Yehudah continued the formula sullenly. It was as I had always heard it, save for the question, “Why is the meat all roasted and none sodden or boiled?” But the father had scarcely begun his ritual reply when we heard a loud knocking on the door, the latch was lifted, and in another instant we saw a burly man panting on the threshold, and behind him, more vaguely in the dusk, an agitated woman under a head-shawl.
“Halphaï!” cried the carpenter in amaze. “Art not in Yerushalaim?”
The little mother had sprung to her feet.
“They have killed my Yeshua!” she shrieked.
“Sit down, woman!” said the carpenter sternly.
But she gestured to the figure in the rear: “Speak, my sister, speak.”
“Nay, _I_ will speak,” grumbled her sister’s husband. “Why else did I take horse from the Holy City without hearing the Levites sing or the trumpets blow for the blood-sprinkling? Thy Yeshua came up through the Fountain Gate riding on an ass, and as one flown with new wine.”
“Yea, the wine of the water-pots!” laughed Yakob.
“And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’” He paused for breath, leaving this picture suspended, and I saw a new light leap into the mother’s tragic eyes, a strange exaltation as of a secret hope incredulously confirmed.
“In Yerushalaim?” she breathed. “They cry Hosanna in Yerushalaim?”
“Yea,” said her sister. “And Halphaï told me, even the little children cried, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’”
The carpenter was crumbling a mazzo with nervous fingers; an angry vein swelled on his forehead. “And Pilatus permitted this?” he cried.
“Patience, Reb Yussef!” said Halphaï. “There is more to come. For, growing yet more swollen in his presumption, Yeshua went to the Holy Temple, and, entering the Court of the Gentiles, where sit those who sell the sheep and the oxen and doves, instead of purchasing a sacrifice for his sins, he drove them all out with a scourge of small cords and poured out the changers’ money!”
Horror held the household dumb. I saw Halphaï look round complacently, as though compensated for his hot ride to Nazara. “And ye know what profit Hanan makes out of his bazaars,” he added significantly.