At this moment a servant burst somewhat unceremoniously into the room.
“How now, fellow?” cried the high priest, “Where are your manners? Don’t you know that I have company and am not to be interrupted?”
“Pardon, my lord,” said the man, in a breathless, agitated voice, “but the matter is urgent. Your nephew Asaph is dying, and has sent begging you to come to him.”
“Asaph dying!” cried the high priest, turning pale. “How is that?”
Asaph had been one of the performers in the exhibition of the day. A light weight, but an exceedingly active and skilful wrestler, he had entered the lists with a competitor much stronger and heavier than himself. The struggle between the two athletes had been protracted and fierce and had ended in a draw. There had been two bouts, but in neither had this or that antagonist been able to claim a decided success. In each, both wrestlers had fallen, Asaph being uppermost in the first, but underneath in the second. On rising from the ground he had complained of severe internal pains; but these had seemed to pass away, and he had been conveyed in a litter to his mother’s house. After a brief interval the pains had returned with increased severity; vomiting of blood had followed, and the physician had declared that the resources of his art were useless. The poor lad—he was but a few months over twenty—sent, in his agony, for his uncle the high priest. It was a forlorn hope—for how could such a man give comfort?—but it was the only one that occurred to him.
No one was more conscious of the incongruity of the task thus imposed upon him, the task of administering consolation and comfort to the dying, than Jason himself. His first impulse was to refuse to go. But to do so would not only cause a scandal, but would also be the beginning of a family feud. And Jason, though selfish and hardened by base ambitions, was not wholly without a heart. He had some affection for his sister, a widow of large means, whose purse was always open to him when he wanted help, and Asaph—or Asius, as he preferred to call him—was his favourite nephew, possibly his successor in his office. He felt that he must go, but it was with a miserable sinking of heart that he felt it.