Chapter XXXIX…

Chapter XXXIX

A Sea Fight

[Sidenote: The Captain as Seaman]

We stretched out far to sea, for the double purpose of falling by surprise upon the Roman squadron and of avoiding the shoals. The wind lulled at intervals so much that we had recourse to our oars; it would then burst down with a violence that all but hurled us out of the water. I now saw more of the captain, and was witness to the extraordinary activity and skill of this singular young man. Never was there a more expert seaman. For every change of sea or wind he had a new expedient; and when the hearts of the stoutest sank, he took the helm into his hands and carried us through the chaos of foam, whirlwind, and lightning with the vigor of one born to sport with the storm.

As I was gazing over the vessel’s side at the phosphoric gleams that danced along the billows, he came up to me.

“I am sorry,” said he, “that we have been compelled to give you so rough a specimen of our hospitality, and this is not altogether a summer sea, but you saw how the matter stood. The enemy would have been upon us, and the whole advantage of our staying at home would be to have our throats cut in company.”

Odd and rambling as his style was, there was something in his manner and voice that had struck me before, even in the boisterousness of the convivial crowd. But now, in the solitary sea, there was a melancholy sweetness in his tones that made me start with sad recollection. Yet, when by the lightning I attempted to discover in his features any clue to memory, and saw but the tall figure wrapped in the sailor’s cloak, the hair streaming over his face in the spray, and every line of his powerful physiognomy at its full stretch in the agitation of the time, the thought vanished again.

[Sidenote: His Request]

“I hinted,” said he, after an interval of silence, “at your taking chance with us. If you will, you may. But the hint was thrown out merely to draw off the fellows about me, and you are at full liberty to forget it.”

“It is impossible to join you,” was my answer; “my life is due to my country.”

“Oh, for that matter, so is mine, and due a long time ago; my only wonder is, how I have evaded payment till now. But I am a man of few words. I have taken a sort of liking to you, and would wish to have a few such at hand. The world calls me pirate, and the majority, of course, carries the question. For its opinion I do not care a cup of water; a bubble would weigh as heavily with me as the rambling, giddy, vulgar judgment of a world in which the first of talents is knavery. I never knew a man fail who brought to market prostitution of mind enough to make him a tool, vice enough to despise everything but gain, and cunning enough to keep himself out of the hands of the magistrate till opulence enabled him to corrupt the law or authority to defy it. But let that pass. The point between us is, will you take service with us?”

“No! I feel the strongest gratitude for the manliness and the generosity of your protection. You saved our lives, and our only hope of revisiting Judea in freedom is through you. But, young man, I have a great cause in hand. I have risked everything for it. Family, wealth, rank, life, are my stake; and I look upon every hour given to other things as so far a fraud upon my country.”

I heard him sigh. There was silence on both sides for a while, and he paced the deck; then suddenly returning, laid his hand on my shoulder.

“I am convinced of your honor,” said he, “and far be it from me to betray a man who has indeed a purpose worthy of manhood into our broken and unhappy—aye, let the word come out, infamous career. But you tell me that I have been of some use to you; I now demand the return. You have refused to take service with me. Let me take service with you!”

[Sidenote: The Presence of the Roman Fleet]

I stared at him. He smiled sadly, and said: “You will not associate with one stained like me. Aye, for me there is no repentance! Yet, why shall the world”—and his voice was full of anguish—“why shall an ungenerous and misjudging world be suffered to keep forever at a distance those whom it has first betrayed?” His emotion got the better of him, and his voice sank. He again approached me. “I am weary of this kind of life. Not that I have reason to complain of the men about me, nor that I dislike the chances of the sea; but that I feel the desire to be something better—to redeem myself out of the number of the dishonored; to do something which, whether I live or die, will satisfy me that I was not meant to be—the outcast that I am.”

“Then join us, if you will,” said I. “Our cause demands the bold; and the noblest spirit that ever dwelt in man would find its finest field in the deliverance of our land, the land of holiness and glory. But can you leave all that you have round you here?”

“Not without a struggle. I have an infinite delight in this wild kind of existence. I love the strong excitement of hazard; I love the perpetual bustle of our career; I love even the capriciousness of wind and wave. I have wealth in return for its perils; and no man knows what enjoyment is but he who knows it through the fatigue of a sailor’s life. All the banquets of Epicureanism are not half so delicious as even the simplest meal to his hunger, nor the softest bed of luxury half so refreshing as the bare deck to his weariness. But I must break up those habits; and whether beggar, slave, or soldier obtaining the distinction of a soldier’s success, I am determined on trying my chance among mankind.”

A sheet of lightning at this instant covered the whole horizon with blue flame, and a huge ball of fire springing from the cloud, after a long flight over the waters split upon the shore. The keenness of the seaman’s eye saw what had escaped mine.

“That was a lucky sea-light for us,” said he. “The Romans are lying under yonder promontory, driven to take shelter by the gale, of course; but for that fire-ball they would have escaped me.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Gives the Order]

All the crew were now summoned on deck; signals were made to the other galleys; the little fleet brought into close order; pikes, torches, and combustibles of all kinds gathered upon the poop; the sails furled, and with muffled oars we glided down upon the enemy. The Roman squadron, with that precaution which was the essential of its matchless discipline, was drawn up in order of battle, tho it could have had no expectation of being attacked on such a night. But the roar of the gale buried every other sound, and we stole round the promontory unheard.

The short period of this silent navigation was one of the keenest anxiety. All but those necessary for the working of the vessel were lying on their faces; not a limb was moved, and like a galley of the dead we floated on, filled with destruction. We were yet at some distance from the twinkling lights that showed the prefect’s trireme when, on glancing round, I perceived a dark object on the water, and pointed it out to the captain.

“Some lurking spy,” said he, “who was born to pay for his knowledge.”

With a sailor’s promptitude he caught up a lamp and swung it overboard. It fell beside the object, a small boat, as black as the waves themselves.

“Now for the sentinel,” were his words, as he plunged into the sea. The act was as rapid as the words. I heard a struggle, a groan, and the boat floated empty beside me on the next billow.

But there was no time to wait for his return. We were within an oar’s length of the anchorage. To communicate the probable loss of their captain (and what could human struggle do among the mountainous waves of that sea?) might be to dispirit the crew and ruin the enterprise. I took the command upon myself, and gave the word to fall on.

[Sidenote: The Suddenness of Mutiny]

A storm of fire, as strange to the enemy as if it had risen from the bottom of the sea, was instantly poured on the advanced ships. The surprise was complete. The crews, exhausted by the night, were chiefly asleep. The troops on board were helpless, on decks covered with spray, and among shrouds and sails falling down in burning fragments on their heads. Our shouts gave them the idea of being attacked by overwhelming numbers, and after a short dispute we cleared the whole outer line of every sailor and soldier. The whole was soon a pile of flame, a sea volcano that lighted sky, sea, and shore.

Yet only half our work was done. The enemy were now fully awake, and no man could despise Roman preparation. I ordered a fire galley to run in between the leading ships; but she was caught half-way by a chain, and turned round, scattering flame among ourselves. The boats were then lowered, and our most desperate fellows sent to cut out or board. But the crowded decks drove them back, and the Roman pike was an over-match for our short falchions. For a while we were forced to content ourselves with the distant exchange of lances and arrows. The affair now became critical. The enemy were still three times our force; they were unmooring, and our only chance of destroying them was at anchor. I called the crew forward and proposed that we should run the galley close on the prefect’s ship, set them both on fire, and in the confusion carry the remaining vessels. But sailors, if as bold, are as capricious as their element. Our partial repulse had already disheartened them. I was met by clamors for the captain. The clamors rose into open charges that I had, to get the command, thrown him overboard.

I was alone. Jubal, worn out with fatigue and illness, was lying at my feet, more requiring defense than able to afford it. The crowd was growing furious against the stranger. I felt that all depended on the moment, and leaped from the poop into the midst of the mutineers.

“Fools,” I exclaimed, “what could I get by making away with your captain? I have no wish for your command. I have no want of your help. I disdain you: bold as lions over the table; tame as sheep on the deck; I leave you to be butchered by the Romans. Let the brave follow me, if such there be among you.”

[Sidenote: The Monarch of a War Galley]

A shallop that had just returned with the defeated boarders, lay by the galley’s side. I seized a torch. Eight or ten, roused by my taunts, followed me into the boat. We pulled right for the Roman center. Every man had a torch in one hand and an oar in the other. We shot along the waters, a flying mass of flame; and while both fleets were gazing on us in astonishment, rushed under the stern of the commander’s trireme. The fire soon rolled up her tarry sides and ran along the cordage. But the defense was desperate, and lances rained upon us. Half of us were disabled in the first discharge; the shallop was battered with huge stones, and I felt that she was sinking.

“One trial more, brave comrades, one glorious trial more! The boat must go down, and unless we would go along with it, we must board.”

I leaped forward and clung to the chains. My example was followed. The boat went down; and this sight, which was just discovered by the livid flame of the vessel, raised a roar of triumph among the enemy. But to climb up the tall sides of the trireme was beyond our skill, and we remained, dashed by the heavy waves as she rose and fell. Our only alternatives now were to be piked, drowned, or burned. The flames were already rapidly advancing; showers of sparkles fell upon our heads; the clamps and ironwork were growing hot to the touch; the smoke was rolling over us in suffocating volumes. I was giving up all for lost when a mountainous billow swept the vessel’s head round, and I saw a blaze burst out from the shore,—the Roman tents were on fire!

Consternation seized the crews, thus attacked on all sides; and uncertain of the number of the assailants, they began to desert the ships and by boats or swimming make for the various points of the land. The sight reanimated me. I climbed up the side of the trireme, torch in hand, and with my haggard countenance, made still wilder by the wild work of the night, looked a formidable apparition to men already harassed out of all courage. They plunged overboard—and I was monarch of the finest war-galley on the coast of Syria.

[Sidenote: The Conflagration]

But my kingdom was without subjects. None of my own crew had followed me. I saw the pirate vessels bearing down to complete the destruction of the fleet, and hailed them, but they all swept far wide of the trireme. The fire had taken too fast hold of her to make approach safe. I now began to feel my situation. The first sense of triumph was past, and I found myself deserted. The deed of devastation, meanwhile, was rapidly going on. I saw the Roman ships successively boarded, almost without resistance, and in a blaze. The conflagration rose in sheets and spires to the heavens, and colored the waters to an immeasurable extent with the deepest dye of gore. I heard the victorious shouts, and mine rose spontaneously along with them. In every vessel burned, in every torch flung, I rejoiced in a new blow to the tyrants of Judea. But my thoughts were soon fearfully brought home. The fire reached the cables; the trireme, plunging and tossing like a living creature in its last agony, burst away from her anchors; the wind was off the shore; a gust, strong as the blow of a battering-ram, struck her; and on the back of a huge wave she shot out to sea, a flying pyramid of fire.

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Chapter XL

A Burning Trireme

[Sidenote: The Solitary Voyager]

Never was man more indifferent to the result than the solitary voyager of the burning trireme. What had life for me? I gazed round me. The element of fire reigned supreme. The shore—mountain, vale, and sand—was bright as day from the blaze of the tents and the floating fragments of the galleys. The heavens were an arch of angry splendor—every stooping cloud swept along reddened with the various dyes of the conflagration below. The sea was a rolling abyss of the fiercest color of slaughter. The blazing vessels, loosened from the shore, rushed madly before the storm, sheet and shroud shaking loose abroad like vast wings of flame.

At length all disappeared. The shore faded far into a dim line of light; the galleys sank or were consumed; the sea grew dark again. But the trireme, strongly built and of immense size, still fed the flame, and still shot on through the tempest, that fell on her the more furiously as she lost the cover of the land. The waves rose to a height that often baffled the wind, and left me floating in a strange calm between two black walls of water reaching to the clouds, and on whose smooth sides the image of the burning vessel was reflected as strongly as in a mirror. But the ascent to the summit of those fearful barriers again let in the storm in its rage. The tops of the billows were whirled off in sheets of foam; the wind tore mast and sail away, and the vessel was dashed forward like a stone discharged from an engine. I stood on the poop, which the spray and the wind kept clear of flame, and contemplated, with some feeling of the fierce grandeur of the spectacle, the fire rolling over the forward part of the vessel in a thousand shapes and folds.

While I was thus careering along, like the genius of fire upon his throne, I caught a glimpse of sails scattering in every direction before me—I had rushed into the middle of one of those small trading-fleets that coasted annually between the Euxine and the Nile. They flew, as if pursued by a fiend. But the same wind that bore them, bore me; and their screams, as the trireme bounded from billow to billow on their track, were audible even through the roarings of the storm. They gradually succeeded in spreading themselves so far that the contact with the flame must be partial. But on one, the largest and most crowded, the trireme bore inevitably down. The hunted ship tried every mode of escape in vain; it maneuvered with extraordinary skill; but the pursuer, lightened of every burden, rushed on like a messenger of vengeance.

[Sidenote: The Sound of a Voice]

I could distinctly see the confusion and misery of the crowd that covered the deck; men and women kneeling, weeping, fainting, or, in the fierce riot of despair, struggling for some wretched spoil that a few moments more must tear from all alike. But among the fearful mingling of sounds, one voice I suddenly heard that struck to my soul. It alone roused me from my stern scorn of human suffering. I no longer looked upon those beings as upon insects, that must be crushed in the revolution of the great wheel of fate. The heart, the living human heart, palpitated within me. I rushed to the side of the trireme, and with voice and hand made signals to the crew to take me on board. But at my call a cry of agony rang through the vessel. All fled to its farther part, but a few, who, unable to move, were seen on their knees, and in the attitudes of preternatural fear, imploring every power of heaven. Shocked by the consciousness that, even in the hour when mutual hazard softens the heart of man, I was an object of horror, I shrank back. I heard the voice once more, and once more resolving to get on board, flung a burning fragment over the side to help me through the waves.

[Illustration: “The solitary voyager of the burning trireme.”

[see page 317.

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

But the time was past. The fragment had scarcely touched the foam when a sheet of lightning wrapped sea and sky; the flying vessel was gone. My eye looked but upon the wilderness of waters. The flash was fatal. It had struck the hold of my trireme, in which was stowed a large freightage of the bitumen and niter of the desert. A column of flame, white as silver, rose straight and steadily up to the clouds; and the huge ship, disparting timber by timber, reeled, heaved, and plunged headlong into the bosom of the ocean.

[Sidenote: In a Whirlpool]

I rose to the surface from a prodigious depth. I was nearly breathless. My limbs were wasted with famine and fatigue; but the tossing of the surges sustained and swept me on. The chill at last benumbed me, and my limbs were heavy as iron, when a broken mast rolling by entangled me in its cordage. It drove toward a point of land, round which the current swept. Strongly netted in the wreck, I was dragged along, sometimes above the billow, sometimes below. But a violent shock released me, and with a new terror I felt myself go down. I was engulfed in the whirlpool!

Every sensation was horribly vivid. I had the full consciousness of life and of the unfathomable depth into which I was descending. I heard the roar and rushing of the waters round me; the holding of my breath was torture; I strained, struggled, tossed out my arms, and grasped madly around, as if to catch something that might retard my hideous descent. My eyes were open. I never was less stunned by shock or fear. The solid darkness, the suffocation, the furious whirl of the eddy that spun me round its huge circle like an atom of sand—every sense of drowning—passed through my shattered frame with an individual and successive pang. I at last touched something, whether living or dead, fish or stone, I know not; but the impulse changed my direction, and I was darted up to the surface in a little bay sheltered by hills.

The storm had gone with the rapidity of the south. The sun burned bright and broad above my head; the pleasant breath of groves and flowery perfumes came on the waters; a distant sound of sweet voices lingered on the air. Like one roused from a frightful dream, I could scarcely believe that this was reality. But the rolling waters behind gave me sudden evidence. A billow, the last messenger of the storm, burst into the little bay, filled it to the brim with foam, and tossed me far forward. It rolled back, dragging with it the sedge and pebbles of the beach. I grasped the trunk of an olive, rough and firm as the rock itself. The retiring waves left me; I felt my way some paces among the trees, cast myself down, and, worn out with fatigue, had scarcely reached their shade when I fainted.

[Sidenote: A Quiet Spot]

I awoke in the decline of the day, as I could perceive by the yellow and orange hues that colored the thick branches above me. I was lying in a delicious recess, crowded with fruit-trees; my bed was the turf, but it was soft as down; a solitary nightingale above my head was sending forth snatches of that melody which night prolongs into the very voice of sweetness and sorrow; and a balmy air from the wild thyme and blossoms of the rose breathed soothingly even to the mind.

I had been thrown on one of the little isles that lie off Anthædon, a portion of the Philistine territory before it was won by our hero the Maccabee. The commerce which once filled the arm of the sea near Gaza had perished in the change of masters, and silence and seclusion reigned in a spot formerly echoing with the tumult of merchant and mariner. The little isle, the favorite retreat of the opulent Greek and Syrian traders in the overpowering heats of summer, and cultivated with the lavish expenditure of commercial wealth, now gave no proof of its ever having felt the foot of man, but in the spontaneous exuberance of flowers, once brought from every region of the East and West, and the exquisite fruits that still glowed on its slopes and dells.

[Sidenote: A Refuge]

In all things else Nature had resumed her rights; the gilded pavilions, the temples of Parian and Numidian stone, were in ruins, and buried under a carpet of roses and myrtles. The statues left but here and there a remnant of themselves, a lovely relic, wreathed over in fantastic spirals by the clematis and other climbing plants. The sculptured fountain let its waters loose over the ground, and the guardian genius that hung in marble beauty over the spring had long since resigned his charge and lay mutilated and discolored with the air and the dew. But the spring still gushed, bounding bright between the gray fissures of the cliff, and marking its course through the plain by the richer mazes of green.

To me, who was as weary of existence as ever was galley-slave, this spot of quiet loveliness had a tenfold power. My mind, like my body, longed for rest.

Through life I had walked in a thorny path; my ambition had winged a tempestuous atmosphere. Useless hazards, wild projects, bitter sufferings, were my portion. Those feelings in which alone I could be said to live had all been made inlets of pain. The love which nature and justice won from me to my family was perpetually thwarted by a chain of circumstances that made me a wretched, helpless, and solitary man. What then could I do better than abandon the idle hope of finding happiness among mankind; break off the trial, which must be prolonged only to my evil; and elude the fate that destined me to be an exile in the world? Yes, I would no longer be a man of suffering, in the presence of its happiness; a wretch stripped of an actual purpose, or a solid hope, in the midst of its activity and triumph; the abhorred example of a career miserable with defeated pursuit, and tantalized with expectations vain as the ripple on the stream!

In this stern resolve, gathering courage from despair—as the criminal on the scaffold scoffs at the world that rejects him—I determined to exclude recollection. The spot round me was henceforth to fill up the whole measure of my thoughts. Wife, children, friends, country, to me must exist no more. I imaged them in the tomb; I talked with them as shadows, as the graceful and lovely existences of ages past,—as hallowed memorials; but labored to divest them of the individual features that cling to the soul.

[Sidenote: On the Shores of the Mediterranean]

Lest this mystic repose should be disturbed by any of the sights of living man, I withdrew deeper into the shades which first sheltered me. It was enough for me that there was a canopy of leaves above to shield my limbs from the casual visitations of a sky whose sapphire looked scarcely capable of a stain, and that the turf was soft for my couch. Fruits sufficient to tempt the most luxurious taste were falling round me, and the waters of the bright rivulet, scooped in the rind of citron and orange, were a draft that the epicure might envy. I was still utterly ignorant on what shore of the Mediterranean I was thrown, further than that the sun rose behind my bower and threw his western luster on the waveless expanse of sea that spread before it to the round horizon.

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Chapter XLI

The Granddaughter of Ananus

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Activity]

But no man can be a philosopher against nature. With my strength the desire for exertion returned. My most voluptuous rest became irksome. Memory would not be restrained; the floodgates of thought opened once more, and to resist the passion for the world, I was driven to the drudgery of the hands. I gathered wood for the winter’s fuel, in the midst of days when the sun poured fire from the heavens; I attempted to build a hut, beside grottoes that a hermit would love; I trained trees and cultivated flowers where the soil threw out all that was rich in both with exhaustless prodigality.

Yet no expedient would appease the passion for the absorbing business of the world. My bower lost its enchantment; the delight of lying on beds of violet, and with my eyes fixed on the heavens, wandering away in rich illusion, palled upon me; the colors of the vision had grown dim. I no longer saw shapes of beauty winging their way through the celestial azure; I heard no harmonies of spirits on the midnight winds; I followed no longer the sun, rushing on his golden chariot-wheels to lands unstained by human step, or plunged with him at eve into the depths and ranged the secret wonders of ocean.

[Sidenote: The Island Prison]

Labor in its turn grew irksome. I began to reproach myself for the vulgar existence which occupied only the inferior portion of my nature; living only for food, sleep, and shelter, what was I better than the seals that basked on the shore at my feet? Night, too—that mysterious rest, interposed for purposes of such varied beneficence: to cool the brain, fevered by the bustle of the day; to soften mutual hostility, by a pause to which all alike must yield; to remind our forgetful nature, by a perpetual semblance, of the time when all things must pass away, and be silent, and sleep; to sit in judgment on our hearts, and by a decision which no hypocrisy can disguise, anticipate the punishment of the villain, as it gives the man of virtue the foretaste of his reward—night began to exert its old influence over me; and with the strongest determination to think no more of what had been, I closed my eyes but to let in the past. I might have said that my true sleep was during the labors of the day, and my waking when I lay, with my senses sealed, upon my bed of leaves.

It is impossible to shut up the mind, and I at last abandoned the struggle. The spell of indolence once broken, I became as restless as an eagle in a cage. My first object was to discover on what corner of the land I was thrown. Nothing could be briefer than the circuit of my island, and nothing less explanatory. It was one of those little alluvial spots that grow round the first rock that catches the vegetation swept down by rivers. Ages had gone by, while reed was bound to reed and one bed of clay laid upon another. The ocean had thrown up its sands on the shore; the winds had sown tree and herb on the naked sides of the tall rock; the tree had drawn the cloud, and from its roots let loose the spring. Cities and empires had perished while this little island was forming into loveliness. Thus nature perpetually builds, while decay does its work with the pomp of man. From the shore I saw but a long line of yellow sand across a broad belt of blue waters. No sight on earth could less attract the eye or be less indicative of man.

[Sidenote: Unanswered Signals]

Yet within that sandy barrier what wild and wondrous acts might be doing, and to be done! My mind, with a pinion that no sorrow or bondage could tame, passed over the desert, and saw the battle, the siege, the bloody sedition, the long and heart-broken banishment, the fierce conflict of passions irrestrainable as the tempest, the melancholy ruin of my country by a judgment powerful as fate, and dreary and returnless as the grave! But the waters between me and that shore were an obstacle that no vigor of imagination could overcome. I was too feeble to attempt the passage by swimming. The opposite coast appeared to be uninhabited, and the few fishing-boats that passed lazily along this lifeless coast evidently shunned the island, as I conceived, from some hidden shoal. I felt myself a prisoner, and the thought irritated me. That ancient disturbance of my mind, which rendered it so keenly excitable, was born again; I felt its coming, and knew that my only resource was to escape from this circumscribing paradise that had become my dungeon. Day after day I paced the shore, awaking the echoes with my useless shouts, as each distant sail glided along close to the sandy line that was now to me the unattainable path of happiness. I made signals from the hill, but I might as well have summoned the vultures to stop as they flew screaming above my head to feed on the relics of the Syrian caravans.

What trifles can sometimes stand between man and enjoyment! Wisdom would have thanked Heaven for the hope of escaping the miseries of life in the little enchanted round, guarded by that entrenchment of waters, filled with every production that could delight the sense, and giving to the spirit, weary of all that the world could offer, the gentle retirement in which it could gather its remaining strength and make its peace with Heaven.

I was lying during a fiery noon on the edge of the island, looking toward the opposite coast, the only object on which I could now bear to look, when, in the stillness of the hour, I heard a strange mingling of distant sounds, yet so totally indistinct that, after long listening, I could conjecture it to be nothing but the rising of the surge. It died away. But it haunted me: I heard it in fancy. It followed me in the morn, the noon, and the twilight; in the hour of toil and in the hour when earth and heaven were soft and silent as an infant’s sleep—when the very spirit of tranquillity seemed to be folding his dewy wings over the world.

Wearied more with thought than with the daily toil that I imposed on myself for its cure, I had one night wandered to the shore, and lain down under the shelter of those thick woven boughs that scarcely let in the glimpses of the moon. The memory of all whom later chances brought in my path passed before me—the fate of my gallant kinsmen in Masada, of the wily Ishmaelite, of the pirate captain, of that unhappy crew whose danger was my involuntary deed, of my family scattered upon the face of the world. Arcturus, bending toward the horizon, told me that it was already midnight, when my reverie was broken by the same sounds that had once disturbed my day. But they now came full and distinct. I heard the crashing of heavy axles along the road, the measured tramp of cavalry, the calls of the clarion and trumpet. They seemed beside me. I started from my sand, but all around was still. I gazed across the waters; they were lying, like another sky, reflecting star for star with the blue immensity above—but on them was no living thing.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Leaves His Shelter]

I had heard of phantom armies traversing the air, but the sky was serene as crystal. I climbed the hill, upon whose summit I recollected to have seen the ruins of an altar; gathered the weeds, and lighted them for a beacon. The flame threw a wide and ruddy reflection on the waters and the sky. I watched by it until morn. But the sound had died as rapidly as it rose; and when, with the first pearly tinge of the east, the coast shaped itself beneath my eye, I saw with bitter disappointment but the same solitary shore. The idea of another day of suspense was intolerable; I returned to my place of refuge; gave it that glance of mingled feeling, without which perhaps no man leaves the shelter which he is never to see again; collected a few fruits for my sustenance, if I should reach the desert; and with a resolution to perish, if it so pleased Providence, but not to return, plunged into the sea.

The channel was even broader than I had calculated by the eye. My limbs were still enfeebled, but my determination was strength. I was swept by the current far from the opposite curve of the shore; yet its force spared mine, and after a long struggle I felt the ground under my feet. I was overjoyed, tho never was scene less fitted for joy. To the utmost verge of the view spread the sands, a sullen herbless waste, glowing like a sheet of brass in the almost vertical sun.

But I was on land! I had accomplished my purpose. Hope, the power of exertion, the chances of glorious future life, were before me. I was no longer a prisoner, within the borders of a spot which, for all the objects of manly existence, might as well have been my grave.

I journeyed on by sun and star in that direction which, to the Jew, is an instinct—to Jerusalem. Yet what fearful reverses, in this time of confusion, might not have occurred even there! What certainty could I have of being spared the bitterest losses, when sorrow and slaughter reigned through the land? Was I to be protected from the storm, that fell with such promiscuous fury upon all? I, too, the marked, the victim, the example to mankind! I looked wistfully back to the isle—that isle of oblivion.

[Sidenote: The Robber Camp]

While I was pacing the sand that actually scorched my feet, I heard a cry, and saw on a low range of sand-hills, at some distance, a figure making violent gestures. Friend or enemy, at least here was man, and I did not deeply care for the consequences, even of meeting man in his worst shape. Hunger and thirst might be more formidable enemies in the end; and I advanced toward the half-naked savage, who, however, ran from me, crying out louder than ever. I dragged my weary limbs after him, and at length reached the edge of a little dell in which stood a circle of tents. I had fallen among the robbers of the desert, but there was evident confusion in this fragment of a tribe. The camels were in the act of being loaded; men and women were gathering their household matters with the haste of terror; and dogs, sheep, camels, and children set up their voices in a general clamor.

Dreading that I might lose my only chance of refreshment and guidance, I cried out with all my might, and hastened down toward them; but the sight of me raised a universal scream, and every living thing took flight, the horsemen of the colony gallantly leading the way, with a speed that soon left the pedestrians far in the rear. But their invader conquered only for food. I entered the first of the deserted tents, and indulged myself with a full feast of bread, dry and rough as the sand on which it was baked, and of water, only less bitter than that through which I had swum. Still, all luxury is relative. To me they were both delicious, and I thanked at once the good fortune which had provided so prodigally for those withered monarchs of the sands, and had invested my raggedness with the salutary terror that gave me the fruits of triumph without the toil.

[Sidenote: A Girl’s Appearance]

At the close of my feast, I uttered a few customary words of thanksgiving. A cry of joy rang in my ears; I looked round; saw, to my surprise, a bale of carpets walk forward from a corner of the tent, and heard a Jewish tongue imploring for life and freedom. I rapidly developed the speaker, and from this repulsive overture came forth one of the loveliest young females that I had ever seen. Her story was soon told. She was the granddaughter of Ananus,[41] the late high priest, one of the most distinguished of his nation for every lofty quality; but he had fallen on evil days. His resistance to faction sharpened the dagger against him, and he perished in one of the merciless feuds of the city. His only descendant was now before me; she had been sent to claim the protection of her relatives in the south of Judea. But her escort was dispersed by an attack of the Arabs, and in the division of the spoil the sheik of this little encampment obtained her as his share. The robber merchant was on his way to Cæsarea to sell his prize to the Roman governor, when my arrival put his caravan to the rout. To my inquiry into the cause of this singular success, the fair girl answered that the Arabs had taken me for a supernatural visitant, “probably come to claim some account of their proceedings in the late expedition.” They had been first startled by the blaze in the island, which by a tradition of the desert was said to be the dwelling of forbidden beings. My passage of the channel was seen, and increased the wonder; my daring to appear alone, among men whom mankind shunned, completed the belief of my more than mortal prowess, and the Arabs’ courage abandoned a contest in which “the least that could happen to them was to be swept into the surge, or tossed piecemeal upon the winds.”

[Sidenote: The Sheik’s Shekels]

To prevent the effects of their returning intrepidity, no time was to be lost in our escape. But the sun, which would have scorched anything but a lizard or a Bedouin to death, kept us prisoners until evening. We were actively employed in the mean time. The plunder of the horde was examined, with the curiosity that makes one of the indefeasible qualities of the fair in all climates; and the young Jewess had not been an inmate of the tent, nor possessed the brightest eyes among the daughters of women, for nothing. With an air between play and revenge, she hunted out every recess in which even the art of Arab thievery could dispose of its produce; and at length rooted up from a hole in the very darkest corner of the tent that precious deposit for which the sheik would have sacrificed all mankind, and even the last hair of his beard—a bag of shekels. She danced with exultation as she poured the shining contents on the ground before me.

“If ever Arab regretted his capture,” said she, “this most unlucky of sheiks shall have cause. But I shall teach him at least one virtue—repentance to the last hour of his life. I think that I see him at this moment frightened into a philosopher, and wishing from the bottom of his soul that he had, for once, resisted the temptation of his trade.”

“But what will you do with the money, my pretty teacher of virtue to Arabs?”

“Give it to my preserver,” said she, advancing, with a look suddenly changed from sportiveness to blushing timidity; “give it to him who was sent by Providence to rescue a daughter of Israel from the hands of the heathen.”

In the emotion of gratitude to me there was mingled a loftier feeling, never so lovely as in youth and woman; she threw up a single glance to heaven, and a tear of piety filled her sparkling eye.

“But, temptress and teacher at once,” said I, “by what right am I to seize on the sheik’s treasury? May it not diminish my supernatural dignity with the tribe to be known as a plunderer?”

“Ha!” said she, with a rosy smile; “who is to betray you but your accomplice? Besides, money is reputation and innocence, wisdom and virtue, all over the world.”

Touching, with the tip of one slender finger, my arm as it lay folded on my bosom, she waved the other hand, in attitudes of untaught persuasion.

[Sidenote: A Maiden’s Philosophy]

“Is it not true,” pleaded the pretty creature, “that next to a crime of our own is the being a party to the crime of others? Now, for what conceivable purpose could the Arab have collected this money? Not for food or clothing; for he can eat thistles with his own camel, and nature has furnished him with clothing as she has furnished the bear. The haik is only an encumbrance to his impenetrable skin. What, then, can he do with money but mischief, fit out new expeditions, and capture other fair maidens, who can not hope to find spirits, good or bad, for their protectors? If we leave him the means of evil, what is it but doing the evil ourselves? So,” concluded this resistless pleader, carefully gathering up the spoil and putting it into my hands, “I have gained my cause, and have now only to thank my most impartial judge for his patient hearing.”

There is a magic in woman. No man, not utterly degraded, can listen without delight to the accents of her guileless heart. Beauty, too, has a natural power over the mind, and it is right that this should be. All that overcomes selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good. Beauty is but melody of a higher kind, and both alike soften the troubled and hard nature of man. Even if we looked on lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter. But as the companion of the mind, as the very model of a friendship that no chance can shake, as the pleasant sharer of the heart of heart, the being to whom man returns after the tumult of the day, like the worshiper to a secret shrine, to revive his nobler tastes and virtues at a source pure from the evil of the external world, where shall we find her equal, or what must be our feelings toward the mighty Disposer of earth, and all that inhabit it, but of admiration and gratitude for that disposal which thus combines our fondest happiness with our purest virtue?

END OF BOOK II.

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Chapter XLII

Naomi’s Story

[Sidenote: The Philosopher’s Place]

The evening came at last; the burning calm was followed by a breeze breathing of life, and on the sky sailed, as if it were wafted by that gentle breeze, the evening star. The lifeless silence of the desert now began to be broken by a variety of sounds, wild and sad enough in themselves, but softening by distance, and not ill suited to that declining hour which is so natural an emblem of the decline of life. The moaning of the shepherd’s horn; the low of the folding herds; the long, deep cry of the camel; even the scream of the vulture wheeling home from some recent wreck on the shore, and the howl of the jackal venturing out on the edge of dusk, came with no unpleasing melancholy upon the wind. We stood gazing impatiently from the tent door, at the west, that still glowed like a furnace of molten gold.

“Will that sun never go down?” I exclaimed. “We must wait his leisure, and he seems determined to tantalize us.”

“Yes; like a rich old man, determined to try the patience of his heirs, and more tenacious of his wealth the more his powers of enjoyment decay,” said the Jewess.

“Philosophy from those young lips! Yet the desert is the place for a philosopher.”

“That I deny,” said my sportive companion. “Philosophy is good for nothing where it has nothing to ridicule, and where it will be neither fed nor flattered. Its true place is the world, as much as the true place of yonder falcon is wherever it can find anything to pounce upon. Here your philosopher must labor for himself and laugh at himself—an indulgence in which he is the most temperate of men. In short, he is fit only for the idle, gay, ridiculous, and timid world. The desert is the soil for a much nobler plant. If you would train a poet into flower, set him here.”

“Or a plunderer.”

“No doubt. They are sometimes much the same.”

“Yet the desert produces nothing—but Arabs.”

“There are some minds, even among Arabs, and some of their rhapsodies are beauty itself. The very master of this tent, who fought and killed, I dare not say how many, to secure so precious a prize as myself, and who, after all his heroism, would have sold me into slavery for life, spent half his evenings sitting at this door chanting to every star of heaven, and riming, with tears in his eyes, to all kinds of tender remembrances.”

“But perhaps he was a genius, a heaven-born accident, and his merit was the more in being a genius in the midst of such a scene.”

“No—everything round us this hour is poetry. The silence—those broken sounds that make the silence more striking as they decay—those fiery continents of cloud, the empire of that greatest of sheiks, the sun, lord of the red desert of the air—the immeasurable desert below. Vastness, obscurity, and terror, the three spirits that work the profoundest wonders of the poet, are here in their native region. And now,” she said, with a look that showed there were other spells than poetry to be found in the desert, “to release you, I know, by signs infallible, that the sun is setting.”

I could not avoid laughing at the mimic wisdom with which she announced her discovery, and asked whence she had acquired the faculty of solving such rare problems.

[Sidenote: A Daughter of the Desert]

“Oh, by my incomparable knowledge of the stars.” She pointed to the eastern sky, on which they began to cluster in showers of diamond. “I have to thank the desert for it; and,” she added, with a slight submission of voice, “for everything. I am a daughter of the desert; the first sight that I saw was a camel; my early, my only accomplishments were to ride, sing Bedouin songs, tell Bedouin stories, and tame a young panther. But my history draws to a close. While I was supreme in the graces of a savage, had learned to sit a dromedary, throw the lance, make haiks, and gallop for a week together, love, resistless love, came in my way. The son of a sheik, heir to a hundred quarrels and ten thousand sheep, goats, and horses, claimed me as his natural prey. I shrank from a husband even more accomplished than myself, and was meditating how to make my escape, whether into the wilderness or into the bottom of the sea, when a summons came which, or the money that came with it, the sheik found irresistible. And now my history is at an end.”

“And so,” said I, to provoke her to the rest of her narrative, “your story ends, as usual, with marriage. You, of course, finding that you had nothing to prevent your leaving the desert, took the female resolution of remaining in it, and as you might discard the young sheik at your pleasure, refused to have any other human being.”

“Can you think me capable of such a horror?”

She stamped her little foot in indignation on the ground; then turning on me with her flashing eye, penetrated the stratagem at once by my smile.

[Sidenote: Naomi Continues Her Story]

“Then hear the rest. I instantly mounted my dromedary, galloped for three days without sleep, and at length saw the towers of Jerusalem—glorious Jerusalem. I passed through crowds that seemed to me a gathering of the world; streets that astonished me with a thousand strange sights; and, overwhelmed with magnificence, delight, and fatigue, arrived at a palace, where I was met by a host of half-adoring domestics, and was led to the most venerable and beloved of wise and holy men, who caught me to his heart, called me his Naomi, his child, his hope, and shed tears and blessings on my head, as the sole survivor of his illustrious line.” She burst into tears.

The recollection of the good and heroic high priest was strong with us both, and in silence I suffered her sorrows to have their way. A faint echo of horns and voices roused me.

“Look to the hills!” I exclaimed, as I saw a long black line creeping, like a march of ants, down the side of a distant ridge of sand.

“Those are our Arabs,” said she, without a change of countenance. “They are, of course, coming to see what the angel, or demon, who visited them to-day has left in witness of his presence. But from what I overheard of their terrors, no Arab will venture near the tents till night; night, the general veil of the iniquities of this amusing and very wicked world.”

“Yet how shall we traverse the sands on foot?”

“Forbid it, the spirit of romance,” said she. “I must see whether the gallantry of the sheik has not provided against that misfortune.”

She flew into the tent, and, drawing back a curtain, showed me two mares, of the most famous breed of Arabia.

[Sidenote: The Spirited Steeds]

“Here are the Koshlani,” said she, with playful malice dancing in her eyes; “I saw them brought in, in triumph, last night, stolen from the pastures of Achmet Ben Ali himself, first horse-stealer and prince of the Bedouins, who is doubtless by this time half dead of grief at the loss of the two gems of his stud. I heard the achievement told with great rejoicings, and a very curious specimen of dexterity it was. Come forth,” said she, leading out two beautiful animals, white as milk; “come forth, you two lovely orphans of the true breed of Solomon—princesses with pedigrees that put kings to shame, unless they can go back two thousand years; birds of the Bedouin, with wings to your feet, stars for eyes, and ten times the sense of your masters in your little tossing heads.”

She sprang upon her courser, and winded it with the delight of practised skill. The Arabs were now but a few miles off and in full gallop toward us. I urged her to ride away at once, but she continued curveting and maneuvering her spirited steed, that, enjoying the free air of the desert after having been shut up so long, threw up its red nostrils and bounded like a stag.

“A moment yet,” said she; “I have not quite done with the Arab. It is certainly bad treatment for his hospitality to have plundered him of his dinner, his money, and his horses.”

“And of his captive, a loss beyond all reparation.”

“I perfectly believe so,” was the laughing answer; “but I have been thinking of making him a reparation which any Arab on earth would think worth even my charms. I have been contriving how to make his fortune.”

“By returning his shekels?”

“Not a grain of them shall he ever see. No, he shall not have the sorrow to think that he entertained only a princess and a philosopher. As a spirit you came, and as a spirit you shall depart, and he shall have the honor of telling the tale. The national stories of such matters are worn out; he shall have a new one of his own, and every emir in the kingdoms of Ishmael—through the fiery sands of Ichama, the riverless mountains of Nejd; Hejaz, the country of flies and fools; and Yemen, the land of locusts, lawyers, and merchants, will rejoice to have him at his meal. Thus the man’s fortune is made, for there is no access to the heart like that of being necessary to the dinners and dulness of the mighty.”

“Or on the strength of the wonder,” said I, “he may make wonders of his own, turn charlatan of the first magnitude, profess to cure the incurable, and get solid gold for empty pretension; sell health to the epicure, gaiety to the old, and charms to the repulsive; defy the course of nature, and live like a prince upon the exhaustless revenue of human absurdity.”

[Sidenote: The Blazing Tents]

A cloud of smoke now wreathed up from the sheik’s tent; fire followed; and even while we looked on, the wind, carrying the burning fragments, set the whole camp in a blaze. The Arabs gave a universal shriek and fled back, scattering with gestures and cries of terror through the sands.

“There—there,” said my companion, clapping her delicate white palms in exultation; “let them beware of making women captives in future. In my final visit to the tent I put a firebrand into the very bundle of carpets in which I played the part of slave.”

“Not to be your representative, I presume.”

[Sidenote: Forward!]

“Yes, with only the distinction that in time I should have been much the more perilous of the two. If that unlucky sheik had dared to keep me a week longer in his detestable tent, I should have raised a rebellion in the tribe, dethroned him, and turned princess on my own account. As to burning him out, there was no remedy. But for those flames the tribe would have been upon our road. But for those flames we might even have been mistaken for mere mortals; and your spirits always vanish as we do, in fire and smoke. How nobly those tents blaze! Now, forward!”

She gave the reins to her barb, flung a triumphant gesture toward the burning camp, and under cover of a huge sheet of fiery vapor we darted into the wilderness.

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Chapter XLIII

Before Masada

Our flight lay toward Masada. The stars were brilliant guides, and the coolness of the Arabian night, which forms so singular a contrast to the overpowering ardors of the day, relieved us from the chief obstacle of desert travel. At daybreak we reached a tract, whose broken and burnt-up ground showed that there had lately encamped the army the sound of whose march had startled my reveries in the island.

It was evening when I caught the glimpse of the fortress. My heart trembled at the sight. An impression of evil was upon me. Yet I must go on or die.

“There,” said I, “you see my home, and yours while you desire it. You will find friends delighted to receive you, and a protection that neither Roman nor Arab can insult. Heaven grant that all may be as when I left Masada!”

The fair girl gratefully thanked me.

[Sidenote: Naomi’s Gratitude]

“I have been long,” said she, “unused to kindness, and its voice overpowers me. But if the duty, the gratitude, the faithful devotedness of the orphan to her generous preserver can deserve protection, I shall yet have some claim. Suffer me to be your daughter.”

She bowed her head before me with filial reverence. I took the outstretched hand, that quivered in mine, and pressed it to my lips. The sacred compact was pledged in the sight of the stars. More formal treaties have been made, but few sincerer.

We rapidly advanced to the foot of the ridge that, now defining and extending, showed its well-known features in all their rugged grandeur. But to come within reach of the gates, I had still one of the huge buttresses of the mountain to go round. My companion, with the quick sympathy that makes one of the finest charms of women, already shared in my ominous fears, and rode by my side without a word. My eyes were fixed on the ground. I was roused by a clash of warlike music. The suspense was terribly at an end.

[Sidenote: Signs of Defeat]

The spears of a legion were moving in a glittering line down the farther declivity. Squadrons of horses in marching order were drawn up on the plain. The baggage of a little army lay under the eye, waiting for the escort now descending from the fortress. The story of my ruin was told in that single glance. All was lost!

The walls of the citadel, breached in every direction, gave signs of a long siege. The White Stag of Naphtali no longer lifted its blazon on the battlements; dismantling and desolation were there. But what horrors must have been wrought before the Romans could shake the strength of those walls!

First and most fearful, what had been the fate of Miriam and my children? In what grave was I to look for my noble brother and my kinsmen?

Conscious that to stay was to give myself and my trembling companion to the cruel mercy of Rome, I yet was unable to leave the spot. I hovered round it, as the spirit might hover round the tomb. Maddening with bitter yearnings of heart, that intense eagerness to know the worst which is next to despair, I spurred up the steep by an obscure path that led me to a postern. There was no sound within. I dashed through the streets. Not a living being was to be seen; piles of firewood lighted under the principal buildings and at the gates showed that the fortress was destined to immediate overthrow. War had done its worst. The broad, sanguine plashes on the pavements showed that the battle had been fought, long and desperately, within the walls. The famous armory was a heap of ashes. Ditches dug across the streets and strewed with broken weapons, and the white remnants of what once was man; walls raised within walls, and now broken down; stately houses loopholed and turned into little fortresses; fragments of noble architecture blocking up the breaches; graves dug in every spot where the spade could open a few feet of ground; fragments of superb furniture lying half burnt where the defenders had been forced out by conflagration—all gave sad evidence of the struggle of brave men against overpowering numbers.

But where were they who had made the prize so dear to the conquerors? Was I treading on the clay that once breathed patriotism and love? Did the wreck on which I leaned, as I gazed round this mighty mausoleum, cover the earthly tenement of my kinsmen, and, still dearer, the last of my name? Was I treading on the grave of those gentle and lovely natures for whose happiness I would rejoicingly have laid down the scepter of the world?

[Sidenote: Salathiel Meets Jubal]

In my agitation I cried aloud. My voice rang through the solitude round me, and returned on the ear with a startling distinctness. But living sounds suddenly mingled with the echo. A low groan came from a pile of ruins beside me. I listened, as one might listen for an answer from the sepulcher. The voice was heard again. A few stones from the shattered wall gave way, and I saw thrust out the withered, bony hand of a human being. I tore down the remaining impediments, and beheld pale, emaciated, and at the point of death by famine, my friend, my fellow soldier, my fellow sufferer—Jubal!

Joy is sometimes as dangerous as sorrow. He gave a glance of recognition, struggled forward, and, uttering a wild cry, fell senseless into my arms. On his recovering, before I could ask him the question nearest my heart, it was answered.

“They are safe—all safe,” said he. “On the landing of fresh troops from Italy, the first efforts of the legions were directed against the fortress. The pirates, in return for the victory to which you led them, had set me at liberty. I made my way through the enemy’s posts; Eleazar, ever generous and noble, received me, after all my wanderings, with the heart of a father, and we determined on defending this glorious trophy of your heroism, to the last man. But with the wisdom that never failed him, he knew what must be the result, and at the very commencement of the siege sent your family away to Alexandria, where they might be sure of protection from our kindred.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Family]

“And they went by sea?” I asked shudderingly, while the whole terrible truth dawned upon my mind. They were in the fleet which I had followed.

“It was the only course. The country was filled with the enemy.”

“Then they are lost! Wretched father, now no father!—man marked by destiny!—the blow has fallen at last! They perished—I saw them perish. Their dying shrieks rang in these ears. I was their destroyer. From first to last I have been their undoing!”

Jubal looked on me with astonishment. My adopted daughter, without any idle attempt at consolation, only bathed my hand with her tears.

“There must be some misconception in all this,” said Jubal. “Before we left that accursed dungeon, they had embarked with a crowd of females from the surrounding country in one of the annual fleets for Egypt. Before we sailed from the pirates’ cavern they were probably safe in Alexandria.”

“No! I saw them perish. I heard their dying cry. I drove them to destruction,” was the only answer that my withering lips could utter. I remembered the horrors of the storm; the desperate efforts of the merchant galley to escape; its fatal disappearance. Faintly, and with many a successive agony, I gave the melancholy reasons for my belief. My auditors listened with fear and trembling.

“There is now no use in sorrow,” said Jubal sternly, “and as little in struggle. I too have lived until the light that brightened my dreary hours is extinguished. I too have known the extremities of passion. If suffering could have atoned for my offenses, I have suffered. A thousand years of existence could not teach me more. Here let us die.”

He unsheathed his poniard.

My young companion, in the anxiety of the moment, forgetting the presence of a stranger, flung back the veil which had hitherto covered her face and figure, and clasping my raised arm, said in a tone so low, yet penetrating, that it seemed the whisper of my own conscience:

[Sidenote: Naomi’s Reprimand]

“Has death no fears?” She fixed her eyes on me and waited breathlessly for the answer.

“Daughter of beauty,” said Jubal, as a smile of admiration played on his sad features, “thoughts like ours are not for the lovely and the young. May the Heaven that has stamped that countenance be your protection through many a year! But to the weary, rest is happiness, not terror. Prince of Naphtali, this fair maiden’s presence forbids darker thoughts; we must speed her on her way to security before we can think of ourselves and our misfortunes.”

“The daughter of Ananus,” said she, in atone of heroic pride, “has no earthly fears. The boldest warrior of Israel never died more boldly than that venerable parent. Within his sacred robes was the heart of a soldier, a patriot, and a king. Let me die for a cause like his; at the foot of the altar, let my blood be poured out for my country; let this feeble form sink in the ruins of the Temple, and death will be of all welcome things the most welcome. But I would not die for a fantasy, for idleness, for nothing. Put up that weapon, warrior, and let us go forth and see whether great things are not yet to be done.”

She significantly pointed toward Jerusalem.

“It is too late,” said Jubal, glancing with a sigh at his own wasted form.

“What?” said the heroine; “is it too late to be virtuous, but not too late to be guilty? Too late to resist the enemies of our country, but not too late to make ourselves worthless to our holy cause? If Heaven demands an account of every wasted talent and misspent hour, what fearful account will be theirs who make all talents and all hours useless at a blow?”

“Maiden, you have not known what it is to lose everything that made earth a place of hope,” said I, gazing with wonder and pity on the fine enthusiasm that the world is so fatally empowered to destroy. “May not the tired traveler hasten to the end of his journey without a crime?”

“May not the slave,” said Jubal, “weary of his chain, escape unchidden from his captivity?”

[Sidenote: Words of Wisdom]

“And may not the soldier quit his post when caprice disgusts him with his duty?” was the maiden’s answer, with a lofty look. “Or, may not the child break loose from the place of instruction and plead his dislike to discipline? As well may man, placed here for the service of the highest of beings, plead his own narrow will against the supreme command, daringly charge Heaven with the injustice of setting him a task above his strength, and madly insult Its power under the pretext of relying on Its compassion.”

She paused, as if surprised at her own earnestness, and blushing, said: “This wisdom is not my own. It was the last gift of an illustrious parent, when in my agony at the sight of his mortal wounds I longed to follow him. ‘Live,’ said he, ‘while you can live with virtue. The God who has placed us on earth best knows when and how to recall us. If self-destruction were no crime in one instance, it would be no crime to universal mankind; the whole frame of society would be overthrown by a permission to evade its duties on the easy penalty of dying. Our obligations to country, family, man, and Heaven would be perpetually flung off, if they were to be held at the caprice of human nature.’”

Jubal looked intently on the young oracle, and tho bending with Oriental deference, was yet unconvinced.

“Is there to be no end to the mind’s anxiety but the tardy decay of the frame? Is there no time for the return of the exile, or what is this very feeling of despair but a voice within—an unwritten command to die?”

Naomi turned to me with a look imploring my aid. But I was broken down by the tidings that had now reached me. Jubal wrapped his cloak round him, and was striding into the shadow of the ruin. Naomi, terrified at the idea of death, seized the corner of his mantle.

“Will you shrink from the evils of life,” she adjured, “and yet have the dreadful courage to defy the wrath of Heaven? Shall worms like us, shall creatures covered with weaknesses and sins, whose only hope must be in mercy, commit a crime that by its very nature disclaims supplication and makes repentance impossible?”

With the energy of terror she threw back the folds of the cloak and arrested the hand, with the dagger already uplifted. She led back the reluctant, yet unresisting, step, and said in a voice still trembling: “Prince of Naphtali, save your brother!”

[Sidenote: Naomi’s Triumph]

I held out my arms to Jubal; the sternness of his soul was past, and he fell upon my neck. Naomi stood, exulting in her triumph, with the countenance that an angel might wear at the return of a sinner.

“Prince of Naphtali,” said she, “if those who were dear to you have perished—which Heaven avert!—you may have been thus but the more marked out for the instrument of solemn services to Israel. The virtues that might have languished in the happiness of home may be summoned into vigor for mankind. Warrior,” and she turned her glowing smile on Jubal, “this is not the time for valor and experience to shrink from the side of our country. Perfidy may still be repelled by patriotism; violence put down by wisdom; the power of the people roused by the example of a hero; even the last spark of life may be made splendid by mingling with the last glories of the people of God.”

Jubal’s wasted cheek reddened with the theme; but his emotion was too deep for language. He led the way; we passed in silence through the deserted streets, and without seeing the face of a human being, reached the dismantled gates of Masada.

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Chapter XLIV

Among Roman Soldiers

Jubal guided us down the declivities among ramparts and trenches, and after long windings, where every step reminded me of havoc, brought us to a little hamlet in the recesses of the valley, so secluded that it seemed never to have heard the sound of war. The thunder of the falling masses of fortification, as the fire reached their props, kept us awake all night, and I arose from my humble couch to breathe the delicious air that makes the summer night of Asia the time of refreshment alike to the frame and to the mind. I found Jubal already abroad and gazing on the summit of the mountain, where the sullen glare of the sky and the crash of buildings showed that the work of devastation was rapidly going on.

[Sidenote: Details of a Siege]

He gave me some details of the siege. The Romans had found the fortress so hazardous to the advance of their reenforcements that its possession was essential to the conquest of Judea. Cestius, my old antagonist, solicited the command to wipe off his disgrace, and the whole force of the legions was brought up. But the generalship of Eleazar and the intrepidity of the garrison baffled every assault, with tremendous loss of the enemy. The siege was next turned into a blockade. Famine and disease were more formidable than the sword; and the brave defenders were reduced to a number scarcely able to man the walls.

“We now,” said Jubal, “fought the battle of despair; we saw the enemy’s camp crowded every day with fresh troops, and the provisions of the whole country brought among them in profusion, while we had not a morsel to eat, while our fountains ran dry, and while our few troops were harassed with mortal fatigue. Yet no man thought of surrender. Eleazar’s courage—a courage sustained by higher thoughts than those of the soldier, the fortitude of piety and prayer—inspired us all, and we went to our melancholy duties with the calmness of men to whom the grave was inevitable.

[Sidenote: The Final Attack]

“At last, when our reduced numbers gave the enemy a hope, we were attacked by their whole force. But, if they expected to conquer us at their ease, never were they more deceived. When the walls gave way before their machines, they were fought from street to street, from house to house, from chamber to chamber. Eleazar, as active as he was wise, was everywhere; we fought in ruins—in fire. Multitudes of the enemy perished, and more deaths were given by the knife than the spear, for our arms were long since exhausted. The last effort was made on the spot where you found me. When every defense was mastered by the constant supply of fresh troops, Eleazar, passing through the subterranean to attack the Roman rear, left me in command of the few who survived. We entrenched ourselves in the armory. For three days we fought without tasting food, without an hour’s sleep, without laying the weapons out of our hands. At length the final assault was given. In the midst of it we heard shouts which told us that our friends had made the concerted attack, but we were too few and feeble to second it. The shouts died away; we were overpowered, and my first sensation of returning life was the combined agony of famine, wounds, and suffocation, under the ruins that I then thought my living grave.”

“By dawn,” said I, “we must set out for Jerusalem.”

“It has been closely invested,” was the answer, “for the last three months;[42] and famine and faction are doing their worst within the walls. Titus is without, at the head of a hundred thousand of the legionaries and auxiliaries. To enter will be next to impossible, and when once entered, what will be before you but the madness of civil discord, and finally, death by the hands of an enemy utterly infuriated against our nation?”

“To Jerusalem, at all risks,” I exclaimed; “my fate is mingled with that of the last stronghold of our fallen people. What matters it to one whose roots of happiness are cut up like mine, in what spot he struggles with man and fortune? As a son of Judea my powers are due to her cause, and every drop of my blood, shed for any other, would be treason to the memory of my fathers. The dawn finds me on my way to Jerusalem.”

“Spoken like a prince of Naphtali,” sighed Jubal; “but there I must not follow you. The course of glory is cut off for me; alone, something may still be done by collecting the fugitives of the tribes and harassing the Roman communications. But Jerusalem, tho every stone of her walls is precious to my soul, must not receive my guilty steps. I have horrid recollections of things seen and done there. Onias, that wily hypocrite, will be there to fill me with visions of terror. There, too, are others.” He was silent, but suddenly resuming his firmness: “I have no hostility to Constantius; I even honor him; but my spirit is still too feverish to bear his presence—I must live and die, far from all whom I have ever known.”

He hid his face in his mantle, but the agitation of his form showed his anguish, more than clamorous grief. He walked forth into the darkness. I was ignorant of his purpose, and lingered long for his return—I saw him no more.

[Sidenote: The Arrival of Roman Cavalry]

Disturbed and pained by his loss, I had scarcely thrown myself on the cottage floor, my only bed, when I was roused by the cries of the village. A squadron of Roman cavalry marching to Jerusalem had entered, and was taking up its quarters for the night. The peasantry could make no resistance, and attempted none. I had only time to call to my adopted daughter to rise, when our hut was occupied and we were made prisoners.

This was an unexpected blow; yet it was one to which, on second thoughts, I became reconciled. In the disturbed state of the country, traveling was totally insecure, and even to obtain a conveyance of any kind was a matter of extreme difficulty. The roving plunderers who hovered in the train of the camp were, of all plunderers, the most merciless; while, falling into the hands of the legionaries, we were at least sure of an escort; I might obtain some useful information of their affairs, and once in sight of the city, might escape from the Roman lines with more ease as a prisoner than I could pass them as an enemy.

The cavalry moved at daybreak, and before night we saw in the horizon the hills which surround Jerusalem. We had full evidence of our approach to the center of struggle by the devastation that follows the track of the best-disciplined army—groves and orchards cut down, cornfields trampled, cottages burned, gardens and homesteads ravaged. Farther on, we traversed the encampments of the auxiliaries, barbarians of every color and language within the limits of the mightiest of empires.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Views the Soldier of Barbarism]

To the soldier of civilized nations, war is a new state of existence; to the soldier of barbarism, war is but a more active species of his daily life. It requires no divorce from his old habits, and even encourages his old objects, cares, and pleasures. We found the Arab, the German, the Scythian, and the Ethiop hunting, carousing, trafficking, and quarreling, as if they had never stirred from their native regions. The hordes brought with them their families, their cattle, and their trade. In the rear of every auxiliary camp was a regular mart crowded with all kinds of dealers. Through the fields the barbarians were following the sports of home. Trains of falconers were flying their birds at the wild pigeon and heron. Half-naked horsemen were running races, without saddle or rein, on horses as wild and swift as the antelope. Groups were lying under the palm-groves asleep, with their spears fixed at their heads; others were seen busily decorating themselves for battle; crowds were dancing, gaming, and drinking.

As we advanced, we could hear the variety of clamors and echoes that belong to barbarian war—the braying of savage horns, the roars of mirth, rage, and feasting; the shouts of clans moving up to reenforce the besiegers; the screams and lamentations of the innumerable women, as the wains and litters brought back the wounded; the barbarian howlings over the hasty grave of some chieftain; the ferocious revelry of the discoverers of plunder, and the inextinguishable sorrows of the captives.

We passed through some miles of this boisterous and bustling scene, in which even a Roman escort was scarcely a sufficient security. The barbarians thronged round us, brandished their spears over our heads, rode their horses full gallop against us, and exhausted the whole language of scorn, ridicule, and wrath upon our helpless condition.

But the clamor gradually died away, and we entered upon another region,—a zone of silence and solitude interposed between the dangerous riot of barbarism and the severe regularity of the legions. Far within this circle, we reached the Roman camp—the world of disciplined war! The setting sun threw a flame on the long vistas of shield and helmet drawn out, according to custom, for the hour of exercise before nightfall. The tribunes were on horseback in front of the cohorts, putting them through that boundless variety of admirable movements in which no soldiery were so dexterous as those of Rome.

[Sidenote: The Perfection of Discipline]

But all was done with characteristic silence. No sound was heard but the measured tramp of the maneuver and the voice of the tribune. The sight was at once absorbing to the eye of one like me, an enthusiast in soldiership, and appalling to the lover of his country. Before me was the great machine, the resistless energy that had leveled the strength of the most renowned kingdoms. With the feeling of a man who sees the tempest at hand, in the immediate terror of the bolt, I could yet gaze with wonder and admiration at the grandeur of the thunder-cloud! Before me was at once the perfection of power and the perfection of discipline. Here were no rambling crowds of retainers, no hurrying of troops startled by sudden rumor, no military clamors. All was calm, regular, and grand. In the center of the most furious war ever waged, I might have thought that I saw but a summer camp in an Italian plain.

As the night fell, the legions saluted the parting sun with homage, according to a custom which they had learned in their eastern campaigns. Sounds less of war than of worship arose; flutes breathed in low and sweet harmonies from the lines; and this iron soldiery, bound on the business of extermination, moved to their tents in the midst of strains made to wrap the heart in softness and solemnity.

I rose at dawn. But was I in a land of enchantment? I looked for the immense camp—it had vanished. A few soldiers collecting the prisoners sleeping about the field were all that remained of an army. Our guard explained the wonder. An attack on the trenches, in which the besiegers had been driven in with serious loss, determined Titus to bring up his whole force. The troops had moved with that habitual silence which eluded almost the waking ear. They were now beyond the hills, and the hour was come when the prisoners were ordered to follow them. But where was the daughter of Ananus? I had placed her in a tent with some captive females of our nation. The tent was struck, and its inmates were gone! On the spot where it stood a flock of sheep were already grazing, with a Roman soldier leaning drowsily on his spear for their shepherd.

To what alarms might not this fair girl be exposed? Dubious and distressed, I followed the guard, in the hope of discovering the fate of an innocent and lovely being, who seemed, like myself, marked for misfortune.

[Sidenote: The Equipment of Soldiers]

In this march we traversed almost the whole circuit of the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and I thus had, for three days, the opportunity that I longed for, of seeing the nature of the force with which we were to contend. The troops were admirably armed. There was nothing for superfluity; yet those who conceived the system knew the value of show, and the equipment of the legions was superb. The helmets, cuirasses, and swords were frequently inlaid with precious metals, and the superior officers rode richly caparisoned chargers, purchased at an enormous price from the finest studs of Europe and Asia. The common soldier was proud of the brightness of his shield and helmet; on duty both were covered, but on their festivals the most cheering moment was when the order was given to uncase their arms. Then nothing could be more magnificent than the aspect of the legion.

[Sidenote: The Methods of Warriors]

One striking source of its pomp was the multitude of its banners. Every emblem that mythology could feign, every animal, every memorial connected with the history of soldiership and Rome, glittered above the forest of spears. Gilded serpents, wolves, lions, gods, genii, stars, diadems, imperial busts, and the eagle paramount over all, were mingled with vanes of purple and embroidery. The most showy pageant of civil life was dull and colorless to the crowded splendor of the Roman line.

Their system of maneuver gave this magnificence its full development. With the modern armies the principle is the avoidance of fire. With the ancient armies the principle was the concentration of force. All was done by impulse. The figure by which the greatest weight could be thrown against the enemy’s ranks, was the secret of victory. The subtlety of Italian imagination, enlightened by Greek science, and fertilized by the experience of universal war, was occupied in the discovery; and the field exercise of the legions displayed every form into which troops could be shaped for victory. The Romans always sought to fight pitched battles. They left the minor services to their allies, and haughtily reserved themselves for the master strokes by which empires are lost or won. The humbler hostilities, the obscure skirmishings and surprises, they disdained; observing that, while “to steal upon men was the work of a thief, and to butcher them was the habit of a barbarian, to fight them was the act of a soldier.”

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Chapter XLV

The Reign of the Sword

[Sidenote: The Track of Invasion]

At the close of a weary day we reached our final station, upon the hill of Scopas, seven furlongs from Jerusalem. Bitter memory was busy with me there. From the spot on which I flung myself in heaviness of heart, huddled among a crowd of miserable captives, and wishing only that the evening gathering over me might be my last, I had once looked upon the army of the oppressors marching into my toils and exulted in the secure glories of myself and my country.

But the prospect now beneath the eye showed only the fiery track of invasion. The pastoral beauty of the plain was utterly gone. The innumerable garden-houses and summer dwellings of the Jewish nobles, gleaming in every variety of graceful architecture, among vineyards and depths of aromatic foliage, were leveled to the ground; and the gardens were turned into a sandy waste, cut up by trenches and military works in every direction. In the midst rose the great Roman rampart, which Titus, in despair of conquering the city by the sword, drew round it, to extinguish its last hope of provisions or reenforcements—a hideous boundary, within which all was to be the sepulcher.

I now saw Jerusalem only in her expiring struggle.[43] Others have given the history of that most memorable siege. My knowledge was limited to the last hideous days of an existence long declining, and finally extinguished in horrors beyond the imagination of man.

[Sidenote: A Fight in a Tempest]

I knew her follies, her ingratitude, her crimes; but the love of the city of David was deep in my soul; her lofty privileges, the proud memory of those who had made her courts glorious, the sage, the soldier, and the prophet, lights of the world, to which the boasted illumination of the heathen was darkness, filled my spirit with an immortal homage. I loved her then—I love her still.

To mingle my blood with that of my perishing country was the first wish of my heart. But I was under the rigor of the confinement inflicted on the Jewish prisoners. My rank was soon known; but while it produced offers of new distinction from my captors, it increased their vigilance. To every temptation I gave the same denial, and occupied my hours in devices for escape. Meanwhile I saw with terror that the wall of circumvallation was closing, and that a short period must place an impassable barrier between me and the city.

I was aroused at midnight by the roaring of one of those tempests which sometimes break in so fiercely upon an Eastern summer. The lightning struck the tower in which I was confined, and I found myself riding on a pile of ruins. Escape, in the midst of a Roman camp, seemed as remote as ever. But the storm which shook walls made its way at will among tents, and the whole encampment was broken up. A column of infantry passed where I was extricating myself from the ruins. They were going to reenforce the troops in the trenches, against the chance of an attack during the tempest. I followed them. The night was terrible. The lightning that blazed with frightful vividness, and then left the sky to tenfold obscurity, alone led us through the lines. The column was too late, and it found the besieged already mounted upon the wall of circumvallation, and flinging it down in huge fragments. The assault and defense were alike desperate. At the moment of our arrival the night had grown pitchy dark, and the only evidence that men were round me was the clang of arms.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Rescues Constantius]

A sudden flash showed me that we had reached the foot of the rampart. The besieged, carried away by their native impetuosity, poured down in crowds. Their leader, cheering them on, was struck by a lance and fell. The sight rallied the Romans. I felt that now or never was the moment for my escape. I rushed in front, and called aloud my name. At the voice the wounded leader uttered a cry which I well knew. I caught him from the ground. A gigantic centurion darted forward and grasped my robe. Embarrassed with my burden, I was on the point of being dragged back; the centurion’s sword glittered over my head. With my only weapon, a stone, I struck him a furious blow on the forehead. The sword fell from his grasp; I seized it, and keeping the rest at bay, and in the midst of shouts from my countrymen, leaped the trench, with the nobler trophy in my arms—I had rescued Constantius!

Jerusalem was now verging on the last horrors. I could scarcely find my way through her ruins. The noble buildings were destroyed by conflagration and the assaults of the various factions. The monuments of our kings and tribes were lying in mutilation at my feet. Every man of former eminence was gone. Massacre and exile had been the masters of the higher ranks; and even the accidental distinctions into which the humbler were thrown by the few past years, involved a fearful purchase of public hazard. Like men in an earthquake, the elevation of each was only a sign to him of the working of an irresistible principle of ruin. But the most formidable characteristic was the change wrought in the popular mind.

A single revolution may be a source of public good, but a succession of great political changes is always fatal, alike to public and private virtue. The sense of honor dies in the fierce pressures of personal struggle. Humanity dies in the sight of hourly violences. Conscience dies in the conflict where personal safety is so often endangered that its preservation at length usurps the mind. Religion dies where the religious man is so often the victim of the unprincipled. Violence and vice are soon found to be the natural instruments of triumph in a war of the passions; and the more relentless atrocity carries the day, until selfishness—the mother of treachery, rapine, and carnage—is the paramount principle. Then the nation perishes, or is sent forth in madness and misery, an object of terror and infection, to propagate evil through the world.

[Sidenote: The Wrecks of Pillage]

The very features of the popular physiognomy were changed. The natural vividness of the countenance was there, but hardened by habitual ferocity. I was surrounded by a multitude, in each of whom I was compelled to see the assassin. The keen eye scowled with cruelty; the cheek wore the alternate flush and paleness of desperate thoughts. The hurried gatherings, the quick quarrel, the loud blasphemy, told me the infuriate temper that had fallen, for the last curse, on Jerusalem. Scarcely a man passed me of whom I could not have said: “There goes one from a murder or to a murder.”

But even more open evidences startled me, accustomed as I was to scenes of military violence. I saw men stabbed in familiar greetings in the streets; mansions set on fire and burned in the face of day, with their inmates screaming for help, and yet unhelped; hundreds slain in rabble tumults, of which no one knew the origin. The streets were covered with the wrecks of pillage, sumptuous furniture plundered from the mansions of the great, and plundered for the mere love of ruin; mingled with the more hideous wrecks of man—unburied bodies, left to whiten in the blast or to be torn by the dogs.

Three factions divided Jerusalem, even while the Roman battering-rams were shaking her colossal towers; three armies fought night and day within the city. Streets undermined, houses battered down, granaries burned, wells poisoned, the perpetual shower of death upon each other from the roofs, made the external hostility trivial; and the Romans required only patience to have been bloodless masters of a city which yet they would have found only a tomb of its people.

[Illustration: “I had rescued Constantius.”

[see page 355.

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

[Sidenote: Salathiel Apostrophizes]

I wandered day by day, an utter stranger, through Jerusalem. All the familiar faces were gone. At an early period of the war, many of the higher ranks, foreseeing the event, had left the city; at a later, my victory over Cestius, by driving back the enemy, had given a free passage to a crowd of others. It was at that time remarked that the crowd were chiefly Christians, and a singular prophecy of their Master was declared to be the warning of their escape. It is certain that of His followers, including many even of our priests and learned men, scarcely one remained.[44] They said that the evil day, menaced by the divine Wisdom, through Moses (may he rest in glory!) was come; that the death of their Master was the consummate crime; and that the Romans, the predicted nation of destroyers, the people “of a strange speech,” flying on “eagle wings from the ends of the earth,” were already commissioned against a land stained with the blood of the Messiah.

Fatally was the word of the great prophet of Israel accomplished; fearfully fell the sword, to smite away root and branch; solemnly, and by a hand which scorned the strength of man, was the deluge of ruin let loose against the throne of David. And still through almost two thousand years, the flood of desolation is at the full; no mountain-top is seen rising above; no spot is left clear for the sole of the Jewish foot; no dove returns with the olive.

Eternal King, shall this be forever? Wilt Thou utterly reject the children of him whom thy right hand brought from the land of the idolater? Wilt Thou forever hide Thy glory from the tribes whom it led through the burning wilderness? Wilt Thou never raise the broken kingdom of Thy servant Israel? Still we wander in darkness, the tenants of a prison, whose chains we feel at every step; the scoff of the idolater, the captive of the infidel. Have we not abided without king or priest, or ephod or teraphim, “many days”—when are those days to be at an end?

Yet is not the captivity at last about to close? Is not the trumpet at the lip to summon Thy chosen? Are not the broken tribes now awaiting but Thy command to come from the desert, from the dungeon, from the mine, like the light from darkness? I gaze upon the stars and think, countless and glorious as they are, such shall yet be thy multitude and thy splendor, people of the undone! The promise of the King of Kings is fulfilling, and even now, to my withered eyes, to my struggling prayer, to the deeper agonies of a supplication that no tongue can utter, there is a vision and an answer. On the flint, worn by kneeling, I hear the midnight voice; and weeping, wait for the day that will come, tho heaven and earth shall pass away.

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Chapter XLVI

A Cry of Wo

My first object was to ascertain the fate of my family. From Constantius I could learn nothing, for the severity of his wound had reduced him to such a state that he recognized no one. I sat by him day after day, watching with bitter solicitude for the return of his senses. He raved continually of his wife, and of every other name that I loved. The affecting eloquence of his appeals sometimes plunged me into the deepest depression—sometimes drove me out to seek relief from them, even in the horrors of the streets. I was the most solitary of men. In those melancholy wanderings, none spoke to me; I spoke to none. The kinsmen whom I had left under the command of my brave son were slain or dispersed, and on the night when I saw him warring with his native ardor, the men whom he led to the foot of the rampart were an accidental band, excited by his brilliant intrepidity to choose him at the instant for their captain. In sorrow, indeed, had I entered Jerusalem.

[Sidenote: The Devastation of Jerusalem]

The devastation of the city was enormous during its tumults. The great factions were reduced to two, but in the struggle a large portion of the Temple had been burned. The stately chambers of the priests were dust and embers. The cloisters which surrounded the sanctuary were beaten down or left naked to the visitation of the seasons, which now, as by the peculiar wrath of heaven, had assumed a fierce and ominous inclemency. Tremendous bursts of tempest constantly shook the city, and the popular mind was kept in perpetual alarm at the accidents which followed those storms. Fires were frequently caused by the lightning; deluges of rain flooded the streets, and falling on the shattered roofs, increased the misery of their famishing inhabitants; the sudden severity of winter in the midst of spring added to the sufferings of a people doubly unprovided to encounter it, by its unexpectedness and by their necessary exposure on the battlements and in the field.

Within the walls all bore the look of a grave, and even that grave shaken by some great convulsion of nature. From the battlements the sight was absolute despair. The Roman camps covered the hills, and we could see the soldiery sharpening the very lances that were to drink our blood. The fires of their night-watches lighted up the horizon round. We hourly heard the sound of their trumpets and their shouts, as the sheep in the fold might hear the roaring of the lion and the tiger, ready to leap their feeble boundary. Yet the valor of the people was never wearied out. The vast mound, whose circle was to shut us up from the help of man or the hope of escape, was the grand object of attack and defense; and tho thousands of my countrymen covered the ground at its foot with their corpses, the Jew was still ready to rush on the Roman spear. This valor was spontaneous, for subordination had long been at an end. The names of John of Giscala, and Simon, influential as they were in the earlier periods of the war, had lost their force in the civil fury and desperate pressures of the siege. No leaders were acknowledged but hatred of the enemy, iron fortitude, and a determination not to survive the fall of Jerusalem!

In this furious warfare I took my share with the rest; handled the spear, and fought and watched without thinking of any distinction of rank. My military experience, and the personal strength which enabled me to render prominent services in those desultory attacks, often excited our warriors to offer me the command; but ambition was dead within me.

[Sidenote: A Universal Outcry]

I was one day sitting beside the bed of Constantius, and bitterly absorbed in gazing on what I thought the progress of death, when I heard a universal outcry, more melancholy than human voices seemed ever made to utter. My first thought was that the enemy had forced the gates. I took my sword down and prepared to go out and die. I found the streets filled with crowds hurrying forward without any apparent direction, but all exhibiting a sorrow amounting to agony; wringing their hands, beating their bosoms, tearing their hair, and casting dust and ashes on their heads. A large body of the priesthood came rushing from the temple with loud lamentations. The DAILY SACRIFICE had ceased![45] The perpetual offering, which, twice a day, burned in testimonial of the sins and the expiation of Israel, the peculiar homage of the nation to Heaven, was no more! The siege had extinguished the resources of the Temple; the victims could no longer be supplied, and the people must perish without the power of atonement! This was the final cutting off—the declaration of the sentence—the seal of the great condemnation. Jerusalem was undone!

Overpowered by this fatal sign, I was sadly returning to my worse than solitary chamber, for there lay, speechless and powerless, the noblest creature that breathed in Jerusalem—when I was driven aside by a new torrent of the people, exclaiming “The prophet! the prophet! wo to the city of David!”

[Sidenote: Wo, Wo, Wo]

They rushed on in haggard multitudes, and in the midst of them came a maniac bounding and gesticulating with indescribable wildness. His constant exclamation was “Wo!—wo!—wo!” uttered in a tone that searched the very heart. He stopped from time to time, flung out some denunciation against the popular crimes, and then recommenced his cry of “Wo!” and bounded forward again.

He at length came opposite to the spot where I stood, and his features struck me as resembling those I had seen before. But they were full of a strange impulse—the grandeur of inspiration mingled with the animal fierceness of frenzy. The eye shot fire under the sharp and hollow brows; the nostrils contracted and opened like those of an angry steed, and every muscle of a singularly elastic frame was quivering and exposed from the effects alike of mental violence and famine.

“Ho, Prince of Naphtali! we meet at last!” was his instant outcry. His countenance fell, and tears gushed from lids that looked incapable of a human feeling. “I found her,” said he, “my beauty, my bride! She was in the dungeon. The ring that I tore from that villain’s finger was worth a gold-mine, for it opened the gates of her prison. Come forth, girl!”

[Sidenote: Sabat the Ishmaelite]

With these words he caught by the hand and led to me a pale creature, with the traces of loveliness, but evidently in the last stage of mortal decay. She stood silent as a statue. In compassion, I took her hand, while the multitude gathered round us in curiosity. I now remembered Sabat, the Ishmaelite, and his story.

“She is mad,” said Sabat, shaking his head mournfully, and gazing on the fading form at his side. “Worlds would not restore her senses. But there is a time for all things.” He sighed, and cast his large eyes on heaven. “I watched her day and night,” he went on, “until I grew mad too. But the world will have an end, and then—all will be well. Come, wife, we must be going. To-night there are strange things within the walls, and without the walls. There will be feasting and mourning; there will be blood and tears; then comes the famine—then comes the fire—then the sword; and then all is quiet, and forever!”

He paused, wiped away the tears, then began again wilder than ever: “Heaven is mighty! To-night there will be wonders; watch well your walls, people of the ruined city! To-night there will be signs; let no man sleep but those who sleep in the grave. Prince of Naphtali, have you too sworn, as I have, to die?” He lifted his meager hand. “Come, thunders! come, fires! vengeance cries from the sanctuary. Listen, undone people! listen, nation of sorrow! the ministers of wrath are on the wing. Wo!—wo!—wo!”

In pronouncing those words with a voice of the most sonorous yet melancholy power, he threw himself into a succession of strange and fearful gestures; then beckoning to the female, who submissively followed his steps, plunged away among the multitude. I heard the howl of “Wo!—wo!—wo!” long echoed through the windings of the ruined streets, and thought that I heard the voice of the angel of desolation.

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Chapter XLVII

The Struggle for Supremacy

[Sidenote: The Sickness of the Heart]

The seventeenth day of the month Tamuz, ever memorable in the sufferings of Israel, was the last of the Daily Sacrifice. Sorrow and fear were on the city, and the silence of the night was broken by the lamentations of the multitude. I returned to my chamber of affliction, and busied myself in preparing for the guard of the Temple, to withdraw my mind from the gloom that was beginning to master me. Yet when I looked round the room, and thought of what I had been, of the opulent enjoyments of my palace, and of the beloved faces which surrounded me there, I felt the sickness of the heart.

The chilling air that blew through the dilapidated walls, the cruse of water, the scanty bread, the glimmering lamp, the comfortless and squalid bed, on which lay in the last stages of weakness a patriot and a hero—a being full of fine affections and abilities, reduced to the helplessness of an infant, and whom in leaving for the night I might be leaving to perish by the poniard of the robber—unmanned me. I cast the simitar from my hand, and sat down with a sullen determination there to linger until death, or that darker vengeance which haunted me, should do its will.

The night was stormy, and the wind howled in long and bitter gusts through the deserted chambers of the huge mansion. But the mind is the true place of suffering, and I felt the season’s visitation in my locks drenched about my face, and my tattered robes swept by the freezing blasts, as only the natural course of things.

I was sitting by the bedside, moistening the fevered lips of Constantius with water, and pressing on him the last fragment of bread which I might ever have to give, when I, with sudden delight, heard him utter for the first time articulate sounds. I stooped to catch accents so dear and full of hope. But the words were a supplication—he prayed to the Christian’s God!

[Sidenote: The Prayer of Constantius]

I turned away from this resistless conviction of his belief. But this was no time for debate, and I was won to listen again. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, but his language was the aspiration of the heart. His eyes were closed, and, evidently unconscious of my presence, in his high communion with Heaven, he talked of things of which I had but imperfect knowledge or none; of blood shed for the sins of man; of a descended Spirit to guide the servants of Heaven; of the unspeakable love that gave the Son of God to mortal suffering for the atonement of that human guilt which nothing but such a sacrifice could atone. He finished by the names dear to us both; and praying “for their safety if they still were in life, or for their meeting beyond the grave, declared himself resigned to the will of his Lord.”

I waited in sacred awe until I saw, by the subsiding motion of the lips, that the prayer was done, and then, anxious to gain information of my family, questioned him. But with the prayer the interval of mental power had passed away. The veil was drawn over his senses once more, and his answers were unintelligible. Yet even the hope of his restoration lightened my gloom; my spirits, naturally elastic, shook off their leaden weight; I took up the simitar, and pressing the cold hand of my noble fellow victim, prepared to issue forth to the Temple. The storm was partially gone, and the moon, approaching to the full, was high in heaven, fighting her way through masses of rapid cloud. The wind still roared in long blasts, as the tempest retired, like an army repulsed, and indignant at being driven from the spoil. But the ground was deluged, and a bitter sleet shot on our half-naked bodies. I had far to pass through the streets of the upper city, and their aspect was deeply suited to the melancholy of the hour.

Vast walls and buttresses of the burned and overthrown mansions remained, that in the spectral light looked like gigantic specters. Ranges of inferior ruins stretched to the utmost glance; some yet sending up the smoke of recent conflagration, and others beaten down by the storms or left to decay. The immense buildings of the hierarchy, once the scene of all but kingly magnificence, stood roofless and windowless, with the light sadly gleaming through their fissures, and the wind singing a dirge of ruin through their halls. I scarcely met a human being, for the sword and famine had fearfully reduced the once countless population.

But I often startled a flight of vultures from their meal; or, in the sinking of the light, stumbled upon a heap that uttered a cry, and showed that life was there; or from his horrid morsel, a wretch glared upon me, as one wolf might glare upon another, that came to rob him of his prey; or the twinkling of a miserable lamp in the corner of a ruin glimmered over a knot of felony and murder, reckoning their hideous gains and carousing with the dagger drawn. Heaps of bones, whitening in the air, were the monuments of the wasted valor of my countrymen, and the oppressive atmosphere gave the sensation of walking in a sepulcher.

[Sidenote: The Avenues of Death]

I dragged my limbs with increased difficulty through those long avenues of death that, black, silent, and split into a thousand shapes of ruin, looked less like the streets of a city than the rocky defiles of a mountain shattered by lightnings and earthquakes. On the summit of the hill I found a crowd of unhappy beings, who came, like myself, actuated by zeal to defend the Temple from the insults to which its sanctity was now nightly exposed. Faction had long extinguished the native homage of the people. Battles had been fought within its walls, and many a corpse loaded the sacred floors, that once would have required solemn ceremonies to free them from the pollution of an unlicensed step.

And what a band was assembled there! Wretches mutilated by wounds, worn with sleeplessness, haggard with want of food; shivering together on the declivity, whose naked elevation exposed them to the whole inclemency of the night; flung like the dead, on the ground, or gathered in little knots among the ruined porticos, with death in every frame and despair in every heart.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Views the Pomp of War]

I was sheltering myself behind the broken columns of the Grand gate, from the bitter wind which searched every fiber, and was sinking into that chilling torpor which benumbs body and mind alike, when a clash of military music and the tramp of a multitude assailed my ear. I started up and found my miserable companions mustered, from the various hollows of the hill, to our post on the central ground of Mount Moriah, whence the view was boundless on every side. A growing blaze rose up from the valley and flashed upon the wall of circumvallation. The sounds of cymbal and trumpet swelled; the light advanced rapidly; and going the circuit of the wall, helmets and lances of the cavalry were seen glittering through the gloom; a crowd of archers preceded a dense body of the legionary horse, at whose head rode a group of officers. On this night the fatal wall had been completed, and Titus was going its round in triumph. Every horseman carried a torch, and strong divisions of infantry followed, bearing lamps and vessels of combustible matter on the points of their spears. As the whole moved, rolling and bending with the inequalities of the ground, I thought that I saw a mighty serpent, coiling his burning spires round the prey that was never to be rescued by the power of man.

But the pomp of war below and the wretchedness round me, raised reflections of such bitterness that when Titus and his splendid troop reached the mountain of the Temple, one outcry of sorrow and anticipated ruin burst from us all. The conqueror heard it, and, from the instant maneuvering of his troops, was evidently alarmed; he had known the courage of the Jews too long not to dread the effect of their despair. And despair it was, fierce and untamable!

I started forward, exclaiming: “If there is a man among you ready to stake his life for his country, let him follow me.”

To the last hour the Jew was a warrior! The crowd seized their spears, and we sprang down the cliffs. As we reached the outer wall of the city, I restrained their exhaustless spirit until I had singly ascertained the state of the enemy. Titus was passing the well-known ravine near the fountain-gate, where the ground was difficult for cavalry, from its being chiefly divided into gardens. I flung open the gate, and led the way to the circumvallation. The sentinels, occupied with looking on the pomp, suffered us to approach unperceived; we mounted the wall, overthrew everything before us, and plunged down upon the cavalry, entangled in the ravine. It was a complete surprise.

The bravery of the legions was not proof against the fury of our attack. Even our wild faces and half-naked forms, by the uncertain glare of the torches, looked scarcely human. Horse and man rolled down the declivity. The arrival of fresh troops only increased the confusion; their torches made them a mark for our pikes and arrows; every point told, and every Roman that fell, armed a Jew. The conflict now became murderous, and we stabbed at our ease the troopers of the Emperor’s guard, through their mail, while their long lances were useless.

The defile gave us incalculable advantages, for the garden walls were impassable by the cavalry, while we bounded over them like deer. All was uproar, terror, and rage. We actually waded through blood. At every step, I trod on horse or man; helmets and bucklers, lances and armor, lay in heaps, and the stream of the ravine soon ran purple with the proudest gore of the legions.

[Sidenote: The Roman Charge]

At length, while we were absolutely oppressed with the multitude of dead, a sudden blast of trumpets and the shouts of the enemy led me to prepare for a still fiercer effort. A tide of cavalry poured over the ground; Titus, a gallant figure, cheering them on, with his helmet in his hand, galloped in their front; I withdrew my wearied followers from the exposed situation into which their success had led them, and posting them behind a rampart of Roman dead, awaited the charge. It came with the force of thunder; the powerful horses of the imperial squadron broke over our rampart at the first shock and bore us down like stubble. Every man of us was under their feet in a moment; and yet the very number of our assailants saved us. The narrowness of the place gave no room for the management of the horse; the darkness assisted both our escape and assault; and even lying on the ground, we plunged our knives in horse and rider, with terrible retaliation.

The cavalry at length gave way, but the Roman general, a man of the heroic spirit that is only inflamed by repulse, rushed forward among the disheartened troops, and roused them by his cries and gestures to retrieve their honor. After a few bold words, he again charged at their head. I singled him out, as I saw his golden helmet gleam in the torch-light. To capture the son of Vespasian would have been a triumph worth a thousand lives. Titus[46] was celebrated for personal dexterity in the management of the horse and lance, and I could not withhold my admiration of the skill with which he penetrated the difficulties of the field, and the mastery with which he overthrew all that opposed him.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Attacks Titus]

Our motley ranks were already scattering, when I cried out my name and defied him to the combat. He stooped over his charger’s neck to discover his adversary, and seeing before him a being as blackened and beggared as the most dismantled figure of the crowd, gave a laugh of fierce derision, and was turning away, when our roar of scorn recalled him. He struck in the spur, and couching his lance, bounded toward me. To have waited his attack must have been destruction; I sprang aside, and with my full vigor flung my javelin; it went through his buckler. He reeled, and a groan rose from the legionaries who were rushing forward to his support. He stopped them with a fierce gesture, and casting off the entangled buckler, charged again. But the hope of the imperial diadem was not to be thus cheaply hazarded. The whole circle of cavalry rolled in upon us; I was dragged down by a hundred hands, and Titus was forced away, indignant at the zeal which had thwarted his fiery valor.

In the confusion I was forgotten, burst through the concourse, and rejoined my countrymen, who had given me over for lost, and now received me with shouts of victory. The universal cry was to advance, but I felt that the limit of triumph for that night was come; the engagement had become known to the whole range of the enemy’s camps, and troops without number were already pouring down. I ordered a retreat, but there was one remaining exploit to make the night’s service memorable.

Leaving a few hundred pikemen outside the circumvallation, to keep off any sudden attempt, I set every hand at work to gather the dry weeds, rushes, and fragments of trees from the low grounds into a pile. It was laid against the rampart. I flung the first torch, and pile and rampart were soon alike in a blaze. Volumes of flame, carried by the wind, rolled round its entire circuit. The Romans rushed down in multitudes to extinguish the fire. But this became continually more difficult. Jerusalem had been roused from its sleep, and the extravagant rumors that a great victory was obtained, Titus slain, and the enemy’s camp taken by storm, stimulated the natural spirit of the people to the most boundless confidence. Every Jew who could find a lance, an arrow, or a knife hurried to the gates, and the space between the walls and the circumvallation was crowded with an army which, in that crisis of superhuman exultation, perhaps no disciplined force on earth could have outfought.

Nothing could now save the rampart. Torches innumerable, piles of faggots, arms, even the dead, all things that could burn, were flung upon it. Thousands, who at other times might have shrunk, forgot the name of fear, leaped into the very midst of the flames, and tearing up the blazing timbers, dug to the heart of the rampart and filled the hollows with sulfur and bitumen; thousands struggled across the tumbling ruins, to throw themselves among the Roman spearsmen and see the blood of an enemy before they died.

[Sidenote: The Rampart’s Illumination]

War never had a bolder moment. Human nature, roused to the wildest height of enthusiasm, was lavishing life like dust. The ramparts spread a horrid light upon the havoc; every spot of the battle, every group of the furious living, and the trampled and deformed dead, was keenly visible. The ear was deafened by the incessant roar of flame, the falling of the huge heaps of the rampart, and the agonies and exultations of men, reveling in mutual slaughter.

[Sidenote: The Phenomenon in the Sky]

In that hour came one of those solemn signs that marked the downfall of Jerusalem. The tempest, that had blown at intervals with tremendous violence, died away at once; and a surge of light ascended from the horizon and rolled up rapidly to the zenith. The phenomenon instantly fixed every eye. There was an indefinable sense in the general mind that a sign of power and providence was about to be given. The battle ceased; the outcries were followed by utter silence; the armed ranks stood still, in the very act of rushing on each other; all faces were turned on the heavens.

The light rose pale and quivering like the meteors of a summer evening. But in the zenith, it spread and swelled into a splendor that distinguished it irresistibly from the wonders of earth or air. It swiftly eclipsed every star. The moon vanished before it; the canopy of the sky seemed to be dissolved, for a view into a bright and infinite region beyond, fit for the career of those mighty beings to whom man is but the dust on the gale.

As we gazed, this boundless field was transformed into a field of battle; multitudes seemed to crowd it in the fiercest combat; horsemen charged and died under their horses’ feet; armor and standards were trampled in blood; column and line burst through each other. At length the battle stooped toward the earth, and with hearts beating with indescribable feelings we recognized in the fight the banners of the tribes. It was Jew and Roman struggling for life; the very countenances of the combatants became visible, and each man below saw a representative of himself above. The fate of Jewish war was there written by the hand of Heaven; the fate of the individual was there predicted in the individual triumph or fall. What tongue of man can tell the intense interest with which we watched every blow, every movement, every wound, of those images of ourselves?

The light now illumined the whole horizon below. The legions were seen drawn out in front of the camps, ready for action—every helmet and spear-point glittering in the radiance; every face turned up, gazing in awe and terror on the sky. The tents spreading over the hills; the thousands and tens of thousands of auxiliaries and captives; the little groups of the peasantry, roused from sleep by the uproar of the night, and gathered upon the knolls and eminences of their fields—all were bathed in a flood of preternatural luster. But the wondrous battle approached its close. The visionary Romans seemed to shake, column and cohort gave way, and the banners of the tribes waved in victory over the celestial field. Then human voices dared to be heard. From the city and the plain burst forth one mighty shout of triumph!

[Sidenote: A Dreadful Sign]

But our presumption was soon to be checked. A peal of thunder that made the very ground tremble under our feet rolled from the four quarters of the heaven. The conquering host shook, broke, and fled in utter confusion over the sapphire field. It was pursued, but by no semblance of the Roman.

An awful enemy was on its steps. Flashes of forked fire, like myriads of lances, darted after it; cloud on cloud deepened down, as the smoke of a mighty furnace; globes of light shot blasting and burning along its track. Then amid the double roar of thunder rushed forth the chivalry of heaven. Shapes of transcendent beauty, yet with looks of wrath that withered the human eye—armed sons of immortality descending on the wing by millions—mingled with shapes and instruments of ruin, for which the mind has no conception. The circle of the heaven was filled with the chariots and horses of fire. Flight was in vain; the weapons were seen to drop from the Jewish host; their warriors sank upon the splendid field. Still the immortal armies poured on, trampling and blasting, until the last of the routed were consumed.

The angry pomp then paused. Countless wings were spread, and the angelic multitudes, having done the work of vengeance, rushed upward, with the sound of ocean in the storm. The roar of trumpets and thunders was heard, until the splendor was lost in the heights of the empyrean.

We felt the terrible warning. Our strength was dried up at the sight; despair seized upon our souls. We had seen the fate of Jerusalem. No victory over man could now save us from the coming of final ruin!

[Sidenote: Despair]

Thousands never left the ground on which they stood; they perished by their own hands, or lay down and died of broken hearts. The rest fled through the night, that again wrapped them in tenfold darkness. The whole multitude scattered with soundless steps, and in silence like an army of specters.

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Chapter XLVIII

The Sting of a Story

In the deepest dejection that could overwhelm the human mind, I returned to the city, where one melancholy care still bound me to existence. I hastened to my comfortless shelter, but the battle had fluctuated so far around the walls that I found myself perplexed, among the ruins of a portion of the lower city, a crowd of obscure streets which belonged almost wholly to strangers and the poorer population.

[Sidenote: In the Darkness of Night]

The faction of John of Giscala, composed chiefly of the more profligate and beggared class, had made the lower city their stronghold, before they became masters of Mount Moriah; and some desperate skirmishes, of which conflagrations were the perpetual consequence, laid waste the principal part of a district built and ruined by the haste and carelessness of poverty. To find a guide through this scene of dilapidation was hopeless, for every living creature, terrified by the awful portents of the sky, had fled from the streets. The night was solid darkness. No expiring gleam from the burned rampart, no fires of the Roman camps, no torch on the Jewish battlements, broke the pitchy blackness. Life and light seemed to have perished together.

To proceed soon became impossible, and I had no other resource than to wait the coming of day. But to one accustomed as I was to hardships, this inconvenience was trivial. I felt my way along the walls, to the entrance of a house that promised some protection from the night, and flinging myself into a corner, vainly tried to slumber. But the rising of the storm and the rain pouring upon my lair drove me to seek a more sheltered spot within the ruin. The destruction was so effectual that this was difficult to discover, and I was hopelessly returning to take my chance in the open air when I observed the glimmer of a lamp through a crevice in the upper part of the building. My first impulse was to approach and obtain assistance. But the abruptness of the ascent gave me time to consider the hazard of breaking in upon such groups as might be gathered at that hour, in a period when every atrocity under heaven reigned in Jerusalem.

My patience was put to but brief trial, for in a few minutes I heard a low hymn. It paused, as if followed by prayer. The hymn began again, in accents so faint as evidently to express the fear of the worshipers. But the sounds thrilled through my soul. I listened, in a struggle of doubt and hope. Could I be deceived? and if I were, how bitter must be the discovery. I sat down at the foot of the rude stair, to feed myself with the fancied delight before it should be snatched from me forever.

[Sidenote: A Sudden Reunion]

But my perturbation would have risen to madness had I stopped longer. I climbed up the tottering steps; half-way I found myself obstructed by a door; I struck upon it, and called aloud. After an interval of miserable delay, a still higher door was opened, and a figure enveloped in a veil timidly looked out and asked my purpose. I saw, glancing over her, two faces that I would have given the world to see. I called out “Miriam!” Overpowered with emotion, my speech failed me. I lived only in my eyes. I saw Miriam fling off the mantle with a scream of joy, and rush down the steps. I saw my two daughters follow her with the speed of love; the door was thrown open, and I fell fainting into their arms.

Tears, exclamations, and gazings were long our only language. My wife hung over my wasted frame with endless embraces and sobs of joy. My daughters fell at my feet, bathed my cold hands with their tears, smiled on me in speechless delight, and then wept again. They had thought me lost to them forever. I had thought them dead, or driven to some solitude which forbade us to meet again on this side of the grave. For two years, two dreadful years, a lonely man on earth, a wifeless husband, a childless father, tried by every misery of mind and body; here—here I found my treasure once more! On this spot, wretched and destitute as it was, in the midst of public misery and personal wo, I had found those whose loss would have made the riches of mankind, beggary to me. My soul overflowed. Words were not made to tell the feverish fondness, the strong delight that quivered through me. I wept with woman’s weakness; I held my wife and children at arm’s length, that I might enjoy the full happiness of gazing on them; then my eyes grew dim, and I caught them to my heart, and in silence, the silence of unspeakable emotion, tried to collect my thoughts and to convince myself that my joy was no dream.

The night passed in mutual inquiries. The career of my family had been deeply diversified. On my capture in the great battle with Cestius, in which it was said that I had fallen, they were on the point of coming to Jerusalem to ascertain their misfortune. The advance of the Romans to Masada precluded this. They sailed for Alexandria, and were overtaken by a storm.

[Sidenote: The Terror of a Memory]

“In that storm,” said Miriam, with terror painted on her countenance, “we saw a sight that appalled the firmest heart among us, and which to this hour recalls fearful images. The night had fallen intensely dark. Our vessel, laboring through the tempest during the day and greatly shattered, was expected to go down before morn, and I had come upon the deck, prepared to submit to the general fate, when I saw a flame in the distance, and pointed it out to the mariners; but they were paralyzed by weariness and fear, and instead of approaching what I conceived to be a beacon, they left the vessel to the mercy of the wind. I watched the light; to my astonishment, I saw it advancing over the waves. It was a large ship on fire, and rushing down upon us. Then, indeed, there was no insensibility among our mariners; they were like madmen, through excess of fear—they did everything but make an effort to escape the danger.

“The blazing ship came toward us with terrific rapidity. As it approached, the figure of a man was seen on the deck, standing unhurt, in the midst of the burning. The Syrian pilot, hitherto the boldest of our crew, at this sight cast the helm from his hands in despair, and tore his beard, exclaiming that we were undone. To our questions, he would give no other answer than by pointing to the solitary being who stood calmly in the center of the conflagration, more like a demon than a man.

[Sidenote: The Solitary Figure Accursed]

“I proposed that we should make some effort to rescue this unfortunate man. But the pilot, horror-struck at the thought, then gave up the tale that it cost him agonies even to utter. He told us that the being whom our frantic compassion would attempt to save, was an accursed thing; that for some crime, too inexpiable to allow of his remaining among creatures capable of hope, he was cast out from men, stricken into the nature of the condemned spirits, and sentenced to rove the ocean in fire, ever burning and never consumed!”

I felt every word, as if that fire was devouring my flesh. The sense of what I was, and what I must be, was poison. My head swam; mortal pain overwhelmed me. And this abhorred thing I was; this sentenced and fearful wretch I was, covered with wrath and shame; this exile from human nature I was; and I heard my sentence pronounced and my existence declared hideous by the lips on which I hung for confidence and consolation against the world.

Flinging my robe over my face to hide its writhings, I seemed to listen, but my ears refused to hear. In my perturbation, I once thought of boldly avowing the truth, and thus freeing myself from the pang of perpetual concealment. But the offense and the retribution were too real and too deadly to be disclosed, without destroying the last chance of happiness to those innocent sufferers. I mastered the convulsion, and again bent my ear.

“Our story exhausts you,” said Miriam; “but it is done. After a long pursuit, in which the burning ship followed us as if with the express purpose of our ruin, we were snatched from a death by fire, only to undergo the chance of one by the waves, for we were sinking. Yet it may have been owing even to that chase that we were saved. The ship had driven us toward land. At sea we must have perished, but the shore was found to be so near, that the country people, guided by the flame, saved us, without the loss of a life. Once on shore, we met with some of the fugitives from Masada, who brought us to Jerusalem, the only remaining refuge for our unhappy nation.”

To prevent a recurrence of this torturing subject, I mastered my emotion so far as to ask some question of the siege. But Miriam’s thoughts were still busy with the sea. After some hesitation, and as if she dreaded the answer, she said:

[Sidenote: A Cry of Recognition]

“One extraordinary circumstance made me take a strong interest in the fate of that solitary being on board the burning vessel. It once seemed to have the most striking likeness to you. I even cried out to it under that impression, but fortunate it was for us all that my heedless cry was not answered, for when it approached us I could see its countenance change; it threw a sheet of flame across our vessel that almost scorched us; and then perhaps thinking that our destruction was complete, the human fiend ascended from the waters in a pillar of intense fire.”

I felt deep pain at this romantic narrative. My mysterious sentence was the common talk of mankind. My frightful secret, that I had thought locked up in my own heart, was loose as the air. This was enough to make life bitter. But to be identified in the minds of my family with the object of universal horror, was a chance which I determined not to contemplate. My secret there was still safe; and my resolution became fixed, never to destroy that safety by any frantic confidence of my own.

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Chapter XLIX

Salathiel’s Strange Quarters

While, with my head bent on my knees, I hung in the misery of self-abhorrence, I heard the name of Constantius sorrowfully pronounced beside me. The state in which he must be left by my long absence flashed upon my mind; I raised my eyes, and saw Salome. It was her voice that sounded, and I then first observed the work of wo in her form and features. She was almost a shadow; her eye was lusterless, and the hands that she clasped in silent prayer were reduced to the bone. But before I could speak, Miriam made a sign of silence to me, and led the mourner away; then returning, said:

“I dreaded lest you might make any inquiries before Salome, for her husband. Religion alone has kept her from the grave. On our arrival here, we found our noble Constantius worn out by the fatigue of the time, but he was our guardian spirit in the dreadful tumults of the city. When we were burned out of one asylum, he led us to another. It is but a week since he placed us in this melancholy spot, but yet the more secure and unknown. He himself brought us provisions, supplied us with every comfort that could be obtained by his impoverished means, and saved us from famine. But now,”—the tears filled her eyes and she could not proceed.

“Yes—now,” said I, “he is a sight that would shock the eye; we must keep Salome in ignorance as long as we can.”

[Sidenote: The Fate of Constantius]

“The unhappy girl knows his fate but too well. He left us a few days since, to obtain some intelligence of the siege. We sat, during the night, listening to the frightful sounds of battle. At daybreak, unable any longer to bear the suspense or sit looking at Salome’s wretchedness, I ventured to the fountain-gate, and there heard what I so bitterly anticipated—our brave Constantius was slain!”

She wept aloud, and sobs and cries of irrepressible anguish answered her from the chamber of my unhappy child.

[Sidenote: A False Report]

The danger of a too sudden discovery prevented me from drying those tears, and I could proceed only by offering conjectures on the various chances of battle, the possibility of his being made prisoner, and the general difficulty of ascertaining the fates of men in the irregular combats of a populace. But Salome sat fixed in cold incredulity. Esther sorrowfully kissed my hand, for my disposition to give them a ray of comfort; Miriam gazed on me with a sad and searching look, as if she felt that I would not tamper with their distresses, yet she was deeply perplexed for the issue. At last the delay grew painful to myself, and taking Salome to my arms, and pressing a kiss of parental love on her pale cheek, I whispered, “He lives!”

I was overwhelmed with transports and thanksgivings. Precaution was at an end. If battle had been raging in the streets, I could not now have restrained the generous impatience of friendship and love. We left the mansion. There was not much to leave besides the walls; but such as it was, the first fugitive was welcome to the possession. Night was still within the building, which had belonged to some of the Roman officers of state, and was massive and of great extent. But at the threshold the gray dawn came quivering over the Mount of Olives.

We struggled through the long and winding streets, which even in the light were nearly impassable. From the inhabitants we met with no impediment; a few haggard and fierce-looking men stared at us from the ruins,[47] but we, wrapped up in rude mantles and hurrying along, wore too much the livery of despair to be disturbed by our fellows in wretchedness. With a trembling heart I led the way to the chamber, where lay one in whose life our general happiness was centered. Fearful of the shock which our sudden appearance might give his enfeebled frame, and not less of the misery with which he must be seen, I advanced alone to the bedside. He gave no sign of recognition, tho he was evidently awake, and I was about to close the curtains and keep, at least, Salome from the hazardous sight of this living ruin, when I found her beside me. She took his hand and sat down on the bed, with her eyes fixed on his hollow features. She spoke not a word, but sat cherishing the wasted hand in her own and kissing it with sad fondness. Her grief was too sacred for our interference, and in sorrow scarcely less poignant than her own, I led apart Miriam and Esther, who, like me, believed that the parting day was come.

Such rude help as could be found in medicine—at a time when our men of science had fled the city, and a few herbs were the only resource—had not been neglected even in my distraction. But life seemed retiring hour by hour, and if I dared to contemplate the death of this beloved being, it was almost with a wish that it had happened before the arrival of those to whom it must be a renewal of agony.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Faces Difficulties]

Still, the minor cares, which make so humble yet so necessary a page in the history of life, were to occupy me. Food must be provided for the increased number of my inmates, and where was that to be found in the circle of a beleaguered city? Money was useless, even if I possessed it; the friends who would once have shared their last meal with me were exiled or slain, and it was in the midst of a fierce populace, themselves dying of hunger, that I was to glean the daily subsistence of my wife and children. The natural pride of the chieftain revolted at the idea of supplicating for food, but this was one of the questions that show the absurdity of pride, and I must beg if I would not see them die.

The dwelling had belonged to one of the noble families extinguished, or driven away, in the first commotions of the war. The factions which perpetually tore each other, and fought from house to house, had stripped its lofty halls of everything that could be plundered in the hurry of civil feud, and when I took refuge under its roof it looked the very palace of desolation. But it was a shelter, undisturbed by the riots of the crowd, too bare to invite the robber; and even in its vast and naked chambers, its gloomy passages and frowning casements, congenial to the mood of my mind. With Constantius insensible and dying before me, and with my own spirit darkened by an eternal cloud, I loved loneliness and darkness. When the echo of the winds came round me, as I sat during my miserable midnights, watching the countenance of my son, and moistening his feverish lip with the water that even then was becoming a commodity of rare price in Jerusalem, I had communed with memories that I would not have exchanged for the brightest enjoyments of life. I welcomed the sad music, in which the beloved voices revisited my soul; what was earth now to me but a tomb? Pomp—nay, comfort—would have been a mockery. I clung to the solitude and obscurity that gave me the picture of the grave.

But the presence of my family made me feel the wretchedness of my abode. When I cast my eyes round the squalid and chilling halls, and saw wandering through them those gentle and delicate forms, and saw them trying to disguise, by smiles and cheering words, the depression that the whole scene must inspire, I felt a pang that might defy a firmer philosophy than mine—the despair that finds its only relief in scorn.

[Sidenote: The Palace of the Winds]

“Here,” said I to Miriam, as I hastened to the door, “I leave you mistress of a palace. The Asmonean blood once flourished within these walls; and why not we? I have seen the nobles of the land crowded into these chambers. They are not so full now, but we must make the most of what we have. Those hangings, that I remember, the pride of the Sidonian who sold them, are left to us still; if they are in fragments, they will but show our handiwork the more. We must make our own music; and in default of menials, serve with our own hands. The pile in that corner was once a throne sent by a Persian king to the descendant of the Maccabee; it will serve us at least for firing. The walls are thick; the roof may hold out a few storms more; the casements, if they keep out nothing else, keep out the daylight, an unwelcome guest, which would do anything but reconcile us to the state of the mansion, and now, farewell for a few hours.”

Miriam caught my arm, and said, in that sweet tone which always sank into my heart:

[Sidenote: Miriam Chides Salathiel]

“Salathiel, you must not leave us in this temper. I would rather hear your open complaints of fortune than this affectation of contempt for your calamities. They are many and painful, I allow, tho I will not, dare not, repine. They may even be such as are beyond human cure, but who shall say that he has deserved better—or if he has, that suffering may not be the determined means of exalting his nature? Is gold the only thing that is to be tried in the fire?”

She waited my answer with a look of dejected love.

“Miriam, I need not say that I respect and honor your feelings, but no resignation can combat the substantial evils of life. Will the finest sentiments that ever came from human lips make this darkness light, turn this bitter wind into warmth, or make these hideous chambers but the dungeon?”

“My husband, I dread this language,” was the answer, with more than usual solemnity; “it is—must I say it?—even unwise. Shall the creatures of the Power by whom we are placed in life either defy His wrath or disregard His mercy? Might we not be more severely tasked than we are? Are there not thousands at this hour in the world who, with at least equal claims to the divine benevolence (I tremble when I use the presumptuous phrase), are undergoing calamities to which ours are happiness? Look from this very threshold; are there not thousands within the walls of Jerusalem, groaning in the pangs of unhealed wounds, mad, starving, stripped of every succor of man, dying in hovels, the last survivors of their wretched race? and yet we, still enjoying health, with a roof over our heads, with our children round us safe, when the plague of the first-born has fallen upon almost every house in Judea, can complain! Be comforted, my love; I see but one actual calamity among us; and if Constantius should survive, even that one would be at an end.”

I left my gentle despot, and hurried through the echoing halls of this palace of the winds. As I approached the great avenues leading from the gates to the Temple, unusual sounds struck my ears. Hitherto nothing in the sadness of the besieged city was sadder than its silence. Death was lord of Jerusalem, and the numberless ways in which life was extinguished had left but the remnant of its once proud and flourishing population.

[Sidenote: Gathering at Jerusalem]

But now shouts, and still more, the deep and perpetual murmur that bespeaks the movements and gatherings of a crowded city, astonished me. My first conception was that the enemy had advanced in force, and I was turning toward the battlements to witness, or repel the general fate, when I was involved in the multitude whose voices had perplexed me.

It was the season of the Passover. The Roman barrier had hitherto kept back the tribes; but the victory that left it in embers opened the gates; and from the most death-like solitude, we were once more to see the sons of Judea filling the courts of the city of cities.

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Chapter L

After the Struggle

Nothing could be more unrestrained than the public rejoicing. The bold myriads that soon poured in, hour by hour, many of them long acquainted with Roman battle and distinguished for the successful defense of their strongholds, many of them even bearing arms taken from the enemy, or displaying honorable scars, seemed to have come, sent by Heaven. The enemy, evidently disheartened by their late losses and the destruction of the rampart which had cost them so much labor, remained collected in their camps, and access was free from every quarter. The rumors of our triumph had spread with singular rapidity through the land, and even the fearful phenomenon that wrote our undoing in the skies stimulated the national hope. No son of Abraham could believe, without the strongest repugnance, that Heaven had interposed, and yet interposed against the chosen people.

[Sidenote: The Living Torrent]

A living torrent had come, swelling into the gates, and the great avenues and public places were quickly impassable with the multitude. Jerusalem never before contained so vast a mass of population. Wherever the eye turned were tents, fires, and feasting; still the multitude wore an aspect not such as in former days. The war had made its impression on the inmost spirit of our country. The shepherds and tillers of the ground had been forced into the habits of soldiership, and I saw before me, for the gentle and joyous inhabitants of the field and garden, bands of warriors made fierce by the sullen necessities of the time.

The ruin in which they found Jerusalem increased their gloom. Groups were seen everywhere climbing among the fallen buildings to find out the dwelling of some chief of their tribe, and venting furious indignation on the hands that had overthrown it. The work of war upon the famous defenses of the city was a profanation in their eyes. Crowds rushed through the plain to trace the spot where their kindred fell and gather their bones to the tardy sepulcher. Others rushed exultingly over the wrecks of the Roman soldiery, burning them in heaps, that they might not mix with the honored dead.

But it was the dilapidation of the Temple that struck them with the deepest emotion. The singularly nervous sensibility and unequaled native reverence of the Jew were fully awakened by the sight of the humiliated sanctuary. They knelt and kissed the pavements, stained with the marks of civil feud. They sent forth deep lamentations for the dismantled beauty of gate and altar. They wrapped their mantles round their heads, and, covering themselves with dust and ashes, chanted hymns of funereal sorrow over the ruins. Hundreds lay embracing pillar and threshold as they would the corpse of a parent or a child; or, starting from the ground, gathered on the heights nearest to the enemy and poured out curses upon the “Abomination of desolation”—the idolatrous banner that flaunted over the Roman camps, and by its mere presence polluted the Temple of their fathers.

[Sidenote: Gloom and Festivity]

In the midst of this sorrow—and never was there more real sorrow—was the strange contrast of an extravagant spirit of festivity. The Passover, the grand celebration of our law, had been until now marked by a grave homage. Even its recollections of triumphant deliverance and illustrious promise were but slightly suffered to mitigate the general awe. But the character of the Jew had undergone a signal change. Desperate valor and haughty contempt of all power but that of arms were the impulse of the time. The habits of the camp were transferred to every part of life, and the reckless joy of the soldier when the battle is done, the eagerness of the multitude of the dissolute for immediate indulgence, and the rude and unhallowed resources to while away, the heavy hour of idleness, were powerfully and repulsively prominent in this final coming-up of the nation.

[Sidenote: The Varied Scene]

As I struggled through the avenues in search of the remnant of my tribe, my ears were perpetually startled by sounds of riot. I saw, beside the spot where relations were weeping over their dead, crowds drinking, dancing, and clamoring. Songs of wild exultation were mingled with the laments for their country; wine flowed, and the board, loaded with careless profusion, was surrounded by revelers, with whom the carouse was invariably succeeded by the quarrel. The pharisee and scribe, the pests of society, were once more as busy as ever, bustling through the concourse with supercilious dignity, canvassing for hearers in the market-places as of old, offering up their wordy devotions where they might best be seen, and quarreling with the native bitterness of religious faction. Blind guides of the blind, vipers and hypocrites, I think that I see them still, with their turbans pulled down over their scowling brows; their mantles gathered round them, that they might not be degraded by a profane touch; and every feature of their acrid and worldly physiognomies wrinkled with pride, put to the torture by the assumption of humility.

Minstrels, far unlike those who once led the way with sacred song to the gates of the holy city, now flocked round the tents, and companies of Greek and Syrian mimes, dancers, and flute-players, the natural and fatal growth of a period of military relaxation, were erecting their pavilions as in the festivals of their own profligate cities.

Deepening the shadows of this fearful profanation, stood forth the traders in terror: the exorcist, the soothsayer, the magician girdled with live serpents, the pretended prophet, naked and pouring out furious rhapsodies; impostors of every color and pursuit, yet some of those abhorred and frightful beings probably the dupes of their own imposture; some utterly frenzied; and some declaring, and doing, wonders that showed a power of evil never learned from man.

In depression of heart I gave up the effort to urge my way through scenes that, firm as I was, terrified me, and turned toward my home through the steep path that passed along the outer court of the Temple. There all wore the mournful silence suited to the sanctuary that was to see its altars kindled no more. But the ruins were crowded with kneeling and wo-begone worshipers, who, from morning until night, clung to the sacred soil and wept for the departing majesty of Judah. I now knelt with them and mingled my tears with theirs.

Prayer calmed my spirit, and before I left the height I stopped to look again upon the wondrous expanse below. The clear atmosphere of the East singularly diminishes distance, and I seemed to stand close by the Roman camps. The valley at my feet was living with the new population of Jerusalem, clustering thick as bees, and sending up the perpetual hum of their mighty hive. The sight was superb, and I involuntarily exulted in the strength that my country was still able to display in the face of her enemies.

Here were the elements of mutual havoc, but might they not be the elements of preservation? The thought occurred that now might be the time to make an effort for peace. We had, by the repulse of the legionaries, shown them the price which they must pay for conquest. Even since that repulse, a new national force had started forward, armed with an enthusiasm that would perish only with the last man, and increasing tenfold the difficulties of the war.

[Sidenote: The Sanhedrin Acts]

I turned again to the ruins, where I joined some venerable and influential men, who alike shuddered at the excesses of the crowd below and the catastrophe that prolonged war must bring. My advice produced an impression. The remnant of the Sanhedrin were speedily collected, and my proposal was adopted that a deputation should immediately be sent to Titus to ascertain how far he was disposed to an armistice. The regular pacification might then follow with a more solemn ceremonial.

[Sidenote: Titus Receives Jewish Envoys]

From the top of Mount Moriah we anxiously watched the passage of our envoys through the multitude that wandered over the space from Jerusalem to the foot of the enemy’s position. We saw them pass unmolested and enter the Roman lines, and from the group of officers of rank who came forward to meet them we gladly conjectured that their reception was favorable. Within an hour we saw them moving down the side of the hill on their return, and at some distance behind, a cluster of horsemen slowly advancing. The deputation had executed its task with success. It was received by Titus with Italian urbanity.[48] To its representations of the power subsisting in Judea to sustain the war he fully assented, and giving high praise to the fortitude of the people, only lamented the necessary havoc of war. To give the stronger proof of his wish for peace, his answer was to be conveyed formally by a mission of his chief councilors and officers to the Sanhedrin.

The tidings were soon propagated among the people, and proud of their strength, and irritated against the invader as they were, the prospect of relief from their innumerable privations was welcomed with undisguised joy. The hope was as cheering to the two prominent leaders of the factions as to any man among us. John of Giscala had been stimulated into daring by circumstances alone; nature never intended him for a warrior. Wily, grasping, and selfish, cruel without personal boldness, and keen without intellectual vigor, his only purpose was to accumulate money and to enjoy power. The loftier objects of public life were beyond his narrow capacity. He had been rapidly losing even his own objects; his followers were deserting him, and a continuance of the war involved equally the personal peril which he feared, and the fall of that tottering authority whose loss would leave him to insulted justice.

Simon, the son of Gioras, was altogether of a higher class of mankind. He was by nature a soldier, and, in other times, might have risen to a place among the celebrated names of war. But the fierceness of the period inflamed his spirit into savage atrocity. In the tumults of the city he had distinguished himself by that unhesitating hardihood which values neither its own life nor the lives of others, and his daring threw the hollow and artificial character of his rival deeply into the shade. But he found a different adversary in the Roman. His brute bravery was met by intelligent valor; his rashness was baffled by the discipline of the legions; and weary of conflicts in which he was sure to be defeated, he had long left the field to the irregular sallies of the tribes, and contented himself with prowess in city feud and the preservation of his authority against the dagger.

[Sidenote: The Meaning of Peace]

Peace with Rome would thus have relieved both John and Simon from the danger which threatened to overwhelm them alike; to the citizens it would have given an instant change from the terrors of assault to tranquillity; and to the nation, the hope of an existence made splendidly secure by its having been won from the master of the world.

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Chapter LI

A Man of Mystery

The movement of the Roman mission through the plain was marked by loud shouts. As it approached the gates, our little council descended from the temple porch to meet it, where one of the open places in the center of the city was appointed for the conference. The applauding roar of the people followed the troops through the streets, and when the tribunes and senators entered the square, and gave us the right hand of amity, universal acclamation shook the air. A gleam of joy revisited my heart, and I was on the point of ascending an elevation in the center, to announce the terms of this fortunate armistice, when to my astonishment I saw the spot preoccupied.

[Sidenote: An Intruder]

Whence came the intruder no one could tell, but there he stood, a figure that fixed the universal eye. He was of gigantic stature, brown as an Indian, and thin as one worn to the last extremity by disease or famine. Conjecture was busy. He seemed alternately the fugitive from a dungeon—one of the half-savage recluses that sometimes came from their dens in the wilderness, to exhibit among us the last humiliation of mind and body—a dealer in forbidden arts, attempting to impose on the credulity of the populace, and a prophet armed with the fearful knowledge of our approaching fall. To me there was an expression in his countenance that partook of all; yet there was a something different from all in the glaring eye, the livid scorn of the lip, and the wild and yet grand outline of features which appeared alike overflowing with malignity and majesty.

[Sidenote: The Tempest of a Soul]

No man thought of interrupting him. A powerful interest hushed every voice of the multitude, and the only impulse was eagerness to hear the lofty wisdom or the fatal tidings that must be deposited with such a being. He himself seemed to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the thoughts that he was commissioned to disclose. He stood for a while with the look of one oppressed by a fearful dream, his bosom heaving, his teeth gnashing, every muscle of his meager frame swelling and quivering. He clasped his bony arms across his breast, as if to repress the agitation that impeded his words; he stamped on the ground, in apparent wrath at the faculties which thus sank under him at the important moment; at last the tempest of his soul broke forth:

“Judah! thou wert as a lion—thou wert as the king of the forest, when he went up to the mountains to slay, and from the mountains came down to devour. Thou wert as the garden of Eden; every precious stone was thy covering; the sardine, the topaz, and the beryl were thy pavements; thy fountains were of silver, and thy daughters who walked in thy groves were as the cherubim and the seraphim.

“Judah! thy temple was glorious as the sun-rising, and thy priests were the wise of the earth. Kings came against thee, and their bones were an offering; the fowls of the air devoured them; the foxes brought their young, and feasted them upon the mighty.

“Judah! thou wert as a fire in the midst of the nations—a fire upon an altar; who shall quench thee? A sword over the neck of the heathen; who shall say unto thee, Smite no more! Thou wert as the thunder and the lightning; thou camest from thy place, and the earth was dark. Thou didst thunder, and the nations shook, and the fire of thy indignation consumed them.”

The voice in which this extraordinary being uttered those words was like the thunder. The multitude listened with breathless awe. The appeal was to them a renewal of the times of inspiration, and they awaited with outstretched hands and quivering countenances the sentence that their passions interpreted into the will of Heaven.

The figure lifted up his glance, which had hitherto been fixed on the ground; and whether it was the work of fancy or reality, I thought that the glance threw an actual beam of fire across the upturned visages of the myriads that filled every spot on which a foot could rest—roof, wall, and ground.

Bowing his head, and raising his hands in the most solemn adoration toward the Temple, he pursued, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, yet indescribably impressive:

“Sons of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob! people elect and holy! will you suffer that house of holiness to be the scoff of the idolater? Will you see the polluted sacrifice laid upon its altars? Will you be slaves in the presence of the house of David?”

[Sidenote: The Outcry of the Multitude]

A rising outcry of the multitude showed how deeply they felt his words. A fierce smile lightened across his features at the sound. He erected his colossal form, and cried out like the roar of a whirlwind:

“Then, men of Judah! be strong, and follow the hand that led you through the sea and through the desert. Is that hand shortened that it cannot save? Break off this accursed league with the sons of Belial. Fly every man to arms, for the glory of the mighty people. Go, and let the sword that smote the Canaanite smite the Roman.”

He was answered with furious exultation. Swords and poniards were brandished in the air. The safety of the Roman officers became endangered, and I, with some of the elders, dreading a result which must throw fatal obstacles in the way of pacification, attempted to control the popular violence by reason and entreaty. But the spirit of the Romans, haughty with conquest and long contempt of the multitude, disdained to take precautions with a mob, and they awaited with palpable contempt the subsiding of this city effervescence. This silent scorn, which probably stung the deeper for its silence, was retorted to by clamors of unequivocal rage. The mysterious disturber saw the storm coming, and flinging a furious gesture toward the Roman camps, which lay glittering in the sunshine along the hills, he rushed into the loftiest language of malediction.

“Take up a lament for the Roman,” he shouted. “He comes like a leviathan; he troubleth the waters with his presence, and the rivers behold him and are afraid.

[Sidenote: The Prophecy of Doom]

“Thus saith the king, He who holdeth Israel in the hollow of His hand: I will spread My net over thee, and My people shall drag thee upon the shore; I will leave thee to rot upon the land; I will fill the beasts of the earth with thee, until they shall come and find thee, dry bones and dust—even thy glory turned into a taint and a scorn.

“Lift up a cry over Rome and say, Thou art the leopard; thy jaws are red with blood, and thy claws are heavy because of the multitude of the slain; thy spots are glorious, and thy feet are like wings for swiftness. But thy time is at hand. My arrow shall smite through thee; My sword shall go through thee; I will lay thy flesh upon the hills; thy blood shall be red in the rivers; the pits shall be full of thee.

“For thus saith the king: I have not forsaken My children. For My pleasure I have given them over for a while to the hands of the oppressor; but they have loved Me—they have come before Me, and offered up sacrifices; and shall I desert the land of the chosen, the sons of the glorious, My people Israel!”

A universal outcry of wrath and triumph followed this allusion to the national vengeance.

“Ho!” exclaimed the figure. “Men of Israel, hear the words of wisdom. The burden of Rome. By the swords of the mighty will I cause her multitude to fall; the terrible and the strong shall be on thee, city of the idolater; they shall hew off thy cuirasses as the hewer of wood, and of thy shields they shall make vessels of water. There shall be fire in thy palaces, and the sword. Thy sons and thy daughters shall they consume, and thy precious things shall be a spoil when the king shall give the sign from the sanctuary.”

He paused, and, lifting up his fleshless arm, stood like a giant bronze pointing to the Temple.

To the utter astonishment of all, a vapor was seen to ascend from the summit of Mount Moriah, wreathing and white like the smoke that used to mark the daily sacrifice. Our first conception was that this great rite was resumed, and the shout of joy was on our lips. But the vapor had scarcely parted from the crown of the hill when it blackened and began to whirl with extraordinary rapidity; it thenceforth less ascended than shot up, perpetually darkening and distending. The horizon grew dim; the cloudy canopy above continued to spread and revolve; lightning began to quiver through, and we heard, at intervals, low peals of thunder. But no rain fell, and the wind was lifeless. Nothing could be more complete than the calm; not a hair of our heads was moved, yet the heart of the countless multitude was penetrated with the dread of some impending catastrophe that restrained every voice, and the silence itself was awful.

In the climate of Judea we were accustomed to the rapid rise and violent devastations of tempests. But the rising of this storm, so closely connected with the appearance of the strange summoner that it almost followed his command, invested a phenomenon, at all times fearful, with a character that might have struck firmer minds than those of the enthusiasts round him. To heighten the wonder, the progress of the storm still seemed faithful to the command. Wherever this man of mystery waved his arm, there rushed a sheet of cloud. The bluest tract of heaven was as black as night, at the moment when he turned his ominous presence toward it, until there was no more sky to be obliterated, and but for the fiery streaks that tore through, we should have stood under a canopy of solid gloom.

At length the whirlwind, that we had seen driving and rolling the clouds like billows, burst upon us, scattering fragments of the buildings far and wide, and cutting a broad way through the overthrown multitude. Then superstition and terror were loud-mouthed. The populace, crushed and dashed down, exclaimed that a volcano was throwing up flame from the mount of the Temple; that sulfurous smokes were rising through the crevices of the ground; that the rocking of an earthquake was felt; and still more terrible, that beings, not to be looked on, nor even to be named, were hovering round them in the storm.

[Sidenote: A Wild Panic]

The general rush of the people, in which hundreds were trampled and in which nothing but the most violent efforts could keep any on their feet, bore me away for a while. The struggle was sufficient to absorb all my senses, for nothing could be more perilous. The darkness was intense, the peals of the storm were deafening, and the howlings and fury of the crowd, trampling and being trampled on, and fighting for life in blindness and despair, with hand, foot, and dagger, made an uproar louder than that of the storm. In this conflict, rather of demons than of men, I was whirled away in eddy after eddy, until chance brought me again to the foot of the elevation.

There I beheld a new wonder. A column of livid fire stood upon it, reaching to the clouds. I could discern the outline of a human form within. But while I expected to see it drop dead or blasted to a cinder, the flame spread over the ground, and I saw its strange inhabitant making signs like those of incantation. He drew a circle upon the burning soil, poured out some unguent which diffused a powerful and rich odor, razed the skin of his arm with a dagger, and let fall some drops of blood into the blaze.

I shuddered at the sight of those palpable appeals to the power of Evil, but I was pressed upon by thousands, and retreat was impossible. The strange being then, with a ghastly smile of triumph, waved the weapon toward the Roman camps.

[Sidenote: The Beginnings of Vengeance]

“Behold,” he cried, “the beginnings of vengeance!”

A thunder-roll that almost split the ear echoed round the hills. The darkness passed away with it. Above Jerusalem the sky cleared, and cleared into a translucence and blue splendor unrivaled by the brightest sunshine. The people, wrought up to the highest expectancy, shouted at this promise of a prouder deliverance, and exclaiming, “Goshen! Goshen!” looked breathlessly for the completion of the plague upon the more than Egyptian oppressor. They were not held long in suspense.

[Sidenote: The Bursting of the Storm]

The storm had cleared away above our heads, only to gather in deeper terrors round the circle of hills on which we could see the enemy in the most overwhelming state of alarm. The clouds rushed on, ridge over ridge, until the whole horizon seemed shut in by a wall of night towering to the skies. I heard the deep voice of the orator; at the utterance of some strange words, a gleam played round his dagger’s point, and the wall of darkness was instantly a wall of fire. The storm was let loose in its rage. While we stood in daylight and in perfect calm, the lightning poured like sheets of rain or gushes of burning metal from a furnace upon the enemy. The vast circuit of the camps was instantly one blaze. The wind tore everything before it with irresistible violence. We saw the tents swept off the ground and driven far over the hills in flames like meteors; the piles of arms and banners blown away; the soldiery clinging to the rocks, flying together in helpless crowds, or scattering, like maniacs, with hair and garments on fire; the baggage and military machines, the turrets and ramparts, sinking in flames; the beasts of burden plunging and rushing through the lines, or lying in smoldering heaps where the lightning first smote them. All was conflagration!

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Chapter LII

The Prophecy of Evil

[Sidenote: The Roman Embassy Grows Indignant]

The Roman embassy had hitherto remained in stern composure. The visitations of nature they were accustomed to sustain; the perturbations of a Jewish mob were beneath the notice of the universal conquerors. But the sight of the havoc among their countrymen shook their stoicism, and the cavalry that formed the escort burst into indignant murmurs at the exultation of the multitude, until the commander of the troop, whose arms and bearing showed him to be of the highest rank, unable to restrain his feelings, spurred to the front of the embarrassed mission.

“How long, senators,” exclaimed he, “shall we stand here to be scoffed at by these wretches? The imperial guard feels itself disgraced by such a service. Will you have the squadron openly mutiny? If they should ride away and leave us to ourselves, who could blame them? What will the noble Titus say, when we return to tell him that we stood by and listened to the taunts of those cooped-up slaves, on him, the army, and Rome? But how long shall we be suffered even to listen? Linger here, and before the day is out your lives will be at the mercy of those assassins. And by the immortal gods, richly shall we all deserve our fate, for having come into this den but as masters riding over the necks of those lost and lowest of mankind.”

It was fortunate for the speaker that he spoke in a language but little known to our bold peasantry. The senators held their peace, and waited for the subsiding of the popular effervescence.

[Illustration: “The Roman rushed at him with his drawn falchion.”

[see page 397.

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

“Noble Æmilius!” exclaimed the fiery youth, to a grave and lofty-countenanced man at the head of the mission, “to remain here is only to risk your safety and the honor of the Emperor. Treaty with this people is out of the question. Give me the order to disperse this rabble, and a single charge will decide the affair.”

He threw himself forward on his horse’s neck, and fixed his look eagerly on the senator’s countenance. But the old Roman was immovable. The man of prophecy, who had stood with his robe wrapped round his arms in an attitude of contemptuous ease, awaiting the result of the demand, burst into loud laughter. The young soldier’s indignation was roused by this new object. He turned to the scorner, and crying out, “Ho! is it you, miscreant? You at least shall not escape me,” flung his lance full against his bosom. I saw the weapon strike with prodigious force, but it might as well have struck a rock. It flew into splinters.

The Roman rushed at him with his drawn falchion. His strange antagonist stood without moving a limb, and only raised his cold, large eye. The charger, in his fiercest bound, instantly swerved, and had nearly unseated his rider. Nothing could bring him forward again. Spur and voice were useless. The animal, a magnificent jet black, of the largest Arab breed, strong as a bull and bold as a lion, could not abide that stern eye. He galloped madly round and round, but the attempt to force him against the stranger stopped him as if he were stabbed. Then with every muscle in his frame palpitating, his broad chest heaving, his nostrils breathing out vapor, and the foam flying over his front like snow, he would plunge and rear until, mastering his powerful rider, he wheeled round and darted away.

[Sidenote: A Marvel of Marvels]

The shouts of scorn that rose from the populace at every fresh failure, doubly enraged the young Roman. He made a final effort, and grasping the bridle in both hands, and dashing in the spur, at length succeeded in forcing the wearied charger on. The noble creature, at one immense leap, reached the fatal spot. But there he was fixed as if some power had transformed him into stone. He no longer staggered nor swerved, but crouching down, with his feet thrust forward, his crest stooped, his nostrils on the ground, and his bright eye strained and filmy, as if he were growing blind, stood gazing with a look of almost human horror. The furious rider struck him on the head with the flat of his falchion. The charger gathered up his limbs at the blow, reared straight as a column, and bellowing, plunged upon his head. There was a general cry of terror, even among the multitude, and they rushed forward to help him to rise. But he rose no more. He rolled over and over his rider, and, stretching out his limbs in a convulsion, died.

The tumult was on the point of being renewed, for the soldiery pushed forward to bear away their officer, who lay like a corpse; but the crowd had already covered the ground, and blows were given on both sides. Indignant at the interruption of the armistice, and the injury that threatened the sacred person of ambassadors, I forced my way through the crowd; by exerting a strength with which few could cope, rescued the young Roman, and delivering him to the mission, protested against their construing the casual violence of rioters into the determination of the people.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Calms Resentment]

I had partially succeeded in calming their resentment, and in restraining the bloodthirsty weapons that were already glittering in numberless hands, when a sound like that of a trumpet, distant but blown with tremendous force, struck every ear at once.

I looked involuntarily to the man who had already been our disturber. He pointed to the heavens. A fragment of cloud, that seemed to have escaped from the mass of the tempest, was floating along the zenith. He took up his parable:

“Have I not covered the heavens with a cloud? saith the Mighty One. Have I not said to the sun, Be dark; and to the moon and stars, Be ashamed? Have I not hidden Mine enemies in the shroud, and said to the whirlwind, Go forth and slay?”

His gesture turned all eyes to the wrecks of the Roman camp, where the whirlwind continued to ravage and the thunders still roared. Then throwing himself forward with a look full of wild grandeur, and in a voice hollow and appalling as the storm, he exclaimed:

“Behold! this day shall a wonder be wrought among you—this day shall a mighty thing be brought to pass. Kings shall see it and tremble; yea, the heathen shall melt before thee. Their strength shall be as water and their hearts as the burning flax. Sorrow shall be on them, as the locust on the green field, and they shall flee as from a lion. Behold! in a cloud shall a sword be brandished before thee; in smoke and in fire shalt thou conquer. For His angel shall come, and the sword and the flame shall at this hour be a sign unto Israel!”

Whether by the proverbial sagacity of the wanderers of the desert, by one of those coincidences which so curiously come to sustain the credit of daring conjecture, or by knowledge from some darker sources, the little orbed vapor began to lengthen and rapidly assumed the shape of a sword.

Dreading the popular power of imposture, and the uses to which it would inevitably be applied, I was glad that this extraordinary being had thus put himself upon his trial; and I stood gazing in eager expectation that some passing gust would dissipate at once the cloud and the reputation of the prophet. Yet utterly scorning the common pretensions of the rambling practisers of forbidden arts, I knew that awful things had been done; that most of all, in these latter days of our country, strange influences were let loose, perhaps to plunge into deeper ruin a people guiltily prone to take refuge in delusions. I had heard prophecies, hideous and unholy, which were never taught by man; I had seen a command of the elements that utterly defied philosophy to account for it; if in the last vengeance of Heaven, evil spirits were ever suffered to go forth and give their power to evil men, for the purpose of binding in the faster chains of falsehood a race who loved a lie, it was in those hours of signs and wonders which might, if possible, deceive the very elect.

[Sidenote: The Flaming Sword]

To my astonishment, the cloud suddenly changed its color; from white it became intensely red; and in a few moments more it burst into a flame that threw a broad reflection upon the whole atmosphere. It was a vast falchion of fire. And from that hour to the last of the glorious and unhappy city of David, that flaming sword—the sign of a wrath predicted a thousand years before—blazed day and night over Jerusalem!

Its instant effect was terrible. The multitude, already indignant against the Romans, and restrained only by my desperate efforts, were now roused to the highest pitch of presumption. To doubt of the help of Heaven was impiety, after this open wonder; to spare an hour between this divine command and the extermination of the idolater was sacrilege. They poured round the unfortunate troop and instantly overwhelmed them, as an earthquake would have overwhelmed them. A mass of human life, dense as the ground it trod upon, broke over them. The Romans struggled heroically; I saw their charges often make fearful way, and their swords and lances dripping with blood every time they were whirled round their heads. But the conflict was too unequal; one by one those brave men were torn down; I saw them swept along by the torrent, fewer and fewer, still above the living wave; gradually separated more widely from each other; each man faintly struggling for himself, flinging his feeble arms to the right and left, till, dizzy with fatigue and despair, at last he went down, and the roaring tide closed over him.

[Sidenote: Superstition and Inexpiable Murder]

All perished, and a day of hope was closed in superstition, treachery, and inexpiable murder.

The dreadful uproar sank as suddenly as it had risen. The Roman troop lay a heap of dead. I turned away from the sight, but at the instant of turning I saw the prophet of evil, whether impostor or magician, whether man or demon, spring into their midst with a roar of laughter. I shrank away. But I heard that terrible laugh ringing through all the streets of Jerusalem!

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Chapter LIII

A Fatal Sign

It was night, and the greater portion of the city lay between me and home. To traverse it was still a matter of danger. Furious festivity had succeeded to furious conflict; the roving mountaineers made little difference between a stranger and an enemy, and whether inflamed with wine or triumph, the carousers on that night were the masters of Jerusalem.

I kept my course through the less frequented ways, and leaving on either side the great avenues, crowded with tents and glittering with illumination, committed myself to the quiet light of the moon.

But in choosing the more solitary streets, I was, without recollecting it, led into the open place where the late disturbance had begun, and I felt some vague dread of passing a spot on which had appeared a being so singular as the leader of the tumult.

[Sidenote: A Wounded Soldier]

By a compromise with my prudence, I kept as far from the hillock as possible, and was moving rapidly by the wall of one of the huge buildings of Herod, when I heard a groan. In the nervousness of the time, and doubtful from what region of earth or air my antagonist, in that place of spells, might come, I drew my dagger with a sensation that I had never felt in the field, and setting my back against the wall, stood on my defense. But a wounded man, the utterer of the groan, now tottered into the light and fell before me. I recognized the commander of the escort. The dying struggles of his charger had crushed him, and the multitude had abandoned him to his fate.

To leave him where he was, was to leave him to perish. I owed something to the survivor of the unfortunate mission, and my short consultation closed by carrying him on my shoulders to the door of my comfortless dwelling.

The Roman had learned to distrust Jewish fidelity. The gloom inside the entrance looked the very color of secret murder. Even the dismantled appearance of the exterior was enough for suspicion, and he firmly ordered that I should terminate my good offices at the threshold. Irritated by his obvious meaning, I left him to his wish, and placing him in the fullest enjoyment of such security as the open street and the moonlight could give, took my farewell, bidding him in future to have a better opinion of mankind.

Yet I was to be startled in my turn. As I climbed the broken staircases, I saw an unusual light in the chambers above. Accustomed as I was to reverses, I felt tenfold alarm from the preciousness of my stake. The ferocious bands that crowded the streets, inflamed with wine and blood, could have no scruples where plunder tempted them; and in the strong persuasion that some misfortune had happened in my long absence, I lingered in doubt whether I should not return to the streets, collect what assistance I could find among the passersby, and crush the robbers by main force. But sudden exclamations and hurried feet above left me no time; I darted up the shattered steps and breathlessly threw open the door.

[Sidenote: Messengers of Good Tidings]

Well might I wonder. I saw a superb room, hung with tapestry, a table in the center covered with plate and viands, a rich lamp illuminating the chamber, stately furniture, a fire blazing on a tripod and throwing a cheering warmth and delicious odor round; yet, to enjoy all this, not a living creature. But whatever my anxieties might be, they were delightfully scattered by the voice of Esther, who came flying toward me with outstretched arms and a face bright with joy. From an inner chamber followed more messengers of good tidings—Miriam and Salome leading Constantius! They had watched over him from the time of my departure with a sickly alternation of hope and fear; as the evening approached he seemed dying. Salome, with the jealousy of deep sorrow, desired to be left alone with him; and the two sad listeners at the door expected at every moment the burst of agony announcing her irreparable loss. They heard a cry of joy; the torpor was gone, and Constantius was sitting up, raised to new life, wondering at all round him, and uttering the raptures of gratitude and love.

The sound that had impelled me to my abrupt entrance was the joy of my family at bringing the recovered patient in triumph from his weary bed into view of the comforts provided for him and for me. The change wrought in the chamber itself was explained by the presence of two old domestics who, in the flight of the former possessors, had been overlooked, and suffered to hide, rather than live, in a corner of the ruin. They had contrived in the general spoliation to secrete some of the precious things which the haste of plunder had not time to seize. The presence of a noble family under the honored roof once more brought out their feelings and treasures together, and by the graceful dexterity of Miriam and Esther were those naked walls converted into an apartment not unworthy to be inhabited by themselves.

While I was indulging in the luxury which those gentle ministers provided, the thought of the unfortunate Roman occurred to me. I slightly mentioned him, and every voice was raised to have him brought in from the hazards of the night. Constantius, feeble as he was, rose from his couch to assist in this work of hospitality; but he was under a fond tyrant, who would not suffer her commands to be questioned. Salome’s orders were obeyed; and to one of the old domestics and me was destined the undivided honor.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Goes to a Roman’s Aid]

I found the wounded officer lying on the spot where I had parted with him, gazing on the moon and humming a gay air of Italy in a most melancholy tone. He had made up his reckoning with this world, and calmly waiting until some Jewish knife should put an end to his troubles, he determined to save himself from the trouble of thinking, and die like a man who had nothing better to do. But the struggle was against nature, and as I slowly felt my way along the obscure passages, I had time to hear the song flutter and now and then a groan supersede it altogether. My step now caught his quick ear, and I heard in return the ringing of a sword plucked sharply from the scabbard.

The bold Roman, reckless as he was of life, was evidently resolved not to let it go without its price, and it was probably fortunate for me, or my old and tottering fellow philanthropist, that the ruinous state of the passages compelled us to take time in our advance.

“Two of them,” I heard him mutter as we gradually worked our way toward the light; “two, and perhaps twenty at their backs.”

He tried to raise himself, leaning on one hand, and with the other feebly pointing the falchion to keep us off.

“Thieves,” said he, “let us understand each other. If you must cut my throat, you must fight for it, and, after all, I have nothing to make it worth your trouble. By Jove and Venus,” and he laughed with the strange jocularity that sometimes besets the bold in the last peril, “the cleverest robber in Jerusalem could make nothing of me.”

I stood in the shadow, while he again tried his expostulation.

[Sidenote: The Roman Negotiates]

“My clothes would not sell for the smallest coin in your sashes; I could not furnish out a scarecrow—yet Jewish patriots, or thieves, or saints, or all together, I will tell you how you can make money of me. Take me to the Roman camp, and I answer for your fortune on the spot.”

I laughed in my turn.

“By all that’s honest, I never was more serious in my life,” said he; “far be it from me to trifle with heroes of your profession. You shall have my helmetful of gold Vespasians.”

“Well, then,” said I, coming forward, “you shall live at least for to-night; but there is one condition which I can not give up——”

“Of course, that I give you two helmetsful instead of one. Agreed.”

“The condition from which nothing can make me recede is——”

“Three times the money, or ten times the money?”

I pondered. The old domestic stared at us both.

“Why, you extravagant Jew, have you no conscience? Recollect how little the lives of half the generals in the service are worth half the sum. But say anything short of the military chest—out with the condition at once.”

“That you come instantly with me—to supper.”

The formidable stipulation was gaily acceded to. The old domestic and I supported him up the stairs, whose condition, as he afterward allowed, led him still to nurture shrewd doubt of Jewish hospitality. But when I opened the door of the chamber and he saw the striking preparations within, he uttered a cry of surprise, and turning, bowed with Italian grace, in tacit acknowledgment of the wrong that he had done me.

[Sidenote: Septimius Recognized]

As I led him forward and the light fell on his features, I saw Esther’s countenance glow with crimson. The Roman pronounced her name and flew over to her. Miriam—we all in the same moment recognized the stranger, and every lip at once uttered “Septimius!”

A few campaigns in the imperial guard had changed the handsome Italian boy, the friend and favorite of Constantius, into the showy officer, the friend and favorite of everybody; with the elegance of the court, and the freedom of the camp, he had inherited from nature the easy lightness and animation of temper that neither can give. Nothing could be more amusing than the restless round of anecdote that he kept up through the night. The circle in which he found himself, contrasted with the wretchedness of the few hours before, let his recollections flow with wild vivacity. His stories of the imperial tent were new to us, and he told them with the taste of a man of high breeding and the sarcastic finish of a keen observer of the absurdities that will creep in even among the mighty and the wise of the world.

In our several ways he delighted us all. Constantius seemed to gain new health in laughing at the histories of his military friends. Salome’s face glistened with the vividness so long chased away by sorrow, as the manners of Rome passed before her in the liveliest colors of pleasantry. Esther treasured every word with an emotion that fluctuated across her beauty like the opening and shutting of a rose under the evening breeze. I was interested by the pungent sketches of public character that started up in the midst of sportive description. Miriam alone was reluctant, and her glance frequently rested with pain on Esther’s hectic cheek. But even Miriam at times gave way to the voice of the charmer; her fears were forgotten, and she joined in the general smile.

When the women retired, we held a short consultation on the means of restoring our guest to his friends. In the immediate temper of the city, to be seen was certain death, and no pacific intercourse with the besiegers could be expected after our enormous infraction of treaty. Constantius urged the despatch of a private messenger to the camp with the proposal of a plan for his escape. To my surprise, and certainly to my gratification, Septimius himself flatly negatived the measure.

[Sidenote: A Precarious Position]

“It has too much hazard for my taste,” said he sportively. “Your messenger will probably be caught by the people and as probably hanged; or if he reach the camp, he will be hanged there inevitably. Jewish credit, I regret to say, will not stand high within these twelve hours, with my countrymen. If the fellow die here like a woman, with a story in his mouth, you will all be brought under the justice of your sovereign lord the mob. If my countrymen inflict the ax, you are not the safer, for every peasant about the camp is a spy, and the news will travel here in the next half-hour, and after all, your trouble will be thrown away. Titus has good-nature enough, and probably would not wish to see me hoisted on the top of a pike on your gates; but he is a furious disciplinarian, swears by the law of honor and arms, and is, I can well believe, chafing like a roused lion against every one who has had a share in this day’s business. I myself should have a chance of hanging, for an example, if I returned before his imperial displeasure had time to cool. So I must trespass on your hospitality for a day or two.”

“But what is to be finally done?” said I. “The armistice can never be tried again.”

“Why not? Do you think that the loss of a few troopers can make any difference? Out of twenty thousand cavalry, we can easily spare a hundred. Those things have happened once a week since the beginning of the campaign. They agree with our notions admirably. The survivors get promotion, and whatever libation they may offer for their good luck; it is certainly not tears. A stupid officer, and on this occasion I fairly reckon myself among the number, is taken off the muster-roll, before he might have the opportunity of doing mischief by some blunder on a larger scale. Experience is gained; we are entrapped no more, at least in the same way; and a group of unfortunates, who have spent half their lives in being browbeaten by their superiors, suddenly start into rank, become superiors themselves, and learn to browbeat in their turn. You will have the armistice again in a week.”

This confession of soldiership repelled me a little, but its air of frankness and disregard of chance and care carried it off showily. I, too, was but a peasant-soldier, with my heart in everything. The man before me was a son of the camp, the professional warrior, whose business it was to stifle all feelings but those of the camp. Yet heroism and hard-heartedness—I could not join them. I had still something to learn, and the gay philosopher of the sword lost ground with me.

I was retiring for the night when I felt the soft hand of Miriam on my shoulder.

“I have been anxious,” she said, “to ask your opinion about this Roman.”

Her fine countenance, that reflected every emotion of her spirit like a mirror, showed that the subject was one of deep interest. “Is misfortune always to pursue us, Salathiel?”

“In what new shape now?” said I. “We have spent some hours, as amusing as I ever remember. What can have occurred since this morning, when your philosophy made so light of our actual evils?”

[Sidenote: Miriam’s Suspicion]

“For external evils I have but little feeling,” was her answer; “but I see in the chance that brought the Roman here to-night something of the fate which you have so often thought to follow your house. I tremble for Esther’s peace of mind. What if she should be attracted by this idolater?”

“Esther! my darling Esther! love an alien, a Roman, an idolater? What an abyss you open before me!” I exclaimed, with a sudden sense of evil.

There was a pause; my wife again spoke.

“While Septimius remained among us in the mountains, I saw with terror that Esther’s beauty attracted him. His Italian elegance was even then a dangerous charm for a mind so inexperienced and so sensitive as hers. I knew the impossibility of their union, and rejoiced when his recovery allowed of his leaving the palace. But for a long period after, Esther was evidently unhappy; her cheerfulness gave way; she became fonder of solitude, and I believe that nothing but extreme care and the change of scene which followed, preserved her from the grave.”

“Miriam! I have no comfort to offer. I am a stricken man; misfortune must be my portion. But if anything were to bereave me of that girl, I feel that my heart would break. We must delay no longer. By the first light the Roman shall quit this house—this city. He shall not stay another hour to poison the peace of my family—the only peace that I now can possess in this world.”

“Yet rashness must not disgrace what is true wisdom, my Salathiel. The Roman is here protected by the laws of courtesy. You can not send him forth without giving him over to the horrid temper of the populace. A few days may make that escape easy which would now be impossible. Besides, I may have done him injustice, and mistaken the common pleasure of seeing unexpected friends for the attempt to mislead the affections of our innocent and ardent child.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel on His Guard]

“No! By the first light he leaves this roof. The truth glares on me. I might have seen it in his looks. His language, however general, was perpetually directed to Esther by some personal allusion. His voice lost its ease when he answered a syllable of hers. After she spoke he affected abstraction—an old artifice. His manner is too well calculated to disturb the mind of woman—and most of all of woman cursed with feeling and genius. Esther has already exalted this showy stranger into a wonder. I must break the spell. What is to become of her, of me, man of misery? By the first dawn the Roman takes his departure.”

[Sidenote: The Ominous Sword Appears]

In the bitterness of soul I turned from the chamber, where the lamp was still burning and the glittering table looked too bright for the gloomy spirit of the hour. The cool air that breathed through a casement led me toward it, and disinclined to speak and holding Miriam’s gentle hand, I listened to the confused murmurs of the city far below. I suddenly felt the hand in mine tremble convulsively. Miriam’s face was pale with fear; she stood with lips apart and breathless, brows raised, eyes straining upward. In utter alarm I asked the cause. She lifted the hand, which had fallen by her side, and slowly, like the staff of the soothsayer, pointed it to the heavens. The cause was there. The ominous sword had for the first time met her eye. The blaze, which even in noonday was fearfully visible, in midnight was tremendous. A blade of the deepest hue of gore stretched to the horizon, pouring from its edge perpetual showers of crimson flame, that looked like showers of fresh blood. Boundless slaughter was in the emblem. Beyond it the circle of the sky was wan; the stars sickened, and the moon, tho at the full, hung like an orb of lead. The mighty falchion, the pledge of an inevitable judgment,[49] extinguished all the beneficent splendors of heaven.

“There, there is the sign that I have seen for months in my dreams,” said Miriam in an awed voice; “that has haunted me when I laid my head upon the pillow; that has been before my mind in the day wherever I moved; that I have seen coloring every object, every moment of my life since I entered these fated walls. I have struggled to drive away the horrid image; I have wept and prayed. But it was where nothing could unfix it. It was pictured on my soul, and with it came other images, fearful, tho they brought me no terrors—melancholy sights to those who have no hope but here, yet glorious to the servants of the truth, Salathiel. I have had warnings. I must never leave the city of David.”

She knelt in the deep prayer of the soul. Her words came on me with the power of prophecy.

“King and protector of Israel!” I exclaimed, “is this to be the suffering of Thy people? On me let Thy wrath be done, but spare her who now kneels before Thee. Are the pure to be given into the hands of the merciless and Thy children to be trampled as the ashes of the unholy?”

My impatient voice caught Miriam’s ear, and she rose with a countenance beaming piety and love.

“Salathiel, we must not murmur. Even that sight of awe, that terrible emblem, has taught me the selfishness of my anxieties. What are our personal sorrows to the weight of affliction figured in that instrument of supreme justice? The wo of millions, the blood of a nation, the ruin of the glorious Law, built by the hands of the Eternal, for the glory and good of mankind, are written in words of flame before our eyes; and can I complain of the perils which may fall to my share? Henceforth, my husband and my love”—and she threw herself into my willing arms—“you shall never be disturbed with my sorrows; exercise your own powerful understanding, guard against evil by your talents and knowledge of life, as far as it can be guarded against by man, and beyond that, cease to repine or fear. In my supplication I have committed our darling child into the hands of Him who sitteth within the circle of eternity!”

[Sidenote: Miriam Comforts Salathiel]

Quivering with every finer feeling of the heart, maternal love, matron faith, and grateful adoration, she hung upon my neck, until as if a portion of her noble spirit had passed into mine, I felt a confidence and a consolation like her own.

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Chapter LIV

Concerning Septimius

I was spared the ungraciousness of urging the young soldier’s departure, for when I met him on the next morning his first topic was escape. He had been since daybreak examining from my turrets the accessible passages of the fortifications, and had even, by the help of a peasant, despatched a letter to his friends, requesting either a formal demand of his person from the Jews, or some private effort to extricate him.

But this glow of society was transient. In the fall of his charger he had been violently bruised. He now complained of inward suffering, and his pallid face and feeble words gave painful proof that he had much still to undergo, tho, even if he was perfectly recovered, the crowded battlements and the popular rage showed the impossibility of immediate return.

[Sidenote: Vexed and Suspicious]

Three days passed thus drearily. At home I was surrounded by sickness or vexed by suspicion—the worst sickness of the mind. Septimius lay in his chamber, struggling to laugh, talk, and read away the heavy hours, and finally, like all such strugglers, giving up the task in despair. His thoughts were in the Roman camp. He professed gratitude of the deepest nature for the service that I had done him now for the second time, if saving so unimportant a life was a service either to him or any one else. Yet he almost wished that he had been left where he was found.

At such times his voice sank, and he was evidently thinking of subjects near to his heart.

Then his soldiership would come again—a man could not finish his course better than among his gallant comrades; and with all his anxiety to return, he felt no trivial concern as to the view which Titus might take of the whole unfortunate affair. Of justice he was secure; but to be questioned for his military conduct was in itself a degradation. The loss of Sempronius, too, the most confidential friend and counselor of the Emperor, would weigh heavily—while there was nothing but his own testimony to sustain his honor against the crowd of secret enemies that every man of military rank was certain to have.

“In short,” said he, “on my sleepless couch I have turned true penitent for the foolish curiosity which prompted me to solicit the command of an escort, which would have been by right put under the care of some mere tribune.”

I tried to cheer him by saying that his had been only the natural desire of an active mind to see so singular a scene as our city offered, or the honorable wish of a soldier to be foremost wherever there was anything to be done.

[Sidenote: Watched by a Slave]

“It was more than either,” said he; “there was actual illusion in the case. I now feel that I was practised upon. You know the strange concourse of all kinds of people that follow a camp for all kinds of purposes—plunderers, traders, and jugglers, crowding on our movements as regularly as the vultures, and with nearly the same objects. For a week past I had found myself beset by an old gibbering slave of this class. Wherever I rode, the fellow was before my eyes; he contrived to mingle with my servants, and became a sort of favorite by selling them counterfeit rings and gems at ten times their value. The wretch was clever, too, and as my tent-hours began to be disturbed by the unusual gaiety of the listeners to his lies, I ordered him to be flogged out of the lines. But twelve hours had not passed before I found him gamboling again, and was about to order the instant infliction of the discipline, when he threw himself on the ground and implored ‘a moment of my secret ear.’ Conceive who the fellow was?”

“The impostor who harangued in the square!”

“The very man. He told me that there were certain contrivances on foot to bring me into disfavor with the general, which I knew to be the fact. He gave me the names of the parties, which I felt to be sufficiently probable, and finished by saying that, having so long eaten of my bread (a week), and enjoyed my liberality (the scourge), he longed to show his gratitude by giving me an opportunity of putting my enemies to silence on the spot. This opportunity was to solicit the command of the escort required for the mission. How he gained his wisdom I know not, but I took the advice, went at once to Titus, found that an armistice was being debated in council, that there was some difficulty in the choice of an officer for the service (by no means likely to be a sinecure in point of either judgment or hazard), stepped forward, and, to the surprise of everybody, disclaimed the privileges of my rank and insisted on marching at the head of this handful, this outpost-guard, into the formidable city of Jerusalem.”

“His object, of course,” said I, “was your destruction. I now see the cause of the harangue that roused the people; he was in the pay of the conspirators against you. Yet his appearance was striking; there was a vigor about his look and language, a fierce consciousness of power somewhere, that distinguished him from his race. He came, too, and has disappeared, without my being able to discover whence or whither.”

[Sidenote: Duped by a Juggler]

“Oh, the commonest contrivance of his trade,” was the reply. “Those fellows always come and go in cloud, if they can. He was probably beside you half the day before and after. You saw how little he thought of the lance, that I sent to bring out his hidden secrets. He doubtless wore armor; otherwise there would have been one juggler the less in the world. The truth is, I have been duped, but I have made up my mind to think nothing about the dupery. The slave is certainly clever, perhaps to an extraordinary degree—a villain undoubtedly, and of the first magnitude. But he has the secret of the cabal against me, and that secret makes him at once fit to be employed, and dangerous to be provoked. The blow of the lance yesterday showed him that I am not always to be trifled with. In fact, prince, you might find it advantageous to employ him occasionally yourself. It was he who conveyed my letter to the camp this morning!”

My look probably expressed my dislike of this species of envoy.

“You may rely on my honor,” said the Roman, “not to involve you in any of the fellow’s inventions. Slippery as he is, I have a hold on him, too, that he will not venture to shake off. And now, to let you into full confidence, I expect him back this very night, when he will relieve your city of an inhabitant unworthy of remaining among so polished a people; and your house, my prince, of an inmate than whom none on earth can be more grateful for your hospitality.”

He concluded this mixture of levity, address, and frankness with a smile, and in a tone of elegance, that compelled me to take it all on the more favorable side. But against suffering the step of his strange emissary to pollute the threshold in which I lived, I expressed my plain determination.

[Sidenote: Secret Preparations for Departure]

“For that, too, I have provided,” said he. “My intercourse with the reprobate is to take place at another quarter of the city, as far as possible from this dwelling,” and he laughed, “for reasons equally of mine and yours. I have managed matters so as not to compromise any of my friends; and to make my arrangements on that point still more secure, may I express a wish that neither Constantius nor any other person of your house may be acquainted with my intention of leaving them, and I may sincerely say, leaving everything that could gratify my best feelings—this very evening.”

This was an easy and graceful avoidance of the difficulties which his longer residence threatened. I gave him the promise of secrecy, cautioning him against reposing any dangerous confidence in his emissary, of whom I had an irrepressible abhorrence, and was about to leave the chamber when he caught my hand and said in unusual emotion:

“Prince of Naphtali, I have but one word more to say. You are a man of the world and can make allowance for the giddiness of human passions. Some of them are uncontrollable, or at least I have never learned to control them, and in me perhaps they belong to inferiority of mind. But if on my departure you should hear calumnies against me——”

“Impossible, my young friend; or if I should, you may rely on my giving the calumniators a very brief answer.”

“Or if even yourself should be disposed to think severely of me, you know the circumstances under which a man of birth and fortune must be placed in our profession.”

“Fully, and am much more disposed to regret than to wonder at the consequences.”

“If you should hear that I had been assailed in an evil hour by an unexpected temptation which I had long labored to resist, assailed by it under the most powerful circumstances that ever yet tasked the human mind, circumstances to which, from the beginning of the world, wisdom has been proverbially folly, and resolution weakness; if it should have mastered my whole being, soul and body; if I were willing to give up the brightest prospects for its possession—to hazard life, hope, honors——”

The thought of Esther smote me. I started from him where he stood, with his fine head drooping like the Antinous and his figure the very emblem of passionate dejection.

“Roman, you are here as my guest, and as such I have listened to you with patience until now. But if any member of my family is concerned in what you say, I demand in the most distinct terms that the subject shall be mentioned no more. The daughters of Israel are sacred. Never shall a child of mine wed with those who now lord it over my unhappy country.”

He spread his hands and eyes in the broadest astonishment.

[Sidenote: Septimius Misunderstood]

“Prince, can it be possible that you have so totally mistaken me? My perplexities are of an entirely different nature. The chain with which I am bound is not of roses, but of iron; a chain of invisible, yet stern influences, that haunt my night, and even my day.”

His voice faltered, and he turned away with a shudder, as from a visionary tormentor.

“What? Has that man of desperate arts, if he be man, involved you, too, in his net? Dares the impostor soar so high?”

He clasped his hands.

“You saw how he defied, how he mocked me, how he spurned me when my abhorrence rose to the madness of attempting to strike him. I might as well have flung the weapon at the clouds. You saw the instinctive terror of my charger. That animal was celebrated in our whole cavalry for its bold, nay, fierce courage. Yet before the eye of that man of power and evil, it cowered like a hare and died of his glance. By him the temptation has been offered; of its nature I dare not speak; but it is dazzling, fearful, and must—I feel it—finally be fatal.”

[Sidenote: “Be a Man—a Hero”]

“Then cast it from you at once. Be a man—a hero.”

“It is hopeless—I must be the victim; I am bound irretrievably. Farewell, prince; we shall see each other no more.”

He flung himself upon the couch. I offered him assistance, advice, consolation in vain. The spirit of the soldier was extinguished. The victim of fantastic illusion lay before me. I left him to the care of the old domestics, and when I closed the door, thought that I had closed the door of the grave.

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Chapter LV

Salathiel a Prisoner

During this period the city presented the turbulent aspect that must result from the concourse of vast warlike multitudes, known only by hereditary bickerings. The clansman of Judah looked down upon every human being; and his countrymen among the rest. The Benjamite retorted it, boasted of the inheritance of Jerusalem, and looked down upon the men of the Galilees as rioters and plunderers. These, too, had their objects of scorn, and the remnants of Dan and Ephraim were held in merciless disdain as the descendants of rebels and idolaters. To deepen those ancient feuds were thrown in the mutual injuries of the factions of John and Simon. Their leaders were now but the shadow of what they had been; yet the memory of their mischiefs survived with a keenness aggravated by the public discovery of the insignificance of the instruments.

Genius in the tyrant offers the consolation that if the chain has galled us, it has been bound by a hand made for supremacy. But the last misery of the slave is to have been bound by a creature even more contemptible than himself; to have given to folly the homage due to talent; to have stooped before the base and trembled under the feeble.

[Sidenote: The Vanity of Conquest]

The obvious alarm of the enemy, who had now totally withdrawn from the plain and were occupied with raising rampart on rampart round their several camps; the triumph over the unfortunate troop; and the excitement of a crowd of pretended prophets and frantic visionaries, filled the populace with every vanity of conquest. The constant exclamation in the streets was: “Let us march to storm the camps and drive the idolater into the sea!” But the new luxuries of the city were too congenial not to act as formidable rivals to the popular ambition. No leader appeared, the boastings passed away, and the boiling temperament of the warrior had time to run into the safer channel of words and wine.

[Sidenote: Sabat’s Wandering]

Still one melancholy reminder was there. Through the wildest festivity, through the groups of drinking, dancing, bravadoing, and quarreling, Sabat the Ishmaelite moved day after day, from dawn till evening, pouring out his sentences of condemnation. Nothing could be more singular or more awful than his figure as the denouncer of ruin hurried along, like a being denuded of all objects in life but the one. The multitude in their most extravagant excesses felt undissembled fear before him. I have seen the most ferocious tumult stilled by the sound of his portentous voice; the dagger instantly sheathed; the head buried in the garment; the form often prostrate until he passed by. Where he went the song of license was dumb; the dance ceased; the cup fell from the hand; and many a lip of violence and blasphemy quivered with long-forgotten prayer.

How he sustained life none could tell. He was reduced to a shadow; his eye had the yellow glare of blindness; his once raven hair was of the whiteness of flax. He was an animated corpse. But he strode onward with a force which, if few attempted to resist, none seemed able to withstand; his gestures were rapid and nervous to an extraordinary degree, and his voice was overwhelming. It had the rush and volume of a powerful blast. Even in the clamor of the day, through the innumerable voices of the streets, it was audible from the remotest quarters of the city. I heard it through the tread and shouts of fifty thousand marching men. But in twilight and silence the eternal “Wo!—wo!—wo!” howled along the air with a sound that told of nothing human.

His unfortunate bride still followed him, never uttering a word, never looking but on him. She glided along with him in his swiftest course, as bound by a spell to wander where he wandered, an unconscious slave; her form almost a shadow; without a sound, a gesture, or a glance—her feet alone moved.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Presentiment of Wo]

I often attempted to render this undone pair some assistance. Sabat recognized me, and returned brief thanks, and perhaps I was the only man in Jerusalem to whom he vouchsafed either thanks or memory. But he uniformly refused aid of every kind, and reproaching himself for the moment given to human recollections, burst away and again began his denunciation of “Wo!—wo!—wo!”

The hope of treaty with the besiegers was now nearly desperate; yet I felt so deeply the ruin that must follow protracted war that I had labored with incessant anxiety to bring the people to a sense of their situation. My name was high; my decided refusal of all command gave me an influence which threw more grasping ambition into the shade; and the leading men of Jerusalem were glad to delegate their power to me, with the double object of relieving themselves from an effort to which they were unequal, and from a responsibility under which even their covetousness had begun to tremble.

But Jerusalem was not to be saved;[50] there was an opposing fatality—an irresistible, intangible power arrayed against all efforts. I felt it at my first step. If I had been treading on a volcano and heard it roar under me, I could not have been made more sensible of the hollowness and hopelessness of every effort to save the nation. In the midst of our most according council some luckless impediment was sure to start up. While we seemed on the verge of conciliating and securing the most important interests, to that verge we were suddenly forbidden all approach. Communications actually commenced with the Roman general, and which promised the most certain results, were broken off, none could tell how. There was an antagonist somewhere, but beyond our grasp; a hostility as powerful, as constant, and as little capable of being counteracted as the hostility of the plague.

After my final conversation with Septimius, I had spent the day in one of those perplexing deliberations, and was returning with a weary heart when, in an obscure street leading into the Upper City, I was roused from my reverie by the sound of one of our mountain songs. Music has been among my chief solaces through existence, and the song of Naphtali in that moment of depression keenly moved me. I stopped to listen in front of the minstrel’s tent, in which a circle of soldiers and shepherds from the Galilees were sitting over their cups. His skill deserved a higher audience. He touched his little harp with elegance to a voice that reminded me of the sportiveness and wild melody of a bird in spring. The moonlight shone through the tent, and as the boy sat under its large white folds in the fantastic dress of his art—a loose vermilion robe, belted with sparkling stones, and turban of yellow silk, that drooped upon his shoulder like a golden pinion—he resembled the Persian pictures of the Peri embosomed in the bell of the lily. The rude and dark-featured listeners round him might well have sat for the swart demons submissive to his will.

But thoughts soon returned that were not to be soothed by music, and throwing some pieces of money to the boy, I hastened on. The departure of the young Roman and the influence that it might have on my family, and peculiarly on the mind of a creature doubly endeared to me by a strange and melancholy similitude to the temper of my own excitable mind, deeply occupied me, and it was even with some presentiment of evil that I reached home.

The first sound that I heard was the lamentation of the old domestics. But I could not wait to solve their unintelligible attempts to explain the disaster. I flew to my family. Miriam was absorbed in profound sorrow; Salome was in loud affliction. Dreading everything that could be told me, yet with that sullen hardihood which long misfortune gives, I took my wife’s hands and in a voice struggling for composure desired her to tell me the worst at once.

[Sidenote: “Esther is Gone!”]

“Esther is gone!” was her answer.

She could articulate no more; the effort to speak this shook her whole frame. But Salome broke out into loud reprobation of the baseness of the wretch who had turned our hospitality into a snare, and whose life, twice saved, was employed only to bring misery on his preserver.

The blow fell upon me with the keenness of a sword.

“Was Esther, was my daughter, my innocent, darling Esther, consenting to this flight?”

“I know not,” said Miriam. “I dare not ask myself the question. If she can have forgotten her duty to follow the stranger; if she can have left her parents—no. It must have been through some horrid artifice. But the thought is too bitter. Raise no more such thoughts in my mind.”

She sank in silence. But Salome was not to be restrained. She asserted the total impossibility of Esther’s having thrown off her allegiance to religion and filial duty.

“She must have been,” said this generous and enthusiastic being, “either subjected to those dreadful arts in which the idolaters deal, or carried away by force. Constantius has gone already in search of her; feeble as he is, he determined to discover the robber, and tho his steps were weak and the effort may hazard his life, he would not be restrained, nor would I restrain him where I should have so much rejoiced to hazard my own.”

I rose to depart. Miriam clung to me.

“Must I lose all, Salathiel?”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Goes to the Rescue]

“I am the guilty one, wife! I should have guarded against this. I alone am to blame. I will recover Esther. Without her we all should be miserable. The Roman general is just. I will demand her of Septimius in his presence. Miriam! you shall see your child. Salome! you shall see your sister. And now, come to my heart—come both; my last hope of happiness, the remnant of all that once promised to fill my declining days with peace and prosperity. Weep no more, Miriam, Salome! I must not be unmanned at this time of trial. Go to your chambers and pray for me. Farewell!”

It was nearly midnight and the city sounds were hushed, except where the crowds, which still poured in, struggled for their quarters. The very fear of being thus disturbed kept up the disturbance of the population, and in the leading avenues the tents showed fierce watchers against this violence sitting round their tables, until wine either sent them to sleep or roused them into daggers-drawing. Subordination was now at an end; plunder and blood were to be dreaded by every man who ventured among those champions of freedom and property; and more than once this night I was compelled to show that I wore a weapon.

Yet the disorder which left the city a seat of dissolute riot was not suffered to interfere with its actual defense. That singular mixture of rabble giddiness and sacred care which distinguished my countrymen above all nations was fully displayed in those final hours, and the walls that enclosed a million of rioters and robbers were guarded with the solemn vigilance of a sanctuary.

No argument could prevail with the peasantry at the gates to let me pass. My rank, and even my public name, went for little in the scale against the possibility of my renewing the treaty with an enemy whom they now scorned, and I was doubting whether I must not lose the night by the reluctance of those rough but honest sentinels, when I was cheered by seeing one of the head men of their tribe arrive. He had been a furious partizan; honor and honesty were his declared worship, and his horror of humbler motives was fierceness itself. This was enough for me. I knew what public vehemence means. I took him aside, without ceremony put gold into his grasp, and saw the gate thrown open before me by the immaculate hand of the patriotic Jonathan.

While I had scarcely congratulated myself on having passed this formidable barrier and was still within the defenses, the trampling of horse echoed on the road. The night was clear, and there was no hope of avoiding them. A large body of Idumean horsemen came on, escorting wagons of provision. The foremost riders were half asleep, and I was in strong hope of eluding them all when one of the drivers, in the wantonness of authority, laid his whip on me. I rashly returned the blow, and the man fell off his horse. I was surrounded, charged with murder; was brought before their chieftain, and found that chieftain Onias!

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Old Enemy]

My old enemy recognized me instantly, and with undying revenge firing every feature demanded whither I was going.

“To the Roman camp,” was the direct answer.

“The purpose?”

“To have an interview with the Roman general.”

“You come deputed by the authorities?”

“By not one of them.”

[Sidenote: The Right of the Stronger]

“I long ago knew you to be a daring fellow, but you exceed my opinion. We can not spare heroes from Jerusalem at this time; you must turn back with us.”

“By what right?”

“By the right of the stronger.”

“With what object?”

“That you may be hanged as a deserter. It will save you the trouble of going to Titus, to be hanged as a spy.”

I disdained reply, and in the midst of a circle of barbarians exulting over their capture, as if they had taken the chief enemy of the state, was marched back to the walls.

There I was not the only person disturbed by the adventure. The first glimpse of me caught by Jonathan exhibited everything that could be ludicrous in the shape of consternation. To the inquiries how I was suffered to pass he answered by an appeal to his “honor,” which he again valued, in my presence too, “as the most invaluable possession of the citizen soldier.” He said the words without a blush, and I even listened to them without a smile. He probably trembled a little for his bribe; but he soon discovered by my look that I considered the money as too far gone to be worth pursuing.

Yet Onias, who seemed to know him as well as I, fixed on him a scrutinizing aspect, of all others the most hateful to a delicate conscience, and his only resource was to heap opprobrium upon me.

“How I had contrived to escape the guard,” said Jonathan, “was totally inconceivable, unless it was by”—I gave him an assuring glance—“by imposing on the credulity of some of the ignorant peasants; possibly even by direct corruption. But to put the matter out of future possibility he would proceed to examine the prisoner’s person.”

He proceeded accordingly, and from my sash took my purse, as a public precaution. He was a vigilant guardian of the state, for the purse was never restored.

Onias looked at him during his harangue with a countenance between contempt and ridicule.

“I must go forward now,” said he; “but, captain, see to your prisoner. He must answer before the council to-morrow, and as you have so worthily disabled him from operations with the guard, your own head is answerable for his safe-keeping.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Confined in a Tower]

My enemy, to make all sure, himself saw me lodged within the tower over the gate, comforted his soul by a parting promise that my time was come, and rode off with his Idumeans—to the boundless satisfaction of the scrupulous and much-alarmed Jonathan.

The tower was massive, and there was no probability that anything less than a Roman battering-ram would ever lay open its solid sides. The captain had recovered his virtue at the instant of my losing my purse, and I now could no more dream of sapping his integrity than of sapping the huge blocks of the tower. Whether I was to be prisoner for the night, or for the siege, or to glut the ax by morning, were questions which lay in the bosom of as implacable a villain as long-delayed revenge ever made malignant; but what was to become of my child, of my family, of my share in the great cause, for which alone life was of value?

The chamber to which I was consigned was at the top of the tower and overlooked a vast extent of country. Before me were the Roman camps, seen clearly in the moonlight, and wrapt in silence, except when the solitary trumpet sounded the watch, or the heavy tread of a troop going its rounds was heard. The city sounds were but the murmurs of the sinking tide of the multitude. The spring was in her glory. The air came fresh and sweet from the fields. All was tranquillity; yet what a mass of destructive power was lying motionless under that tranquillity! Fire, sword, and man were before me—elements of evil that a touch could rouse into tempest, not to be allayed but by torrents of blood and the ruin of empires.

[Illustration: “‘Esther is gone!’ was her answer.”

[see page 420.

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

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