeed.
Zacharias held the lovely coin on his palm and invited her approval; dumbly, like a trained hound.
Elisabeth said, “For Mary ?” and he nodded.
She said, “It is beautiful; and, with the lily bulb, a fine gift. How
clever of you. Where did you find it?“He wrote on the tablet which he now always carried.
“At the money-changer’s stall.”
It was just right; a thing of beauty, a thing of value, a suitable accompaniment to the lily bulbs. And yet, Elisabeth thought, tupping to the hearth, not right, in some mysterious way. Mary, as she remembered her, had such a lovely brow, so calm and smooth, with the hair growing back from it in such a pretty way. For some reason it was difficult to imagine Mary, the young Mary, with the usual coin collection dangling between the curve of her eyebrows and the curve of her hair. It would seem a deformity.
Nonsense, nonsense, Elisabeth told herself. Mary, like every other married woman, would now begin to make the collection of coins for the head-dress which constituted in fact, every respectable family’s nest-egg. And Mary, who loved even the wild cornflower, would love the rose.
Lifting the pot from the hearth, she said, “We must find a trustworthy messenger to carry it.” And she said again that it had been clever of him to obtain it. She said, “If I thought I could get in and out of Nazareth without seeing Anne, who, though she is my aunt, is younger than I, I would take it myself. I think that Mary is the one woman in the world whom I could tell, and be at ease with.”