Through long wanderings
We never once were parted. In his youth
I deemed him honest, loved him as myself,
Nor doubted he should richly thrive and prosper
Amongst the sons of men. But day by day
The hand of opportunity unmasked
The sleeping guilt within. Envy and greed,
Pitiless malice, pride, and wantonness
Started like lion's cubs that scent their prey
And roared increasingly. Time drew aside
Veil after veil that cloaked his villainy,
Till looking on his stark and naked soul
I stood aghast and trembled.

KNIGHT. God, that made us,
Engraved his sacred image in our hearts
Deeper than cruel eyes may boast to pierce.
Has not my brother too a priceless soul
For which Christ died? Did God not ransom it?
Yes, I will find him, lift him to my breast
And say, "Forget the past. Thy home is here."

HERMIT. Beware! Didst thou embrace him he would die,
And he hath grievous penance yet to do
Ere he be ripe for heaven. In purgatory
The pains are doubly sharp and manifold
With which our guilt is cleansed. Forbear to search.

KNIGHT. This ministration is a task that heaven
Now lays upon me. Hinder not his weal.
What better battle could approve my courage
Than in a brother's soul to fight despair?
If I could bring that brother back to life
Long dead to me, and dead, it seems, to God,
Were't not a deed of Christian chivalry
To win my lady by? Father, I pray thee,
Where is my brother now?

HERMIT. A mystery
Enshrouds his penance. Vain to question more.
A secret vow on which salvation hangs
Lies between him and all men.

KNIGHT. Marvellous!

Where hath he roamed, what nameless sin committed
That I may not embrace him?

HERMIT. Listen, Knight,

For I may tell thee that; and when thou knowest
The sins he shrives and what his penance is,
Assist him with thy charitable prayers
To bear his cross, but lift it not away,
For with it goes his hope of paradise.

KNIGHT. There is indeed some mystery in this.
The pain of it doth weigh upon thy soul
Even in the telling.

HERMIT. Did his own pale lips
Read from the branded tablets of his heart
The record of his sorrows, they could never
More truly speak than I, for all his woes
I knew, and inly felt them as my own.
Would that some ruffian knife had gashed his throat
On that foul day of slaughter, when thy mother
Bore thee afar to safety. Ah, how near
Salvation hung that day above his head!
But wondrously, as Isaac once was spared,
Some voice he heard not stayed the murderous hand,
Then dealing death abroad; and from that mercy
The dreadful brood of all his torments sprang.

They bound his wrists with painful twisted thongs
And drove him with the flocks and captive women
Into their camp, across the smouldering heaps
Of burning rubbish and through sulphurous fumes.
That night he found him tied behind a cart—
The crawling palace of that savage chief
Whose greed had saved him. Shivering he stood,
For they had stripped him, through the starlight hours,
And found no piteous orb less bright above him
For looking on his grief. Alas, his soul
Entered that night into the maze of hell.
For gazing on those stars and on the corpses
Of all he loved and knew, mangled and bare,
Upbraiding heaven with their lidless eyes,
And heaven's eyes still smiling back at them,
He said to his cold heart, "There is no God."
And when the rosy dawn with jocund seeming
Gilded the valley as if naught had chanced,
He, like the morning, banished grief and love,
And in his vain and cruel heart repeating
"There is no God," arose to greet the sun.
They took him to a village by a stream,
And in the market sold him to a Jew,
A long-robed man, who stroked thy brother's hair—
'T was flaxen then and silken as thy own—
And chuckled as he hurried him away
Into a galley, by the margin moored.
They voyaged long, until they reached a vast
And splendid city. Egypt's sunken shore
Stretches behind it, and before its walls
Pharos, by day a pillar and by night
A flaming beacon, greets the mariner.
'T is Satan's capital. If holy men
Have dwelt within it, teaching all the Church,
That was of old. Now Saracens and Jews
Possess it wholly. There no Christian thrives,
But every monstrous and lascivious crime
Findeth a palace or a den to hide it.
There did thy brother waste his youth, a slave,
And no unwilling service did he render
To every base command. His shepherd's skin,
Ruddy with mountain suns, they smoothed with unguents,
And bleached in pillared courts; they shaved his hair,
Forbade him labour, save to hold a torch
While his young masters read, or at the banquet
To mix the lucent sherbets with the snows
Of Sinai's deepest gorge, or in the censer
To drop large incense-grains. He learned to sing
What songs of wine their ribald poets penned,
And all the witch of Lesbos raved of love.
The lute and timbrel in his skilful hands
They loved to place; oft in their languid souls
His wild chant roused some savage memory
And their hearts leapt like leopards in the night
That prowl through broad Sahara. His delight
Was henceforth the choice morsel, the fat fee,
The subtle theft. He brought the gossip home
From the loud market, lest his lord should yawn
The morning long beneath the barber's hands,
Nor praise his wit and to the tittering group
Repeat his story. In the brothel streets
He ran sly errands, nor escaped in fear
If as he passed some wife of Potiphar
Plucked at his tunic. His best art it was
To know the cunning mixture of good wines
And poisons too, if some adulterous slave
Or long-lived uncle or importunate brother
Needed a poison.—Close about his soul
This bitter flood of luxury crept up
Until it choked him. He forgot the past
And blushed to be a Christian. Their vain prayers
He learned to mutter, and was circumcised.
Thrice in the day, and dawn and noon and eve,
He washed his feet and hands, a foolish rite
That left the soul still foul. Twice seven devils
Lodged in his body and tormented him,
And lust pursued him when all ways of lust
Were stale and sickened.

But there came an end.
For by the flesh as he had chiefly sinned,
So in the flesh he had his punishment.
Ulcers and boils, to make another Job,
Thickened upon him, and his beauty gone,
They drove him like a pest from all their gates
Among the lepers. Then he called on God.
Then he remembered all he once had heard
But understood not touching Calvary;
And rising up, all naked as he was,
He plucked the stout stem of a bramble-bush
To be his palmer's staff, and with a rag
That once had been the blanket of a mule
Girded his loins, and stalked into the wild.

KNIGHT. And whither, father, whither did he go?

HERMIT. Mount Sinai first received him, on whose crests
The Lord in the beginning reared his throne,
And from whose spurs and watered crevices
The children of Saint Anthony for ever
Pour praise and supplication. There he dwelt,
Recalling to his troubled memory
The precepts of the faith; but from those haunts
He journeyed soon to deeper