Act third, the Lost Child, or Christ in the Temple. The scene is before
the Temple on a festival day, plenty of chorus-girls, music, and
flowers. Demas and the impenitent Gestas and Barabbas, who, I was
pleased to see, was after all a very good sort of fellow, with no more
malice than you or I, were down in the city on a sort of lark, their
leopard skins left in the mountains and their daggers hid under the
natty costume of the Judaean dandy of the period. Demas and Gestas have
a quarrel, in which Gestas is rather roughly handled, and goes off
growling like every villain, _qui se respecte,--_"I will have
r-revenge." Barabbas proposes to go around to the cider-cellars, but
Demas confides to him that he is enslaved by a dream of a child, who
said to him, "Follow me--to Paradise;" that he had come down to
Jerusalem to seek and find the mysterious infant of his vision. The
jovial Barabbas seems imperfectly impressed by these transcendental
fancies, and at this moment Mary comes in dressed like a Madonna of
Guido Reni, and soon after St. Joseph and his staff. They ask each other
where is the Child,--a scene of alarm and bustle, which ends by the door
of the Temple flying open and discovering, shrined in ineffable light,
Jesus teaching the doctors.
In the fourth act, Demas meets a beautiful woman by the city gate, in
the loose, graceful dress of the Hetairai, and the most wonderful
luxuriance of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to
her knees.
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