Chapter LVI…

Chapter LVI

A Narrow Escape

[Sidenote: A Basket of Wine]

While my mind was wandering away in thoughts of the madness of ambition in so brief a being as man, I heard a loud clamor of voices in the chambers below. The rustic guards had been enjoying themselves, but their wine was already out, and they set their faces boldly against the discipline which pretended to limit the wine of patriots so true and thirsty. The clamor arose from the discovery that the cellars of the tower had been examined by a previous guard, who provided for the temperance of their successors by taking the whole temptation to themselves. High words followed between the abettors of discipline and the partizans of the vintage, and if my door were but unbarred I might have expeditiously relieved the captain of his charge. But its bolts were enormous, and I tried them in vain. As I was giving up the effort, a light footstep ascended the stairs; a key turned in the ponderous wards, and the minstrel of the tent stood before me.

“If you wish to escape from certain death,” he whispered, “do as I bid you.”

[Sidenote: A Minstrel’s Aid]

He looked from the casement, sang a few notes, and on being answered from without pulled up a rope, which we hauled in together. The task was of some difficulty, but at length a weighty basket appeared, loaded with wine. He took a portion of the contraband freight in his hands and without a word disappeared. I heard his welcome proclaimed below with loud applause. Half the guard were instantly on the stairs to assist him down with the remainder, but against this he firmly protested, and threatened in case of a single attempt to interfere with his operations that he would awake the captain and publicly give back this incomparable private store to the legitimate hand. The threat was effective; the unlading of the basket was left to his own dexterity, and at length but one solitary flask lay before us.

“You deserve some payment for your trouble,” said he, with the careless and jovial air of his brethren. “Here’s to your night’s enterprise, whatever it be,” pouring out a few drops and tasting them, while he gave a large draft to my feverish lips. “And now, good-night, my prince, unless you love the tower too much to take leave of this gallant guard by a window.”

“But, boy, if you should be detected in assisting my escape?”

“I have no fear of that,” said he. “I have been detected in all sorts of frolics in my time, and yet here I am. The truth is, my prince, I have traveled in your country and have an old honor for your name. No later than to-day you gave me the handsomest present I have got since I came within the walls. I know the noble captain of the guard to be a thorough knave, and the mighty Onias to want nothing for wickedness but the opportunity. In short, the thought occurred to me, on seeing you, to help the honest revelers below to a little more wine than was good for their understandings, the contraband being a commodity in which, between ourselves, I deal; and further to break the laws by assisting you to leave captain, sentinels, and all behind.”

I asked what was to be done.

“If you value your life, be the substitute for the empty flasks and make your way through the air like a bird. I shall be safe enough. You need have no fears for me.”

I coiled the rope round a beam, forced myself through the narrow casement, and launched out into air at a height of a hundred feet. If I felt any distrust, it was brief. I was rapidly lowered, passing the various casements, in which I saw the successive watches of the guard drinking, sleeping, singing, and discussing public affairs with village rationality. Luckily no eye turned upon the fugitive, and the ground was touched at last.

In another moment the minstrel came, rather flying than sliding, down the rope. I said something in acknowledgment of this service, but he laid his finger on his lip, and pointing to a rampart, where a moving torch showed me that we were still within observation, led on through paths beset with thickets that no eye could penetrate, but, as he laughingly said, “that of a supplier of garrisons with contraband.” But their intricacy offered no obstruction to this stripling; and after amusing himself with my perplexities he led me to the verge of the plain.

“I have detained you,” said he, “in these brambles for the double purpose of avoiding the lookout from the battlements and of giving the moon time to hide her blushing beauties.”

She lay reddening with the mists on the horizon.

“She has been often called our mother, and as her children the minstrels are allowed the privilege of keeping later hours and being madder than the mob of mankind. But like other children we are sometimes engaged in matters which would dispense with the maternal eye, and to-night I wished that she was many a fathom below the ocean. Mother,” said he, throwing himself into an attitude, “take a child’s blessing and begone.”

The words were spoken to a touch on his little harp—rambling, but singularly sweet.

“Do you know,” said he with a sigh, as he turned and saw me gazing in admiration of his skill, “I am weary to death of my profession.”

“Then why not leave it? You are fit for better things. Your skill is of the very nature that makes its way in the world.”

[Sidenote: The Freedom of Singing]

“Why not leave it? For a hundred reasons. In the first place, I should be more wearied of every other. I should be the bird in the cage, fed, sheltered, and possibly a favorite. But what bird would not rather take the chance of the open air, even to be scorched by the summer and frozen by the winter? No; let me clap my pinions and sing my song under the free canopy of the skies, or be voiceless, and wingless, and—dead.”

“Boy, this is the natural language of your years. But the time must come when the spirit sinks and man requires other charms in life than the power of roaming.”

He hung his head over the harp and let his fingers stray among the strings. The moon was now touching the mountains.

“We must begone,” said I. “I owe you something for your night’s service, which shall be repaid by taking you into my household should the siege be raised; if not, you are but as you were.”

He was all nervous excitement at the offer—wept, laughed, danced, played a prelude upon the strings, kissed my hand, and finally bounded away before me. I called to him, repeating my wish that he should go no farther.

[Sidenote: The Minstrel Guide]

“Impossible,” said he; “you would be lost in a moment. If I had not crossed the ground hundreds of times, I should never be able to find my road. Half a mile forward it is all rampart, trench, and ravine. You would be stopped by a myriad of sentinels. Nothing on earth could get to the foot of yonder hills, but an army—or a minstrel.”

He ran on before me, and ran with a rapidity that tasked even my foot to follow. We soon came into the fortified ground, and I then felt his value. He led me over fosse and rampart, up the scarp and through the palisade, with the sagacity of instinct. But this was not all. I repeatedly saw the sentinels within a few feet of us, and expected to be challenged every moment, but not a syllable was heard. I passed with patrols of the legionary horse on either side of me; still not a word. I walked through the rows of tents, in which the troops were preparing for the duties of the morning. Not an eye fell upon me, and I almost began to believe myself, like a hero of the heathen fables, covered with a cloud.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s New Captors]

The boy still continued racing along, until, on reaching the summit of a mound at some distance in front of me, he uttered a cry and fell. I had heard no challenge, and hurried toward him. A flight of arrows whizzed over my head, and the black visages of a mob of Ethiopian riders[51] came bounding up a hollow between us. It was not my purpose to fight, even if I had any hope of success against marksmen who could hit an elephant’s eye. I surrendered in every language of which I was capable. But the Ethiopians only shook their woolly heads, laid hands on me, and began an investigation of my riches creditable to polished society. Barbarians, with a tongue and physiognomy worthy only of their kindred baboons, probed every plait of my garments, with an accuracy that could have been surpassed only in the most civilized custom-houses of the empire. A succession of shrieks, which I mistook for rage, but which were the mirth of those sons of darkness, were the prelude to measures which augured more formidable consequences. A rope was thrown over my arms, and I was led toward the outposts.

Yet even the neighborhood of their Roman friends did not seem the most congenial to my captors. More than one consultation was held, in which their white teeth were bared to the jaw with rage, and their simitars were whirled like so many flashes of lightning about each other’s turbans, before they could decide whether my throat was to be cut on the spot, to get rid of an incumbrance, or whether they were to try how far the emptiness of my purse might not be made up by the reward for the capture of a spy in the trappings of a chieftain.

I gave up remonstrance where, if I had all the tongues of Babel, none of them seemed likely to answer my purpose, and reserving the nice distinction between an ambassador and a spy for more cultivated ears, quietly walked onward in the midst of this troop of thieves; the more insensible to honesty or argument, as they were privileged according to law. But our approach to the camp bred another difficulty. The troop felt an obvious disinclination to come too close to the legionaries. Untutored as the negroes were, they had acquired a knowledge of the official conscience, and they bowed to the mastery of the white in plunder as among the accomplishments of an advanced age!

All could not venture to the camp; yet who was to be entrusted with receiving the reward? The discussion was carried on chiefly by gesture, which sometimes proceeded to blows, and at last was wound up to such vigor that a brawny ruffian, to preserve the peace, seized the rope and, dragging me out the circle, began sharpening his simitar, to extinguish the controversy. But at the instant a horrid outcry arose, and a figure, hideous beyond conception, not a foot high, blacker than the blackest, and darting flames from its mouth, bounded in among us, mounted upon a wild beast of a horse that kicked and tore at everything. The Ethiopians shrieked with terror and scattered on all sides at the first shock, but the ground was so cut up by the military operations that they stumbled at every step. Some were unhorsed; some probably had their necks broken, and others carried home the tale, to spread it through the land of lions. I heard it long after, exciting the utmost amaze in a venerable circle round one of the fountains of the Nile.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Appeal]

I was now saved from being thus summarily made the victim of peace, but was as far as ever from freedom. While I was endeavoring to loose the rope, a patrol of the legionary horse came galloping from the camp, and I was seized with this badge of a bad character upon me. But the flying negroes were the more amusing objects. There was just light enough to see them rolling about the plain; turbans flying off in the air; and the few riders who could boast of keeping their seats, whirled away over brake and brier, at the mercy of their frightened horses. This display, which had been at first taken for the prelude to an assault on the lines, was now a source of pleasantry, and the horsemanship of the savages was honored with many a roar.

My case came next under consideration. “I was found at the edge of the Roman entrenchments, where to be found was to die; I was besides taken with the mark of reprobation upon me.”

I pleaded my own merits loudly, and appealed to the rope as evidence that I was not there by my own will. The legionaries were better soldiers than logicians, and my defense perplexed them until some one thought of inquiring what brought me there at all. The troop flocked round to hear my answer to this overwhelming question. I told my purpose in a few words.

[Sidenote: On the Point of Death]

The scale again turned in my favor, and I began to think victory secure, when a young standard-bearer, who was probably destined to rise in the state, declared, with a splenetic tongue and brow of office, that “in this land of cheating too much precaution could not be adopted against cheats of all colors; that the more plausible my story was, the more likely it was to be a falsehood; and finally, that as my escape might do some kind of mischief, while my hanging could do none whatever, it was advisable to hang me without delay.”

The orator spoke the words of popularity, and my fate was sealed. But a new difficulty arose. By whom was the sentence to be put in execution?—for the duty would have sullied the legionary honor for life. A trampled African, who lay groaning in a ditch beside me, caught the sound of the debate, dragged himself out, and offered, mangled as he was, to perform the office for any sum that their generosity might think proper to give. Never was man nearer to paying the grand debt than I was at that moment. The African recovered his vigor as by magic, and the young statesman took upon himself the superintendence of this service to his country. I raised my voice loudly against this violence to a “negotiator”; but the troopers of the imperial horse had been roused from their sleep on my account, and they were not to return, liable to the ridicule of having been roused by a false alarm. I still endeavored to put off the evil hour, when the trampling of a large body of cavalry was heard.

“The general!” exclaimed the young officer, who evidently had an instinctive sensibility to the approach of rank.

“Let Titus come,” said I, “or any man of honor, and he will understand me.”

I tore the badge of disgrace from my arms and stepped forward to meet the great son of Vespasian. My confidence alarmed the troop, and the standard-bearer made way for the man who dared to speak to the heir of the throne. But the general was not Titus; a broad, brutal countenance, red with excess, glared haughtily round. I recognized Cestius. A whisper from one of the officers put him in possession of the circumstances, and he rode up to me.

“So, rebel! you are come to this at last! You have been taken in the fact and must undergo your natural fate.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Defies Cestius]

“I demand to be led to your general. I scorn to defend myself before inferiors.”

“Inferiors!” He bit his livid lip. “Traitor, you are not now on the hill of Scopas at the head of an army.”

“Nor you,” said I, “on the plain at the head of an army—and so much the more fortunate for both you and them. But I scorn to talk to men whose backs I have seen. Lead me to your master, fugitive!”

The troops, unaccustomed to this plain speaking, looked on with wonder. Cestius himself was staggered, but the nature of the man soon returned, and in a voice of fury he ordered a body of Arab archers, who were seen moving at a distance, to be brought up for the extinction of a “traitor unworthy of a Roman sword.” The Arabs, exhilarated by the prospect of employment, came up, shouting, tossing their lances, and shooting their arrows. As a last resource, I solemnly protested against this murder, which I pronounced to be the work of a revenge disgraceful to the name of soldier; and taunting Cestius with his defeat, demanded that, if he doubted my honor, he should try on the spot “which of our swords was the better.”

He answered only by a glare of rage and a gesture to the archers, who instantly threw themselves into a half circle round me, with the expertness of proficients in the trade of justice, and bended their bows. Determined to resist to the last, I flung out upbraidings and scorn upon the murderer, which drove him to hide his head behind the troops. Another disturbance arose. Simitars waved, turbans shook, horses plunged; the deep order was broken, and at length a horseman, magnificently appareled and mounted, burst into the ring and looked fiercely round.

“What, you miscreants,” he shouted, “who dares to take command out of my hands? Down with your bows! Commit murder and I not present! The first man that pulls a string shall leave an empty saddle. Draw off, cutthroats, or if you want to do the world a service, shoot one another.”

[Sidenote: A Meeting With the Captain]

I seemed to remember the voice, but I gazed in vain on the splendid figure. The turban that, blazing with gems, hung down on his forehead, and the beard that, black as the raven’s wing, curled full round his lip, completely baffled me. He looked at me in turn, thrust out a sinewy hand, and, clasping mine, exclaimed with a laugh:

“Prince, does the plumage make you forget the bird? What can have brought you into the hands of my culprits? I thought that you were drowned, burned, or a candidate for the imperial diadem by this time.”

I now knew him.

“My friend of the free-trade!” said I in a low tone.

He spoke in a fearless tone. “By no means. I have reformed—am a changed man—captain of the seas no more; but a loyal plunderer—in the service of Vespasian, and in command of a thousand Arab cavalry that will ride, run away, and rob with any corps in the service; and the word is a bold one.”

Our brief conference was broken up by the return of Cestius, who, outrageous at the delay and coming to inquire the cause, found fresh fuel for his wrath in the sight of the Arab captain turned into my protector. With an execration he demanded “why his orders had been disobeyed.”

The captain answered, with the most provoking coolness, that “no Roman officer, let his rank be what it might, was entitled to degrade the allies into executioners.”

The Roman grew furious with the slight in the face of the troops, who highly enjoyed it. The Arab grew more sarcastic, till Cestius was rash enough to lift his hand, and the Arab anticipated the blow, by dashing his charger at him and leaving the general and his horse struggling together on the ground. An insult of this kind to the second in command was, of course, not to be forgiven. The Arabs bent their bows to make battle for their captain, but he forbade resistance; and when the legionary tribune demanded his sword, he surrendered it with a smile, saying that “he had done service enough for one day in saving an honest man and punishing a ruffian,” and that he should justify himself to Titus alone.

[Sidenote: The Approach of the Enemy]

My fate was still undetermined. But the legionaries soon had more pressing matters to think of. The clangor of horns and shouts came in the direction of the city. The plain still lay in shade, but I could see through the dusk immense crowds moving forward like an inundation. The legions were instantly under arms, and I stood a chance of being walked over by two armies!

But I was not to encounter so distinguished a catastrophe. Some symptoms of my inclination to escape attracted the eye of the guard, and I was marched to the common repository of malefactors in the rear of the lines.

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Chapter LVII

Onias, the Enemy of Salathiel

[Sidenote: Within Sound of Battle]

My new quarters were within the walls of one of those huge country mansions which the pride of our ancestors had built to be the plague of their posterity; for those the enemy chiefly employed for our prisons. Their solid strength defied desultory attack; time made little other impression on them than to picture their walls with innumerable stains; and the man must be a practised prison-breaker who could force his way out of their depths of marble. But if my eyes were useless, my ears had their full indulgence. Every sound of the conflict was heard. The attack was furious, and must have often been close to the walls of my dungeon. The various rallying-cries of the tribes rang through its halls; then a Roman shout, and the heavy charge of the cavalry would roll along until, after an encountering roar and a long clashing of weapons, the tumult passed away, to be rapidly renewed by the obstinate bravery of my unfortunate countrymen.

I felt as a man and a leader must feel during scenes in which he ought to take a part, yet to which he is virtually as dead as the sleeper in the tomb. My life had been activity; my heart was in the cause; I had knowledge, zeal, and strength that might in the chances of battle turn the scale. I even often heard my name among the charging cries of the day. But here I lay within impassable barriers. A thousand times during those miserable hours I measured their height with my eye; then threw myself on the ground, and placing my hands over my ears, labored to exclude thought from my soul.

[Sidenote: The Sons of Chance]

But my fellow prisoners were practical philosophers to a man; untaught in the schools, ’tis true, yet fully trained in that great academy worth all that Philosophy ever dreamed in—experience. In all my wanderings among mankind I never before had so ample an opportunity of studying variety of character. War is the hotbed that urges all our qualities, good and evil, into their broadest luxuriance. The generous become munificent; the mean darken into the villainous; and the rude harden into brutality. The camp is the great inn at which all the dubious qualities set up their rest, and a single campaign perfects the culprit to the height of his profession. There were round me in these immense halls about five hundred profligates, any one of whose histories would have been invaluable to a scorner of human nature.

Among the loose armies of the East those fellows exercised their vocation as regular appendages; often lived in luxury, and sometimes shot up into leaders themselves. But robbery in the Roman armies required master-hands. The temptation was strong, for the legionary was the grand ravager, and like the lion, he left the larger share of the prey to the jackal. Yet justice, inexorable and rapid, was his rule—in all cases but his own; and the jackal, suspected of trespassing within the legitimate distance from the superior savage, ran imminent hazard of being disqualified for all encroachment to come. Three-fourths of my associates had played this perilous game, and its penalties were now awaiting only the first leisure of the troops. Peace, at all times vexatious to their trade, had thus a double disgust for them, and the most patriotic son of Israel could not have taken a more zealous interest in the defeat of the legions.

[Sidenote: A Victim of Ingratitude]

But philosophy still predominated; if hope was at an end, hilarity took its place, and the prison rang with reckless exhibitions of practical glee, riotous songs, and mockeries. In the idleness of the lingering hours the professional talents of those sons of chance were brought into play. The mimic collected his audience, burlesqued the pompous officials of the army, and gathered his pence and plaudits as if he were under the open sky and could call his head his own. The nostrum-vender had his secrets for the cure of every ill, and harangued on the impotence of brand, scourge, and blade, if the patient had but the wisdom to employ his irresistible unguent. The soothsayer sold fate at the lowest price, and fixed the casualties of the next four-and-twenty hours—an easy task with the principal part of his audience. The minstrel chanted the pleasures of a life unencumbered by care or conscience; and the pilferer, with but an hour to live, exercised his trade with an industry proportioned to the shortness of his time.

In the whole gang I met with but one man thoroughly out of spirits. He had obviously been no favorite of fortune, for the human form could scarcely be less indebted to clothing. His swarthy visage was doubly blackened by hunger and exhaustion, and even his voice had a prison sound. Driven away from the joyous groups by the natural repulsion which the careless feel at visages that remind them of trouble, he took refuge in the corner where I lay, tormented by every echo of the battle. Not unwilling to forget the melancholy scenes in which every moment was draining the last blood of my country, I turned to the wretch beside me and asked the cause of his sorrows.

“Ingratitude,” was the reply. “This is a villainous world; a man may spend his life in serving others, and what will he gain in the end? Nothing. There is, for instance, the prince of Damascus wallowing in wealth; yet the greatest rogue under this roof has not a more pitiful stock of honor. Witness his conduct to me. He was out of favor with his uncle, the late prince; was not worth more than the raiment on his limbs, and as likely to finish his days on the gibbet as any of the knot of robbers that helped him to scour the roads about Sidon. In his distress he applied to me. I had driven a handsome share of the free-trade between Egypt and the north, and now and then gave him a handsome price for his booty. The idea of bringing his uncle to terms was out of the question. I named my price; it was allowed to be fair. I made my way into the palace, was exalted to the honors of cupbearer, and on my first night of office gave the old man a cup which cured him of drunkenness forever. And what do you think was my reward?”

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Interest Roused]

“I could name what it ought to have been.”

“You conclude half the old man’s jewels at the least. No; not a stone—not a shekel. I was thrown into chains, and finally kicked out of the city, with a promise, the only one that he will ever keep, that if I venture there again I shall leave it without my head! There’s gratitude! There’s honor for you!

“My next example,” he continued, “was among the Romans. It must be owned that they pay well for secret services. But then, ingratitude infects them from top to toe. I had been three years in their employment, and if I made free with a few of their secrets in favor of others, it was only on the commercial principle of having as many customers as one can supply; still, I helped them to the knowledge of all that was going on.”

He had found a listener, and indulged his recollection; after a variety of events, in which he cheated everybody, he came to one that had some interest for myself.

“At last a showy adventurer changed the scene,” he continued. “Some insult had stirred up his blood, and in revenge he sailed away with the prefect’s galley and set up on his own account. Not a sail, from a shallop to a trireme, could touch the water from the Cyclades to Cyprus without being overhauled by the captain. I was set by the prefect upon his track, and got into his good graces by lending him a little of my information, of which he made such desperate use that the Roman swore my destruction as a traitor. To make up the quarrel I tried a wider game, and was bringing his fleet upon the pirates in their very nest when ill luck came across me. A pair whom to the last hour of my life nothing will persuade me to think anything but demons, sent expressly to do me mischief, spoiled one of the finest inventions that ever came into the head of man.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Becomes a Foil]

“The consequence was that the pirates, instead of being attacked, burned the Roman’s trireme round him, and would have burned himself, if he had not thought a watery end better than a fiery one, leaped overboard, and gone straight to the bottom. The whole blame fell upon me, and my only payment was the cropping of my ears and a declaration, sworn to in the names of Romulus and Remus, that if I ever ventured again within a Roman camp I should not get off so well. Ingratitude again! Never was a man so unfortunate.”

“Quite the contrary. It appears to me that seldom was man so lucky. If one in a hundred would have your tale to tell, not one in a thousand would have lived to tell it.” I had already recognized the Egyptian of the cavern.

“But justice, honor!”

“Say no more about them. Whatever the Romans may be in the matter of justice, your case is an answer to all charges on their mercy.”

He looked at me with a ghastly grimace, and as he threw back the long and squalid locks that covered his countenance, showed what beggary had done to the sleek features of the once superbly clothed and jeweled sea-rover.

“But what,” said I, “threw a man of your virtue among such a gang of caitiffs as are here?”

“Another instance of ingratitude. I had been for twenty years connected with one of the leading men of Jerusalem, and I will say that in my experience of mankind I have known no individual less perplexed with weakness of conscience. He had a difficult game to play between the Romans, whom he served privately, the Jews, whom he served publicly, and himself, whom he served with at least as much zeal as either of his employers. The times were made for the success of a man who has his eyes open and suffers neither the fear of anything on earth nor the hope of anything after it to shut them. He succeeded accordingly; got rid of some rivals by the dagger; sent others to the dungeon; bribed where money would answer his purpose; threatened where threats would be current coin; and by the practise of those natural means of rising in public affairs, became the hope of a faction. But on his glory there was one cloud—the prince of Naphtali!”

[Sidenote: Onias and His Rival]

I listened attentively. I had deeply known the early hostility of Onias, but his devices were too tortuous for me to trace, and until the past night I had lost sight of him for years. I asked what cause of bitterness existed between those personages.

“A hundred, as generally happens where the imagination becomes a party and the accuser is the judge. The prince in his youth and before he attained his rank had the insolence to fall in love with the woman marked by Onias for his own. He had the additional insolence to win her; and the completion of his crimes was marriage. Onias thenceforth swore his ruin. Public convulsions put off the promise, and while he was driven to his last struggle to keep himself among the living, he had the angry indulgence of seeing the young husband shoot up without any trouble into rank, wealth, and renown.”

“But has not time blunted his hostility?” I asked.

“Time, as the proverb goes, blunts nothing but a man’s wit, his teeth, and his good intentions,” said the knave, with a sneer on his grim visage. “The next half of the proverb is that it sharpens wine, women, and wickedness. What Onias may have been doing of late I can only guess; but unless he is changed by miracle, he has been dealing in every villainous contrivance from subornation to sorcery. I had my own affairs to mind. But unless Satan owes him a grudge, he is now not far from his revenge.”

I thought of our meeting at the city gates, and alarmed at the chance of his discovering my family, anxiously asked whether Onias had obtained any late knowledge of his rival.

[Sidenote: A Confessor’s Fear]

“Of that I know but little,” said he; “yet quick as his revenge may be, unless my honest employer manages with more temper than usual, he will rue the hour when he set foot on the track of the prince of Naphtali. If ever man possessed the mastery of the spirits that our wizards pretend to raise, the prince is that man. I myself have hunted him for years, yet he always baffled me. I have laid traps for him that nothing in human cunning could have escaped, yet he broke through them as if they were spider’s webs. I saw him sent to the thirstiest lover of blood that ever sat on a throne. Yet he came back, aye, from the very clutch of Nero. I maddened his friends against him, and he contrived to escape even from the malice of his friends, a matter which you will own is among the most memorable. I had him plunged into a dungeon, where I kept him alive for certain reasons, while Onias was to be kept to his bargain by the prisoner’s reappearance. Yet he escaped, and my last intelligence of him is that he is at this moment living in pomp in Jerusalem, the spot where I have been for the last month in close pursuit of him. Time or some marvelous power must have disguised him. And yet if I were to meet him this night——”

“Look on me, slave!” I exclaimed, and grasping him by the throat unsheathed my dagger. “You have found him, and to your cost. Villain! it is to you then that I owe so much misery. Make your peace with Heaven if you can, for it would be a crime to suffer you to leave this spot alive.”

He was dumb with terror. I held him with an iron grasp. The thought that if he escaped me, it must be only to let loose a murderer against my house, made me feel his death an act of justice.

“Let me go,” he at last muttered; “let me live; I am not fit to die. In the name of that Lord whom you worship, spare me!” He fell at my feet in desperate supplication. “You have not heard all; I have abjured your enemy. Spare me and I will swear to pass my days in the desert, never to come again before the face of man; to lie upon the rock, to live upon the weed, to drink of the pool until I sink into the grave!”

I paused in disgust at the abject eagerness for life in a wretch self-condemned! While I held the dagger before him, his senses continued bound up by fear. He gazed on it with an eye that quivered with every quivering of the steel. With one hand he grasped my uplifted arm as he knelt, and with the other gathered his rags round his throat to cover it from the blow. His voice was lost in horrid gaspings; his mouth was wide open and livid. I sheathed the weapon, and his countenance instantly returned into its old grimace. A ghastly smile grew upon it as he now drew from his bosom a small packet.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Hold upon Onias]

“If you had put me to death,” said the wretch, “you would have lost your best friend. This packet contains a correspondence for which Onias would give all that he is worth in the world; and well he might, for the man who has it in his hands has his life. The world is made up of ingratitude. After all my services—slandering here, plundering there, hunting down his opponents in every direction, till they either put themselves out of the world or he saved them the trouble—he had the baseness to throw me off. At the head of his troops he kicked me from his horse’s side, ordering me to be turned loose, ‘to carry my treachery to the Romans, if they should be fools enough to think me worth the hire.’ I took him at his word. I was watching my opportunity to enter Jerusalem and stab him to the heart when I was taken by some of the plunderers that hover round the camp, and am now probably to suffer for the benefit of Roman morality, as a robber and assassin, as soon as the legions shall have murdered every man and robbed every mansion in Jerusalem.”

The packet contained a correspondence of Onias with the Romans. A sensation of triumph glowed through me—I held the fate of my implacable enemy in my hand. I could now, with a word, strike to the earth the being whose artifices and cruelties had waylaid me through life, and the traitor to my country would perish by the same blow that avenged my own wrongs. My nature was made for passion. In love and hatred, in ambition, in revenge, my original spirit knew no bounds. Time, sorrow, and the conviction of my own outcast state had partially softened those hazardous impulses, and I found the value of adversity. Misfortune comes with healing on its wings to the burning temper of the heart, as the tempest comes to the arid soil; it tears up the surface, but softens it for the seeds of the nobler virtues; even in its feeblest work, it cools the withering and devouring heat for a time. I had yet to find with what fatal rapidity the heart gives way to its old overwhelming temptations.

[Sidenote: The Power of Gold]

“I spare your life,” said I, “but on one condition—that you henceforth make Onias the constant object of your vigilance; that you keep him from all injury to me and mine; and that when I shall seize him at last, you shall be forthcoming to give public proof of his treachery.”

“This sounds well,” said the Egyptian as he cast his eyes round the lofty hall, “but it would sound better if we were not on this side of the gate. All the talking in the world will not sink these walls an inch, nor make that gate turn on its hinges, tho for that, and for every other too, there is one master-key. Happy was the time”—and the fellow’s sullen eye lighted up with the joy of knavery—“when I could walk through every cabinet, chamber, and cell from the Emperor’s palace in Rome down to the Emperor’s dungeon in Cæsarea.”

I produced a few coins which I had been enabled to conceal, and flung them into his hand. The sum rekindled life in him; avarice has its enthusiasts as well as superstition. He forgot danger, prison, and even my dagger at the sight of his idol. He turned the coins to the light in all possible ways; he tried them with his teeth; he tasted, he kissed, he pressed them to his bosom. Never was lover more rapturous than this last of human beings at the touch of money in the midst of wretchedness and ruin. His transports taught me a lesson, and in that prison and from that slave of vice I learned long to tremble at the power of gold over the human mind.

It was past midnight and the noise of the criminals round me had already sunk away. The floor was strewn with sleepers, and the only waking figure was the sentinel as he trod wearily along the passages, when the Egyptian, desiring me to feign sleep that his further operations might not be embarrassed, drew himself along the ground toward him. The soldier, a huge Dacian, covered with beard and iron, and going his rounds with the insensibility of a machine, all but trod upon the Egyptian, who lay crouching and writhing before him. I saw the spear lifted up and heard a growl that made me think my envoy’s career at an end in this world. He still lay on the ground, writhing under the sentinel’s foot, as a serpent might under the paw of a lion.

[Sidenote: The Sentinel Bribed]

I was about to spring up and interpose, but his time was not yet come. The spear hung in air, gradually turned its point upward, and finally resumed its seat of peace on the Dacian’s shoulder. That art of persuasion which speaks to the palm and whose language is of all nations had touched the son of Thrace; I heard the sound of the coin on the marble; a few words arranged the details. The sentinel discovered that his vigilance was required in another direction, broke off his customary round, and walked away. The Egyptian turned to me with a triumphant smile on his hideous visage, the gate rolled on its hinge, and he slipped out like a shadow.

At the instant my mind misgave me. I had put the fate of my family into the hands of a slave, destitute of even the pretense of principle. In my eagerness to save, might I not have been delivering them up to their enemy? He had sold Onias to me; might he not make his peace by selling me to Onias? The gate was still open. A few steps would put me beyond bondage. Yet I had come to claim Esther. If I left the camp, what hope was there of my ever seeing this child of my heart again? Would not every hour of my life be embittered by the chance that she might be suffering the miseries of a dungeon, or borne away into a strange land, or dying and calling on her father for help in vain?

Those contending impulses passed through my mind with the speed and almost with the agony of an arrow. The more I thought of the Egyptian, the more I took his treachery for certain. But the present ruin of all predominated over the possible sufferings of one, and with a heart throbbing almost to suffocation and a step scarcely able to move I dragged myself toward the portal.

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Chapter LVIII

Eleazar the Convert

[Sidenote: The War of Extermination]

I was not to escape! As I reached the gate a loud sound of trampling feet and many voices drove me back. By that curious texture of the feelings which prefers suffering to suspense I was almost glad to have the question decided for me by fortune, and flung myself on the ground among a heap of the undone, who lay enjoying a slumber that might be envied by thrones. The gate was thrown open and in another moment in burst a living mass of horror, a multitude of beings in whom the human face and form were almost obliterated; shapes gaunt with famine, black with dust, withered with deadly fatigue, and covered with gashes and gore.

The war had gone on from cruelty to cruelty. To the Roman the Jew was a rebel, and he had a rebel’s treatment; to the Jew the Roman was a tyrant, and dearly was the price of his tyranny exacted. Quarter was seldom given on either side. The natural generosity of the son of Vespasian had attempted for a while to soften this furious system. But the slaughter of the mission exasperated him; he declared the Jews a people incapable of faith, and proclaimed a war of extermination. The battle of the day had furnished the first opportunity of sweeping vengeance.

[Sidenote: Salathiel among the Wounded]

The people, stimulated by the arrival of Onias, had made a desperate effort to force the Roman lines. The attacks were reiterated with more than valor—with rage and madness; the Jews fought with a disregard of life that appalled and had nearly overwhelmed even the Roman steadiness. The loss of the legions was formidable; all their chief officers were wounded, many were killed. Titus himself, leading a column from the Decuman gate of the camp, was wounded by a blow from a sling; and the state of its ramparts, as I saw them at daybreak, torn down in immense breaches, and filling up the ditch with their ruins, showed the imminent hazard of the whole army. Another hour of daylight would probably have been its ruin. But Judea would not have been the more secure, for the factions, relieved from the presence of an enemy, would have torn each other to pieces.

The loss of the Jews was so prodigious[52] as to be accounted for only by their eagerness to throw away life. Not less than a hundred thousand corpses lay between the camp and Jerusalem. No prisoners were taken on either side, and the crowds that now approached were the wounded, gathered off the field, to be crucified in memory of the mission. The coming of those victims put an end to the possibility or the desire of sleep.

The immense and gloomy hall, one of those in use for the stately banquets customary among the leaders of Jerusalem, was suddenly a blaze of torches. The malefactors and captives were thrown together in heaps, guarded by strong detachments of spearmen that lined the sides, like ranges of iron statues, overlooking the mixed and moving confusion of wretched life between. Guilt, sorrow, and shame were there in their dreadful undisguise. The roof rang to oaths and screams of pain as the wounded tossed and rolled upon each other; rang to bitter lamentation, and more bitter still, to those self-accusing outcries which the near approach of violent death sometimes awakens in the most daring criminals. For stern as the justice was, it still was justice; the Jewish character had fearfully changed. Rapine and bloodshed had become the habits of the populace, and among the panting and quivering wretches before me begging a moment of life I recognized many a face that, seen in Jerusalem, was the sign of plunder and massacre.

[Sidenote: The Fury of the Condemned]

Repulsive as my recollections were, I spent the greater part of the night in bandaging their wounds and relieving the thirst which scarcely less than their wounds wrung them. There were women, too, among those wrecks of the sword, and now that the frenzy of the day was past, they exhibited a picture of the most heart-breaking dejection. Lying on the ground wounded and with every lineament of their former selves disfigured, they cried from that living grave alternately for vengeance and for mercy. Then tearing their hair and flinging it, as their last mark of hatred and scorn, at the legionaries, they devoted them to ruin in the name of the God of Israel. Then passion gave way to pain, and in floods of tears they called on the names of parent, husband, and child, whom they were to see no more!

It was known that at daybreak the prisoners were to die, and the din of hammers and the creaking of wagons bearing the crosses broke the night with horrid intimation. At length the stillness terribly told that all was prepared. The night, measured by moments, seemed endless, and many a longing was uttered for the dawn that was to put them out of their misery. Yet when the first gray light fell through the casements and the trumpets sounded for the escort to get under arms, nothing could exceed the fury of the crowd. Some rushed upon the spears of the reluctant soldiery; some bounded in mad antics through the hall; others fell on their knees and offered up horrid and shuddering prayers; many flung themselves upon the floor, and in the paroxysm of wrath and fear perished.

Shocked and sickened by this misery, I withdrew from the gate, where the tumult was thickest, as the soldiery were already driving them out, and returned to my old lair, to await the will of fortune. But I found it occupied. A circle of the wounded were standing round a speaker, to whom they listened with singular attention. The voice caught my ear; from the crowd round him I was unable to observe his features, but once drawn within the sound of his words, I shared the general interest in their extraordinary power. He was a teacher of the new religion.

[Sidenote: The Teachers of Christianity]

In my wanderings through Judea I had often met with those Nazarenes. Their doctrines had a vivid simplicity that might have attracted my attention as a philosopher, but philosophy was cold to their power. The splendor and strength of their preaching realized the boldest traditions of oratory. Yet their triumph was not that of oratory; they disclaimed all pretension to eloquence or learning, declaring that even if they possessed them, they dared not sully by human instruments of success the glory due to Heaven. They carried this self-denial to the singular extent of divulging every circumstance calculated to deprive themselves and their doctrines of popularity. They openly acknowledged that they were of humble birth and occupation, sinners like the rest of mankind, and in some instances guilty of former excesses of blind zeal, persecutors of the new religion, even to blood. Of their Master they spoke with the same openness. They told of His humble origin, His career of rejection, and His death by the punishment of a slave. To the scoffer at their hopes of a kingdom to be given by the sufferer of that ignominious death, they unhesitatingly answered that their hope was founded expressly upon His death, and that they lived and rejoiced in the expectation that they were, like Him, to seal their faith with their blood!

[Sidenote: The Strength of the New Religion]

I had often seen enthusiasm among my countrymen, but this was a spirit of a distinct and a loftier birth. It had the vigor of enthusiasm without its rashness; the gentleness of infancy, with the wisdom of years; the solemn reverence of the Jew for the divine Will, free from his jealous claims to the sole possession of truth. The Law and the Prophets were perpetually in their hands, and they often embarrassed our haughty doctors and acrid Pharisees with questions and interpretations to which no reply could be returned but a sneer or an anathema. But in the power of conviction, in the master art of striking the heart and understanding with sudden light, like the bolt from heaven, I never heard, I never shall hear, their equals. To call it eloquence was to humiliate this stupendous gift; the most practised skill of the rhetorician gave way before it, like gossamer, like chaff before the whirlwind. It broke its way through sophistry by the mere weight of thought. It had a rapid reality that swept the hearer along. In its disdain of the mere decorations of speech, in the bold and naked nerve of its language, there was an irresistible energy—the energy of the tempest, giving proof in its untamable rushings of its descent from a region beyond the reach of man. I never listened to one of these preachers but with a consciousness that he was the depository of mighty knowledge. He had the whole mystery of the human affections bare to his eye. Among a thousand hearts one word sent conviction at the same instant. All their diversities of feeling, sorrow, and error were shaken at once by that universal language. It talked to the soul!

Of these overwhelming appeals, which often lasted for hours together and to which I listened overwhelmed, nothing is left to posterity but a few fragments, and those letters which the Christians still preserve among their sacred writings—great productions and giving all the impression that it is possible to transmit to the future. But the living voice, the illumined countenance, the frame glowing and instinct with inspiration!—what can transmit them?

“Here,” said I, as I often stood and heard their voices thundering over the multitude, “here is the true power that is to shake the temples of heathenism. Here is a new element come to overthrow or to renovate the world.”

I saw our holy law struggling to keep itself in existence, compressed on every side by idolatry; a little fountain feebly urging its way through its native rocks, but exhausted and dried up at the moment it reached the plain. But here was an ocean, an inexhaustible depth and breadth of power made to roll round the world, and be, at the will of Providence, the illimitable instrument of its bounty. I saw our holy law feebly sheltering under its despoiled and insulted ordinances the truth of Heaven. But here was a religion scorning a narrower temple than the earth and the heaven!

[Sidenote: “The Hour is Come”]

Yet I turned away from those convictions. A thousand times I was on the point of throwing myself at the feet of the men who bore this transcendent gift and asking: “What shall I do?” A thousand times I could have cried out: “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” But oh, my doubting heart! I make no attempt to account for myself or my career—I have felt as strongly driven back as if there were an actual hand forcing me away. The illusion was a willing one, and it was suffered, like all such, to hold me in its captivity. But even when I shrank away I have said: “Whence had those men this knowledge? If angels from God were to come down to reclaim the world, could they tell us things different or tell us more?”

I looked round upon the labors of ancient wisdom, and I saw how trivial a space its utmost vigor had cleared, and how soon even that space was overrun by the rankness of the world, and I said: “Here is the central fire, the mighty reservoir of light, awaiting but the divine command to burst up in splendor, consume the impurities of the world at once, and regenerate mankind.” But the veil was upon my face. I labored against conviction, and shutting out the subject from my thoughts, sternly determined to live and die in the faith of my fathers.

I now heard but the few and simple closing words of the speaker in this group of the devoted. He was sorrowful that the Gospel had been so long committed to his hands in vain. He had, through fear of his own inadequacy, and in the remaining deference to the prejudices of his people, suffered the truth to decay, and seen the illustrious labors of the apostles without following their example.

“But,” said he, “I was rebuked; the opportunity once neglected was refused even to my prayers. I was thenceforth in perils, in civil war, in domestic sedition. I am but now come from a dungeon. But in my bonds it pleased Him, in whose hand are the heavens, to visit me. I knelt and prayed, acknowledging my sin, and beseeching Him that before I died I might proclaim His truth before Israel. In that hour came a voice, bidding me go forth; and lo! my chains fell from my hands and I went forth. And when I came to the gates of the dungeon, I willed to go forward to the city of David. But I was forbidden, and my steps were turned here, to awake my brethren to knowledge before they perish.”

The trumpets rang again as a new crowd were drained off to execution. My heart sank at the melancholy sound, but among the converts there was not a murmur.

“Kneel,” said the preacher; “the hour is come!”

They knelt and he poured out his spirit aloud in prayer

[Sidenote: “Go Forth, Redeemed of the Lord”]

“Now go forth,” he said, rising alone, “go forth, redeemed of the Lord. This night have ye known that He is gracious. Those things that God before hath shown by the mouth of all His prophets that Christ should suffer, He hath fulfilled. But ye have heard, but ye have been converted, that your sins may be blotted out when the times of refreshing shall come. But ye have been called—but ye have been justified—but ye shall be glorified. Our hope of you is stedfast—knowing that as you have been partakers of His cross, so shall ye be of His kingdom. Now be grace unto you, and peace from the King of Kings!”

He laid his hands upon the kneeling converts and went slowly round, blessing them. His face had been hitherto turned from me, and I was too much impressed by his words and the awful circumstances in which he stood even to conjecture who he was. At length in moving round he came before me. To my inexpressible surprise and sorrow the teacher was Eleazar! I had lost every trace of him since we parted in the fortress, and with sorrow of heart had concluded him a sacrifice to the common atrocities of our ferocious war. His long absence was now explained, but no explanation could account for the extraordinary change that had been wrought upon his countenance. Always generous and manly, yet the softness of a nature made for domestic life had concealed the vigor of his understanding. He was the general reconciler in the disputes of the neighboring districts, the impartial judge, the unwearied friend, and his features had borne the stamp of this quiet career.

But the man before me bore uncontrollable energy in every tone and feature. The failing flame of the torch that burned over his head was enough to show the transformation of his countenance into grandeur; his glance was a living fire; the hair that floated over it, changed by captivity to the whiteness of snow, shaded a forehead that seemed to have suddenly expanded into majesty. If I had met such a man in a desert, I should have augured in him the founder or the subverter of a throne.

While I stood absolutely awed by his presence, a cohort of spearmen poured in to gather up the gleanings of the hall. Then was renewed the scene of misery. Wretches whom I had thought dead started from the ground and flung themselves at their feet, or rushed against the ranks, tore the weapons out of their hands, and broke them in fury through the hall. Others dashed their foreheads against the walls and floor and died upon the spot. Others sprang up the projections of the sculpture and climbed with the agility of leopards to the roof, to force the casements. But additional troops poured in, and the crowd were overwhelmed and driven out to undergo their destiny.

During this long tumult, the Christian converts continued kneeling and evidently absorbed by thoughts that extinguished fear. Even the sounds from without, that terribly told what was going on, and every tone of which pierced me to the heart, produced only a deeper supplication that light would be given to the souls of the sufferers. This patience probably induced the soldiery to leave them to the last, while they drove out the more untractable at the point of the spear, like cattle to the slaughter. I still stood aloof. The sacredness of the moments that came before death were not to be interrupted. The transformed Eleazar had already passed away from the things of this world. I would not force them on him again, nor vainly and cruelly disturb the holy serenity of one at peace alike with man and Heaven.

At length the order came.

[Sidenote: “Go to the Kingdom of Glory”]

“Now, my beloved brothers, beloved in the Lord, go forth,” said Eleazar, with a noble exultation glowing in his countenance, “quit ye like men; be strong; fear not them who can kill only the body. Even this night saw you still in your sins—the wisdom that was before all worlds, hidden from you. But He that calleth light out of darkness hath wrought in you. He hath poured upon you that Spirit which is an earnest of your inheritance, holy, incorruptible, eternal in the heavens. Now, sons of Abraham, redeemed of Christ, kings and priests of God forever, go where He is gone to prepare a place for you—go to the house of many mansions—go to the kingdom of glory!”

[Illustration: “‘Now, my beloved brothers, beloved in the Lord, go forth,’ said Eleazar.”

[see page 452.

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

With tears and blessings Eleazar took water and baptized the converts. They sang a hymn, and then rising, moved toward the gate, the soldiers standing at a distance and looking on at this more than heroic resignation with eyes of respect and wonder.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Confronts Eleazar]

I could restrain myself no longer. I grasped Eleazar; he instantly recognized me, and the color that shot through his cheek showed that with me came a tide of memory. I was speechless; I embraced him; tears of old friendship dimmed my eyes. He was overpowered like myself, and could only exclaim:

“Salathiel, my brother! What misfortune has brought you here? Where is Miriam? Where are your children? You can not be a prisoner? Fly from this dreadful place!”

“Never, my brother, unless I can save you. The tyrants shall have the curse of both upon their heads.”

“This is madness, Salathiel—impiety! Oh, that you were this moment even as I am—in all but death! It is your duty to live; you have many ties to the world.”

He paused, and with a look upward said in a tone of prayer:

“Oh, that you were at this moment awake to the truths, the holy and imperishable consolations, that make the cross to me more triumphant than a throne!”

The theme was a painful one. He instantly saw my perturbation and forebore to urge me; but fixing his humid eyes on heaven, and with uplifted hands, he gave me his parting benediction.

“May the time come,” said he, “when the veil shall be taken away from the face of my unhappy kindred and of my undone country! When the days of the desolation of Israel come to be accomplished, let her kneel before the altar!—let her weep in sackcloth and repent of her iniquities; so shall the sun of glory arise upon her once more.”

Then, as if a flash of knowledge had darted into his soul, he fixed his solemn gaze on me.

[Sidenote: A Day of Brightness]

“Salathiel, you are not fit to die; pray that you may not now sink into the grave. You have fierce impulses, of whose power you have yet no conception. Supplicate for length of years; rather endure all the miseries of exile; be alone upon the earth—weary, wild, and desolate; but pray that you may not die until you know the truths that Israel yet shall know. Let it be for me to die, and seal my faith by my blood. Let it be for you to live, and seal it by your penitence. But live in hope. Even on earth, a day bright beyond earthly splendor, lovely beyond all the visions of beauty, magnificent and powerful beyond the loftiest thought of human nature, shall come, and we, even we, my brother, shall on earth meet again.”

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Chapter LIX

The Clemency of Titus

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Supplication]

There was a thrilling influence in the words of Eleazar that left me without reply, and for a while I stood absorbed. When I raised my eyes again, I saw him following the melancholy train down the valley of slaughter. I rushed after him. He would not listen to my entreaties; he would suffer no ransom to be offered for his life. I supplicated the tribune of the escort for a moment’s delay until I could solicit mercy from Titus. The officer, himself deeply pained by the service on which he was ordered, had no authority, but sent a centurion with me to the general commanding.

I hurried my guide through the immense force drawn up to witness the offering to the shades of the Roman senators and soldiers. The morning was stormy, and clouds covering the ridges of the hills darkened the feeble dawn so much that torches were necessary to direct the movement of the troops. The wind came howling through the spears and standards, but with it came the fiercer sounds of human agony. As we reached the entrance of the valley, the centurion pointed to a height where the general stood in the midst of a group of mounted officers, wrapped in their cloaks against the snows that came furiously whirling from the hills. I darted up the steep with a rapidity that left my companion far below, and implored the Roman humanity for my countrymen and for my noble and innocent brother.

On my knee, that I had never before bowed to man, I besought the muffled form, whom I took for the illustrious son of Vespasian, to spare men “whose only crime was that of having defended their country.” I adjured the heir of the empire “to rescue from an ignominious fate, subjects driven into revolt only by violences which he would be the first to disown.”

“If,” exclaimed I, “you demand money for the lives of my countrymen, it shall be given even to our last ounce of silver; if you would have territory, we will give up our lands and go forth exiles. If you must have life for life, take mine, and let my brother go free!”

The form slowly removed the cloak and Cestius was before me.

“So,” said he, with a malignant smile, “you can kneel, Jew, and play the rhetorician; however, as you are here, your having escaped me once is no reason why you should laugh at justice a second time. Here, Torquatus,” he beckoned to a centurion, “take this rebel to the crosses and bring me an account of the way in which he behaves. You see, Jew, that I have some care of your reputation. A fellow careless as you are would probably have died like a slave in a skirmish; but you shall now figure before your countrymen as a patriot should, and die with the honors of a native rebel.”

[Sidenote: The Valley of the Crosses]

I disdained to answer. The officer came up, attended by his spearmen, and I was led down to the valley. A storm of extraordinary violence, long gathering on the sky, broke forth as I descended, and it was only by grasping the rocks and shrubs on the side of the declivity that we could avoid being blown away. We staggered along, blinded, and half frozen. The storm fell heavily upon the legions, and the heights were quickly abandoned for the shelter of the valley. The valley itself was a sheet of snow, torn up by blasts that drifted it hazardously upon the troops and threw everything into confusion. But the sight that opened on me as I passed the first gorge effaced storm and soldiery, and might have effaced the world, from my mind. Through the whole extent of the naked and rocky hollow were planted crosses. The ravine, dark even in sunshine, was now black as midnight, and its only light was from the scattered torches and the fires into which the bodies of the victims were flung as they died, to make room for others. On those crosses hung hundreds, writhing in miseries made only to show the hideous capability of suffering that exists in our frame. I was instantly recognized, and many a hand was stretched out to me imploring that I should mercifully hasten death. I heard my name called on as their prince, their leader, their countryman; I heard voices calling on me to remember and revenge! Horror-struck, I raved at the legionaries and their tyrant master until I sank upon the ground in exhaustion, covering my head with my mantle that I might exclude alike sight and sound.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Awed by a Face]

A voice at my side aroused me; a cross had just been fixed on the spot, and at its foot stood, preparing for death, the man who had spoken. I looked upon his face and gave an involuntary cry. For seven-and-thirty years I had not seen that face; but I had seen it on a NIGHT never to be erased from my remembrance or my soul! I knew every feature of it through all the changes of years!

Manhood had passed into age; the bold and sanguine countenance was furrowed with cares and crimes. But I knew at once the man who had on that night been foremost at my call; the daring rabble-leader who had first shouted at my fatal summons, and maddened the multitude, as I had maddened myself and him. He turned his glance upon me at the cry. His pale visage grew black as death. The past flashed upon his soul. He shook from head to foot with keen convulsion. He gasped and tried to speak, but no words came. He beat his breast wildly and pointed to the cross with dreadful meaning. The executioner, a brutal slave, scoffed at him as a dastard. He heard nothing, but with his pallid eyes staring on me and his hand pointed upward, stood stiffening. Life departed as he stood! The executioner, impatient, laid his grasp upon him, but he was beyond the power of man. He fell backward like a pillar of stone!

I started from the corpse, and utterly unnerved, looked wildly round for some way of escape from this scene of despair. As I tried to penetrate the dusk toward the bottom of the valley, Eleazar was seen at the head of his little band, standing at the foot of a cross, surrounded by soldiers. I thought no more of safety, and plunging into the valley, forced my way through the rocks and snowdrifts until I reached the foot of the declivity on which this true hero was about to die. But there an impenetrable fence of spears stopped me. I implored, execrated, struggled; Eleazar’s look fell on me, and the smile on his uplifted countenance showed at once how much he thanked me and how calmly he was prepared to bid the world farewell. My struggles were useless, and I had but one resource more. I flew with a swiftness that baffled pursuit to the camp; passed the entrenchments by the breaches left since the battle, and before I could be stopped or questioned, entered the tent of Titus.

[Sidenote: News from Rome]

The supper-lamps were burning, and three stately-looking men still lingered over the table, one of the few unpopular luxuries of the general. A large packet of letters was being distributed by a page, and while I stood in the shade of the tent-curtain a moment, until I should ascertain whether Titus was among the three, I was made the unwilling sharer of the secrets of Rome.

“All is going on well,” said one of the readers; “here, that truest of courtiers, my showy friend, Statilius, sends, compiled by his own hand, an endless list of the pomps and processions, games and congratulations, in the Emperor’s progress through Italy. The intelligence is not the newest in the world, but it would break my courtly friend’s heart to think that he had not the happiness of giving it first. So let him think, and so let him worship the rising sun, until another dynasty comes, and he discovers that if this sun has risen in the East, a much finer one may rise in the West. Thus runs the world.”

“War with the Britons,” read another; “they have marched a hundred of their naked clans from the hills. The remnant of the Druids are busy again with their incantations, and it is more than suspected that the whole is stirred up by our incomparable governor of western Gaul, who affects the diadem, like all the ridiculous governors of the age.”

“Well then, he shall have his wish,” said a third, “the Emperor will give him, of course, a court fit for a rebel: his council, lictors; and his palace, the Mamertine. But as to the Britons, I doubt if they care one of their own leather pence whether he wears the diadem or the halter. The savages have probably been vexed by some new attempt to squeeze money from them—the quickest way to try the national sensibilities. They have the spirit of trade in them already, and are as keen in the barter of their wolf-skins and bulls’-hides as if they supplied the world with Tyrian canopies and Indian pearls.”

[Sidenote: A Letter from Sempronius]

“A letter from Sempronius!” was the next topic; “its exquisite intaglio and elaborate perfumes would betray it all the world over; full of scandals, as usual, and full of discontent. He seems quite dismantled, and complains that—the sex is growing ugly, the seasons comfortless, and mankind dull; a certain sign that my emptiest of friends and the best dresser in Italy is growing old.”

“So much the better for his circle,” said another, sipping his goblet. “As for himself, while he can flourish in curls and calumny, he will be happy, the true man of high life, a prey to tailors, a figure for actors to burlesque, and an inveterate weariness to the world.”

“But here is a private despatch from the Emperor, and, unfortunately for human eyes, written in his own most unreadable hand.”

The speaker stood up to the lamp and gave me an opportunity of observing him. His countenance and figure struck me as what no other word could express than—princely.[53] The features were handsome and strongly marked Italian, and the form, tho tending to breadth and rather under the usual stature, was eminently dignified. His voice, too, was remarkable. I never heard one that more completely united softness and majesty. Here I could have but the shadow of a doubt that I had found Titus; yet I had that shadow. Our meeting in the field, where we had fought hand to hand, gave me no recollection of the man before me. Titus might not even be among the three, and nothing but seizure and ruin could be the consequence of discovering myself to subordinates.

“Good news, it is to be hoped,” said both the listeners together as they deferentially watched his perusal.

“None whatever; a mere private chronicle in the Emperor’s usual style; all kinds of oddities together. He laughs at me for complaining of the want of intelligence from Rome, and says that unless we send him some, the politicians of the city will die of emptiness or raise a rebellion; and that he is the most ill-used personage in the empire in being obliged to supply brains for so many blockheads and keep up the reputation of an honest man in the midst of so many knaves. But he mentions, and for that I am deeply grateful, that he has just erected the golden statue, which I vowed so long ago to the memory of my unfortunate friend Britannicus, and is about to dedicate a bronze equestrian one to me, to be placed in the Circus. He concludes the epistle by saying that unless the British insurrection speedily blows over, he shall be a beggar, and must turn tribune for a livelihood; defends his impracticable manuscript, which, he says, I am imitating as fast as I can, and repeats his old jest, that if I were not born to be a prince and an idler, I might have made my bread by my talents for forgery.”

His hearers repaid the imperial merriment by its full tribute of loyal laughter.

Doubt was now at an end, and I advanced. My step roused the party, and they started up, drawing their swords. But the quick eye of Titus recognized me, and satisfying his companions by a gesture, I heard him pronounce to them: “My antagonist, the prince of Naphtali.”

There was no time for ceremony, and I addressed him at once.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Appeals to Titus]

“Son of Vespasian, you are a soldier, and know what is due to the brave. I come to solicit your mercy; it is the first time that I ever stooped to solicit man. My brother, a chieftain of Israel, is in your hands, condemned to the horrid death of the cross; he is virtuous, brave, and noble; save him, and you will do an act of justice more honorable to your name than the bloodiest victory.”

Titus looked at me in silence, and was evidently perplexed; then he returned to his chair, and having consulted with his companions, hesitatingly said:

“Prince, you know not what you have asked. I am bound, like others, by the Emperor’s commands, and they strictly are, that none of your countrymen, taken after the offer of peace, must live.”

“Hear this, God of Israel!” I cried; “King of Vengeance, hear and remember!”

“You are rash, prince,” said Titus gravely; “yet I can forgive your national temper. With others, even your venturing here might bring you into hazard. But the perfidy of your people makes truce and treaty impossible. They leave me no alternative. I lament the necessity. It is the desire of the illustrious Vespasian to reign in peace. But this is now at an end.”

He paused, and advancing toward me, offered his hand with the words: “I know that there are brave and high-minded men among your nation. I have been astonished at the valor, nay, I will call it the daring and heroic contempt of suffering and death, that this siege has already shown. I have been witness, too,” and he smiled, “of the prince of Naphtali’s prowess in the field, and I would most willingly have such among my friends.”

I waited for the conclusion.

[Sidenote: The Offer of Titus]

“Why not come among us,” he said; “give up a resistance that must end in ruin; abandon a cause that all the world sees to be desperate; save yourself from popular caprice, the violence of your rancorous factions, and the final fall of your city? Be Cæsar’s friend, and name what possession, power, or rank you will.”

The thought of deserting the cause of Jerusalem was profanation. I drew back and looked at the majestic Roman as if I saw the original tempter before me.

“Son of Vespasian, I am at this hour a poor man; I may in the next be an exile or a slave. I have ties to life as strong as ever were bound round the heart of man; I stand here a suppliant for the life of one whose loss would embitter mine! Yet not for wealth unlimited, for the safety of my family, for the life of the noble victim that is now standing at the place of torture, dare I abandon, dare I think the impious thought of abandoning, the cause of the City of Holiness.”

The picture of her ruin rose before my eyes, and tears forced their way; my strength was dissolved; my voice was choked. The Romans fixed their looks on the ground, affected by the sincerity of a soldier’s sorrow. I took the hand that was again offered.

“Titus! in the name of that Being to whom the wisdom of the earth is folly, I adjure you to beware. Jerusalem is sacred. Her crimes have often wrought her misery—often has she been trampled by the armies of the stranger. But she is still the City of the Omnipotent, and never was blow inflicted on her by man that was not terribly repaid. Hear me a moment.”

Titus stood at this, and I continued:

[Sidenote: The Passing of Power]

“The Assyrian came, the mightiest power of the world; he plundered her Temple and led her people into captivity. How long was it before his empire was a dream, his dynasty extinguished in blood, and an enemy on his throne? The Persian came; from her protector he turned into her oppressor, and his empire was swept away like the dust of the desert! The Syrian smote her; the smiter died in agonies of remorse, and where is his kingdom now? The Egyptian smote her, and who now sits on the throne of the Ptolemies? Pompey came—the invincible conqueror of a thousand cities, the light of Rome, the lord of Asia riding on the very wings of victory. But he profaned her Temple, and from that hour he went down—down, like a millstone plunged into the ocean! Blind counsel, rash ambition, womanish fears were upon the great statesman and warrior of Rome. Where does he sleep? What sands were colored with his blood? The universal conqueror died a slave by the hands of a slave! Crassus came at the head of the legions; he plundered the sacred vessels of the sanctuary. Vengeance followed him, and he was cursed by the curse of God. Where are the bones of the robber, and his host? Go tear them from the jaws of the lion and the wolf of Parthia—their fitting tomb!

[Sidenote: A Recognition and a Lie]

“You, too, son of Vespasian, may be commissioned for the punishment of a stiff-necked and rebellious people. You may scourge our naked vice by the force of arms; and then you may return to your own land, exulting in the conquest of the fiercest enemy of Rome. But shall you escape the common fate of the instrument of evil? Shall you see a peaceful old age? Shall a son of yours ever sit upon the throne? Shall not rather some monster of your blood efface the memory of your virtues, and make Rome in bitterness of soul curse the Flavian name?”

Titus grew pale, and shuddering, covered his eyes with his mantle. His companions stood gazing on me with the aspect of men gazing on the messenger of fate.

“Spare Eleazar,” was all that I could utter.

Titus made a sign to a tribune, who flew to bear, if not too late, the command of mercy.

While we continued in a silence that none of us felt inclined to break, a door opened behind me and an officer entered. It was Septimius. I seized him by the throat.

“Villain!” I cried, “give me back my child; base hypocrite! give up my innocent daughter. Where have you taken her? Lead me to her, or die!”

Titus rose, in evident surprise and indignation.

“What do I hear, Septimius? Have you been guilty of this offense? Prince, let him loose until his general shall hear what he has to say for himself.”

Septimius affected the most extreme and easy ignorance.

“Most noble Titus, I have to thank you for having saved my neck from the grasp of this hasty personage; but beyond that I have nothing to say for myself or any one else. I never saw this man before. I know no more of his daughter than of the queen of Abyssinia, or the three-formed Diana; and by the goddess, I swear that I believe him to be perfectly under her influence, and either a lunatic or a most excellent actor. Be honest, Jew, if you can, and acknowledge that you never saw me before in your life.”

I stood in astonishment; his effrontery struck me dumb.

[Sidenote: Warned of an Assassin]

“You perceive, most noble Titus,” he went on, “how a plain question puts an end to this public accuser’s charges. But in his present state, whether affected or real, he should not be suffered to go at large; suffer me to send him to my quarters, where he shall be guarded, until we at least find out what brought him here.”

“Ingrate,” I exclaimed, “you make me hate human nature! Better that I had left you to be trampled like the viper that you are.”

The dark eye of the general, again turned on Septimius, seemed to require a graver explanation.

“Ingrate!” retorted he. “By Jupiter, the fellow’s insolence is superb. For what should I be grateful? but for my escape from his detestable hands. Very probably he figured among the rabble that would have murdered me as they did the rest of us; grateful, yes, I ought to be for the lesson never to venture within his walls on the faith of the traitors that hold them. But let me be allowed to say, most noble Titus, that you condescend too much in listening to any of this rabble; nay, that you hazard the safety of the state in hazarding your person within the reach of one of a race of assassins.”

Titus smiled, and waved back his companions, who, on the surmise, were approaching him.

“Let me be honored with your commands,” urged Septimius, “to take this person in charge; felon or insane, I shall speedily put him in the way of cure.”

A tribune, breathless with haste, came in at the moment with a letter, which he gave to Titus, and retired to a distant part of the tent to await the answer. The color rose to the Roman’s cheek as he looked over the paper; he showed it to his companions, and then put it into my hand. I read the words:

“An assassin, hired by the chiefs of Jerusalem, yesterday passed the gates. His object is the life of the Roman general. He goes under the pretense of recovering one of his family, supposed to be carried off from the city, but who has never left his house. He has communications with the camp, by which he can enter at pleasure, and the noble Titus can not be too much on his guard.”

[Sidenote: Held in Custody]

The note was in an enclosure from Cestius, stating that it had just been transmitted to him from a high authority in Jerusalem. I flung it on the ground with the scorn due to such an accusation, declaring that it was unnecessary for “my enemy Cestius to have put his name to a document which so easily revealed its writer.”

“You, of course, Septimius,” said the general, fixing his penetrating gaze on him, “could know nothing of this letter.”

Septimius entered on his defense with seriousness, and showed that from the time and circumstances no share in it could be attached to him. Titus retired a few steps, and having consulted with the officers, who I perceived were unanimous for my being instantly put to death, addressed me in that grave and silver-toned voice which characterized the singular composure of his nature.

“We have exchanged blows and pledges of honor, prince, and I will not suffer myself to believe that a man of your rank and soldiership could stoop to the crime charged here. In truth, were none but personal considerations in question, I should instantly set you free. But there are weighty interests connected with my life, which make it seem fitting to my friends and advisers that in all cases precautions should be taken which otherwise I should disdain. To satisfy their minds, and the spirit of the Emperor’s orders, I must detain you for a few days. Your treatment shall be honorable.”

Septimius advanced again to demand my custody, but a look repelled the request, and I was directed to follow one of the secretaries of Titus.

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Chapter LX

The Treatment of a Prisoner

[Sidenote: A Favored Prisoner]

A troop of cavalry were at the tent door. We set off through the storm, and a few miles from the camp reached a large building peopled with a crowd of high functionaries attached to Titus as governor of Judea.

“You must be a prodigious favorite with the general,” said my companion, as we passed through a range of magnificent rooms furnished with Italian luxury, “or he would never have sent you here. He had these chambers prepared for his own residence, but your countrymen have kept him too busy, and for the last month he is indebted to them for sleeping under canvas.”

I observed that “peace was the first wish of my heart, but that no people could be reproached with contending too boldly for freedom.”

“The sentiment is Roman,” was the reply. “But let us come to the fact. Titus, once fixed in the government, would be worth all the fantasies that ever fed the declaimers on independence. His character is peace, and if he ever comes to the empire, he will make the first of monarchs. You should try him and reap the first fruits of his talent for making people happy. There, look round this room; you see every panel hung with a picture, a lyre, or a volume; what does that tell?”

“Certainly not the habits of a camp; yet he is distinguished in the field.”

[Sidenote: The Emperor]

“No man more. There is not a rider in the legions who can sit a horse or throw a lance better. He has the talents of a general besides; and more than all, he has the most iron perseverance that ever dwelt in man. If the two armies were to slaughter each other until there was but half a dozen spearmen left between them, Titus would head his remnant and fight until he died. But whether it is nature or the poison that he drank along with Britannicus, he wants the eternal vividness of his father. Aye, there was the soldier for the legions. Look, prince, at this picture,[54] and tell me what you think of the countenance.”

He drew aside a curtain that covered a superb portrait of the Emperor. I saw a countenance of incomparable shrewdness, eccentricity, and self-enjoyment. Every feature told the same tale, from the rounded and dimpled chin to the broad and deeply veined forehead, overhung with its rough mat of hair. The hooked nose, the deep wrinkles about the lips, the thick dark eyebrows, obliquely raised as if some new jest was gathering, showed the perpetual humorist. But the eye beneath that brow—an orb black as charcoal, with a spot of intense brightness in the center, as if a breath could turn that coal into flame—belonged to the supreme sagacity and determination that had raised Vespasian from a tent to the throne.

The secretary, whose jovial character strongly resembled that of the object of his panegyric, could not restrain his admiration.

“There,” said he, “is the man who has fought more battles, said more good things, and taken less physic than any emperor that ever wore the diadem. I served with him from decurion up to tribune, and he was always the same—active, brave, and laughing from morn to night. Old as he is, day never finds him in his bed. He rides, swims, runs, outjests everybody, and frowns at nothing on earth but an old woman and a physician. He loves money, ’tis true; yet what he squeezes from the overgrown, he scatters like a prince. But his mirth is inexhaustible; a little rough, so much for his camp education; but the most curious mixture of justice, spleen, and pleasantry in the world.”

My companion’s memory teemed with examples.

[Sidenote: An Emperor’s Traits]

“An Alexandrian governor was ordered to Rome to account for a long course of extortion; immediately on his arrival he pretended to be taken violently ill, which, of course, put off the inquiry. The Emperor heard of this, expressed the greatest interest in so meritorious a public servant, paid him a visit the next day, disguised as a physician, ordered him a variety of medicines, which the unfortunate governor was compelled to take, renewed his visit regularly every day, and every day charged him an enormous fee! Beggary stared the governor in the face, and never was a complication of disorders so rapidly cured!

“I was riding out in his attendance one day a few miles from Rome when we saw a fellow beating his mule cruelly, and on being called to, insisted on his right to torture the animal. I was indignant and would have fought the mule’s quarrel. But the Emperor laughed at my zeal, and after some jesting with the brutal owner, bought the mule, only annexing the condition that the fellow should lead it to the stable; he actually sent him with the mule two hundred and fifty miles on foot, to one of his palaces in Gaul, and with a lictor after him to see that the contract was fairly performed.

“One of his chamberlains had been soliciting a place about court, for, as he said, his brother. The Emperor found out the fact that it was for a stranger, who was to lay down a large sum. He sent for the stranger, ratified the bargain, gave him the place, and put the money in his own pocket. The chamberlain was in great alarm on meeting the Emperor some days after. ‘Your dejection is natural enough,’ said Vespasian, ‘as you have so lately lost your brother; but, then, you should wish me joy, for he has become mine!’

“By the altar of Momus and the brass beard of the god Ridiculous, I could tell you a hundred things of the same kind,” continued the jovial and inexhaustible secretary; “take but one more.

[Sidenote: Betraying Court Secrets]

“One of our great patricians, an Æmilian, and as vain and insolent a beast as lives, had ordered a quantity of a particular striped cloth, which it cost the merchant infinite pains to procure. But the great man’s taste had altered in the mean time, and he returned the cloth without ceremony, threatening, besides, that if the merchant made any clamors on the subject, his payment should be six months’ work in the slave-mill. The man, on the verge of ruin, came, tearing his hair and bursting with rage, to lay his complaint before the Emperor, who, however, plainly told him that there was no remedy, but desired him to send a dress of the same cloth to the palace. Within the week the patrician was honored with a message that the Emperor would dine with him, and the message was accompanied with the dress and an intimation that Vespasian wished to make it popular. Rome was instantly ransacked for the cloth, but not a yard of it was to be found but in the merchant’s hands. The patrician’s household must be equipped in it, cost what it would. The dealer, in pleasant revenge, charged ten times the value, and his fortune was made in a day.

“Now Titus, with many a noble quality, is altogether another man. He abhors the Emperor’s rough-hewn jocularity; he speaks Greek better than the Emperor does his own tongue; is a poet, and a clever one besides, in both languages; extemporizes verse with elegance; is no mean performer on the lyre; sings; is a picture-lover, and so forth. I believe from my soul that, with all his talents for war and government, he would rather spend his day over books and his evenings among poets and philosophers, or telling Italian tales to the ears of some of your brilliant orientals, than ride over the world at the head of legions. And now,” said my open-hearted guide, “having betrayed court secrets enough for one day, I must leave you and return to the camp. Here you will spend your time as you please until some decision is come to. The household is at your service, and the officer in command will attend your orders. Farewell!”

Captivity is wretchedness, even if the captive trod on cloth of gold. My treatment was imperial; a banquet that might have feasted a Roman epicure was laid before me; a crowd of attendants, sumptuously habited, waited round the table; music played, perfumes burned, and the whole ceremonial of princely luxury was gone through, as if Titus were present instead of his heart-broken prisoner. But to that prisoner bread and water with freedom would have been the truer luxury.

I wandered through the spacious apartments, dazzled by their splendor and often ready to ask: “Can man be unhappy in the midst of these things?” yet answering the question in the pang of heart which they were so powerless to soothe. I took down the richly blazoned volumes of the Western poets, and while at every line that I unrolled, I felt how much richer were their contents than the gold and gems that encased them, still I felt the inadequacy of even their beauty and vigor to console the spirit stricken by real calamity. I strayed to the crystal casements, through which the sunset had begun to pour in a tide of glory. The landscape was beautiful—a peaceful valley, shut in with lofty eminences, on whose marble foreheads the sunbeams wrought coronets as colored and glittering as ever were set with chrysolite and ruby. The snow was gone as rapidly as it had come, and the green earth, in the freshness of the bright hour, might almost be said “to laugh and sing.” The air came, laden with the fragrance of flowers. There was a light and joyous beauty in even the waving of the shrubs as they shook off the moisture in sparkles at every wave; birds innumerable broke out into song, and fluttered their little wet wings with delight in the sunshine; and the rivulet, still swelled with the snows, ran dimpling and gurgling along with a music of its own.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Alone]

But the true sadness of the soul is not to be scattered even by the loveliness of external things. I turned from the sun and nature to fling myself on my couch and feel that where a man’s treasure is, there his heart is also.

“What might not in those hours be doing in Jerusalem?” mused I; “what fanatic violence, personal revenge, or public license might not be let loose while I was lingering among the costly vanities of the pagan? My enemy at least was there in the possession of unbridled authority”; and the thought was in itself a history of evil. “And where was Esther, my beloved, the child of my soul, the glowing and magnificent-minded being whose beauty and whose thoughts were scarcely mortal? Might she not be in the last extremity of suffering, upbraiding me for having forgotten my child; or in the hands of robbers, dragging her delicate form through rocks and sands; or dying, without a hand to succor, or a voice to cheer her in the hour of agony?”

Thought annihilates time, and I had lain one day thus sinking from depth to depth, I know not how long, until I was roused by the entrance of the usual endless train of attendants; and the chief steward, a venerable man of my country, whom Titus had generously continued in the office where he found him, came to acquaint me that the banquet awaited my pleasure. The old man wept at the sight of a chieftain of Israel in captivity; his heart was full, and when I had dismissed the attendants with their untasted banquet, he gave way to his recollections.

[Sidenote: In the Palace of Ananus]

The palace was once the dwelling of Ananus, the high priest whose death under the cruelest circumstances was the leading triumph of the factions and the ruin of Jerusalem. In the very chamber where I sat he had spent the last day of his life, and left it only to take charge of the Temple on the fatal night of the assault by the Idumæans. He was wise and vigorous, but what is the wisdom of man? A storm, memorable in the annals of devastation, had raged during the night. Ananus, convinced that all was safe from human hostility in this ravage of the elements, suffered the wearied citizens to retire from their posts. The gates were opened by traitors; the Idumæans, furious for blood and spoil, rushed in; the guard, surprised in their sleep, were massacred; and by daylight eight thousand corpses lay on the sacred pavements of the Temple, and among them the noblest and wisest man of Judea, Ananus.

“I found,” said the old man, “the body of my great and good lord under a heap of dead, but was not suffered to convey it to the tomb of his fathers, in the valley of Jehoshaphat. I brought his sword and his phylactery here, and they are now the only memorials of the noblest line that perished since the Maccabee. In these chambers I have remained since, and in them it is my hope to die. The palace is large; the Roman senators and officers reside in another wing, which I have not entered for years, and shall never enter; mild masters as the Romans have been to me, I can not bear to see them masters within the walls of a chief of my country.”

The story of Naomi occurred to me, but she was so much beyond my hope of discovery that I forbore to renew the old man’s griefs by her name. A sound of trumpets and the trampling of cavalry were now heard from the portal.

“It is but the nightly changing of the troops,” said the steward, “or perhaps the arrival of officers from the camp; they often ride here after nightfall to supper, spend a few hours, and by daybreak are gone. But of them and their proceedings I know nothing. No Jew enters, or desires to enter, the banquet-hall of the enemies of his country.”

[Sidenote: In Closer Confinement]

A knocking at the door interrupted him, and an officer appeared with an order for the prisoner in the palace to be removed into strict confinement. The venerable steward gave way to tears at the new offense to a leader of his people. I felt some surprise, but merely asked what new alarm had demanded this harsh measure.

“I know no more,” replied the officer, “than that the general has arrived here a few minutes since, and that as some attempts have been lately made on his life, the council have thought proper to put the Jewish poniards as much out of his way as they can. The order is universal, and I am directed to lead you to your apartment.”

“Then let them look to my escape,” said I; “I thank the council for this service. While I continued above suspicion, they might have thrown open every door in their dungeons. But since they thus degrade me, you may tell them that their walls should be high and their bolts strong to keep me their prisoner. Lead on, sir.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s New Quarters]

The council seemed to have been aware of my opinion, for my new chamber was in one of the turrets. The lower floor being occupied by the guard, there could be no undermining; the smallness of the building laid all the operations of the fugitive open to the sentinel’s eye, and the height was of itself an obstacle that, even if the bars were forced, might daunt the adventurer. The steward followed me to my den, wringing his hands. Yet the little apartment was not incommodious; there were some obvious attempts at rendering it a fitter place of habitation than usual, and a more delicate frame than mine might have found indulgence in its carpets and cushions. Even my solitary hours were not forgotten, and some handsome volumes from the governor’s library occupied a corner. There was a lyre, too, if I chose to sing my sorrows, and a gilded chest of wine if I chose to drink them away. The height was an inconvenience only to my escape, but a lover of landscape and fresh air would have envied me, for I had the range of the horizon and the benefit of every breeze from its four quarters. A Chaldee would have chosen it for his commerce with the lights of heaven, for every star, from the gorgeous front of Aldebaran to the minutest diamond spark of the sky, shone there in all its brightness. And a philosopher would have rejoiced in the secluded comfort of a spot which, in the officer’s parting pleasantry, was in every sense “so much above the world.”

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Chapter LXI

A Steward’s Narrative

To me, the prison and the palace were the same. No believer in fate, and a strong believer in the doctrine that in the infinite majority of cases the unlucky have to thank only themselves, I was yet irresistibly conscious of my own stern exception. That there was an influence hanging over me I deeply knew; that I might as well strive with the winds was the fruit of my whole experience; and with the loftiest calculation of the wonders that human energy may work, I abandoned myself on principle to the chances of the hour. I was the weed upon the wave, and whether above or below the surface, I knew that the wave would roll on, and that I must roll on along with it. I was the atom in the air, and whether I should float unseen forever or be brought into sight by the gilding of some chance sunbeam, my destiny was to float and quiver up and down. I was the vapor, and whether, like the evening cloud, my after-years were to evolve into glorious shapes and colors, or I should creep along the pools and valleys of fortune till the end of time—yet there I was, still in existence, and that existence bound by laws incapable of the choice or the caprices of man.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Burden]

I had yet to learn the true burden of my great malediction, for the circumstances of my life were adverse to its fated solitude of soul; its bitter conviction that there was not a being under the canopy of heaven whose heart was toward me. I was still in the very tumult of life and battling with the boldest. Public cares, personal interests, glowing attachments, the whole vigorous activity of the citizen and the soldier were mine. I was still husband, father, friend, and champion; my task was difficult and grave, but it was ardent, proud, and animating. I was made for this energy of the whole man; master of a powerful frame that defied fatigue, and was proof against the sharpest visitations of nature; and of an intellect which, whatever might be its rank, rejoiced in tasking itself with labors that appalled the multitude.

Idle as I knew the praise of man, and sovereign as was my scorn for the meanness which stoops to the vulgar purchase of popularity, I felt and honored the true fame—that renown whose statue is devoted, not by suspicious and clamorous flattery of the time, but by the solemn and voluntary homage of the future, whose splendor, like that of a new-born star, if it take ages to reach mankind, is sure to reach them at last, and shines for ages after its fount is extinguished; whose essential power, if it be coerced and obscured, like that of a man while his earthly tenement still shuts him in, is thenceforth to develop itself from strength to strength—the mortal putting on immortality.

[Sidenote: The Fetters of a Soul]

In the whirl of such thoughts I was often carried away, to the utter oblivion of my peculiar fate, for the man and his associations were strong within me, in defiance of the command. The gloom often passed away from my soul, as the darkness does from the midnight ocean in the dash and foam of its own waters. Nature is perpetual and drives the affections, sleeping or waking, as it drives the blood through the old channels. It was only at periods, produced by strong circumstance, that I felt the fetter, but then the iron entered into my soul! To this partial pressure belongs the singular combination of such a fate as mine with an interest in the world, with my loves and hates, my thirst of human fame, my reluctance at the prospect of the common ills and injuries of life. I was a man, and this is the whole solution of the problem. For one remote evidence that I was distinct from mankind, I had ten thousand, direct and constant, that I was the same. But for the partiality of the pressure there was a lofty reason.

The man who feels himself above the common fate is instantly placed above the common defenses of mankind. He may calumniate and ruin; he may burn and plunder; he may be the rebel and the murderer. Fear is, after all, the great defense. But what earthly power could intimidate him? What were chains or the scaffold to him who felt instinctively that time was not made for his being; that the scaffold was impotent; that he should yet trample on the grave of his judge, on the moldered throne of his king, on the dead sovereignty of his nation? With his impassiveness, his experience, his knowledge, and his passions, concocted and blackened by ages, what breast could be safe against the dagger of this tremendous exile? What power be secure against the rebel machination or the open hostility of a being invested with the strength of immortal evil? What was to hinder a man made familiar with every mode of influencing human passions—the sage, the sorcerer, the fount of tradition, the friend of their worshiped ancestors—from maddening the multitude at whose head he willed to march, clothed in the attributes of almost a divinity?

But I was precluded or saved from this fearful career by the providential feeling of the common repugnances, hopes, and fears of human nature. Pain and disease were instinctively as much shunned by me as if I held my life on the frailest tenure; death was as formidable as my natural soldiership would suffer it to be; and even when the thought occurred that I might defy extinction, it threw but a darker shade over the common terrors, to conceive that I must undergo the suffering of death without the peace of the grave. Man bears his agony for once, and it is done. Mine might be borne to the bitterest extremity, but must be borne with the keener bitterness of the knowledge that it was in vain.

[Sidenote: A Message from Septimius]

I was recalled from those reveries to the world by a paper dropped through a crevice in the rafters above my head. On seeing its signature, “Septimius,” my first impulse was to tear it in pieces, but Esther’s name struck me, and I read it through.

“You must not think me a villain, tho I confess appearances are much in favor of the supposition. But I had no choice between denying that I knew you and being instantly beheaded. This comes of discipline. Titus is a disciplinarian of the first order, and the consequence is that no man dares acknowledge any little irregularity before him: so far, his morality propagates knaves. But I must clear myself of the charge of having acted disingenuously by your daughter. I take every power that binds the soul to witness that I know not what is become of her; nay, I am in the deepest anxiety to know the fate of one so lovely, so innocent, and so high-minded.

[Sidenote: A Lover’s Confession]

“And now, prince, that I am out of the reach of your frown, let me have courage to disburden my heart. I have long known Esther, and as long loved her. From the time when I was first received within your palace in Naphtali—and I have not forgotten that to your hospitality I then owed my life—I was struck with her talents and her beauty. When the war separated us and I returned to Rome, neither in Rome nor in the empire could I see her equal. To solicit our union I gave up the honors and pleasures of the court for the campaign in your hazardous country. I searched Judea in vain, and it was chiefly in the vague hope of obtaining some intelligence of Esther that I solicited the command of our unfortunate mission. There I felt all hazard more than repaid by her sight, to me lovelier than ever. I will acknowledge that I prolonged my confinement to have the opportunity of obtaining her hand. But her religious scruples were unconquerable. I implored her leave to explain myself to you. Even this, too, she refused, ‘from her knowledge of your decision.’ What then was I to do? Loving to excess, bewildered by passion, oppressed with disappointment, and seeing but one object on earth, my evil genius prompted me to act the dissembler.

“Under pretext of disclosing some secrets connected with your safety I induced her to meet me, for the first and the last time, on the battlements. There I besought her to fly with me—to be my bride—to enjoy the illustrious rank and life that belonged to the imperial blood; and when we were once wedded, to solicit the approval of her family. I was sincere; I take the gods to witness I was sincere. But my entreaty was in vain; she repelled me with resolute scorn; she charged me with treachery to you, to her, to faith, and to sacred hospitality. I knelt to her—she spurned me. In distraction, and knowing only that to live without her was wretchedness, I was bearing her away to the gate when we were surrounded by armed men. My single attendant fled; I was overpowered, and I saw Esther, my lovely and beloved Esther, no more.”

There was an honesty in this full confession that did more for the writer’s cause than subtler language. The young Roman had been severely tried, and who could expect from a soldier the self-denial that it might have been hard to find under the brow of philosophy? Stern as time and trial had made me, I was not petrified into a contempt for the generous weaknesses of earlier years; and to love a being like Esther—what was it but to be just? While I honored the high sense of duty which repelled a lover so dangerous to a woman’s heart, I pitied and forgave the violence of a passion lighted by unrivaled loveliness of form and mind.

It was growing late, and the steward, who made a virtue of showing me the more respect the more I was treated with severity, came in to arrange my couch for the night; he would suffer no inferior hands to approach the person of one of the leaders of his fallen country.

“In truth,” said he, “if I were not permitted to be your attendant to-night, my prince might have been forgotten, for every human being but myself is busy in the banquet-gallery.”

Sounds of instruments and voices arose.

[Sidenote: Titus Gives a Banquet]

“There,” said he, “you may hear the music. Titus gives a supper in honor of the Emperor’s birthday, and the palace will be kept awake until daylight, for the Romans, with all their gravity, are great lovers of the table, and Titus is renowned for late sittings. Would you wish to see the banquet?”

So saying, he unbarred the shutters of a casement, commanding a view along the gallery, of which every door and window was thrown open for the breeze.

If an ancient Roman could start from his slumber into the midst of European life, he must look with scorn on its absence of grace, elegance, and fancy. But it is in its festivities, and most of all in its banquets, that he would feel the incurable barbarism of the Gothic blood. Contrasted with the fine displays that made the table of the Roman noble a picture and threw over the indulgence of appetite the colors of the imagination, with what eyes must he contemplate the tasteless and commonplace dress, the coarse attendants, the meager ornament, the want of mirth, music, and intellectual interest—the whole heavy machinery that converts the feast into the mere drudgery of devouring!

[Sidenote: Salathiel Views the Scene]

The guests before me were fifty or sixty splendidly attired men, attended by a crowd of domestics equipped with scarcely less splendor, for no man thought of coming to the banquet in the robes of ordinary life. The embroidered couch, itself a striking object, allowed the ease of position, at once delightful in the relaxing climates of the south and capable of combining with every grace of the human figure. At a slight distance the table, loaded with plate, glittering under a profusion of lamps and surrounded by couches covered with rich draperies, was like a central source of light radiating in broad shafts of every brilliant hue. All that belonged to the ornament of the board was superb. The wealth of the patricians and their perpetual intercourse with Greece made them masters of the finest performances of the arts. The sums expended on plate were enormous, but its taste and beauty were essential to the refined enjoyment of the banquet. Copies of the most famous statues and groups of sculpture in the precious metals, exquisite trophies of Greek and Roman victory, models of the celebrated temples, mingled with vases of flowers and burning perfumes; and covering and coloring all was a vast scarlet canopy, which combined the groups beneath the eye, and threw the whole scene into the light that a painter would love.

But yet finer skill was shown in the constant prevention of that want of topic which turns conversation into weariness. There was a rapid succession of new excitements. Even the common changes of the table were made to assist this purpose. The entrance of each course was announced by music, and the attendants were preceded by a procession of minstrels, chaplet-crowned, and playing Grecian melodies. Between the courses a still higher entertainment was offered in the recitations, dramas, and pleasantries, read or acted by a class of professional satirists, of the absurdities of the day.

[Sidenote: The Amusements of a Feast]

It is easy to imagine how fertile a source of interest this must have been made by the subtle and splenetic Italian moving through Roman life; the most various, animating, and fantastic scene in which society ever shone. The recitations were always looked to as the charm of the feast. They were often severe, but their severity was reserved for public men and matters. The court supplied the most tempting and popular ridicule, but the reciter was a privileged person, and all the better-humored Cæsars bore the castigation without a murmur. No man in the empire was more laughed at than Vespasian, and no man oftener joined in the laugh.

One of this morning’s sports was to collect the burlesques of the night before, give them new pungency by a touch of the imperial pen, and then despatch them to make their way through the world. The strong-headed sovereign knew the value of an organ of public opinion, and used to call their perusal, “sitting for his picture.” The picture was sometimes so strong that the courtiers trembled. But the veteran, who had borne thirty years of battle, laid it up among “his portraits,” laughed the insult away, and repeated his popular saying, “that when he was old enough to come to years of discretion and give up the emperor, he should become reciter himself and have his turn with the world.”

The recitations again were varied by a sportive lottery, in which the guests drew prizes—sometimes of value, gems and plate—sometimes merely an epigram, or a caricature. The banquet generally closed with a theatric dance by the chief public performers of the day, and the finest forms and the most delicate art of Greece and Ionia displayed the story of Theseus and Ariadne, the flight of Jason, the fate of Semele, or some other of their brilliant fictions. In the presence of this vivid display sat, tempering its sportiveness by the majesty of religion, the three great tutelar idols of Rome—Jove, Juno, and Minerva, of colossal height, throned at the head of the hall; completing, false as they were, the most singular and dazzling combination that man ever saw, of the delight of the senses with the delight of the mind.

To me human delight was always a source of enjoyment, and in the sounds of the harps and flutes and the pleasant murmur of cheerful voices I was not unwilling to forget the spot from which I listened. But the prisoner can not long forget his cell, and closing the casement I walked away.

[Sidenote: The Steward Tells of Matthan]

“Little I ever thought,” sighed the old steward, “of seeing that sight. But all nations have fallen in their time, and perhaps the only wonder is that Israel should have stood so long. It is still stranger to my eyes to see that gallery as it is to-night. It is fifteen years this very day since I saw the light of lamp or the foot of man within those casements.”

“Yet,” said I, “the great Ananus lived as became his rank, and there were then no dangers to disturb him in the midst of his people.”

“But there was one terrible event which made those walls unhallowed; nay, even in this spot I would not remain alone through the night to have the palace for my own.”

A rich strain of music that ushered in some change in the displays of the banquet interrupted my question, while the old man’s countenance assumed something of the alarm which he described.

“That sound,” said he, shuddering, “goes to my heart. It is the same that I heard on the night of death. On that night Matthan, the only son of my great master, was to be wedded to the daughter of the prince of Hebron, and that gallery was laid out for the wedding-feast. All the leaders of Jerusalem were there, all the noble women, all the chief priesthood; all the grandeur, wealth, and beauty of our tribe. But Matthan was not the son of his father’s mind. He had fled from his father’s roof years before, and taken refuge in the mountains. The caravan passing through Galilee dreaded the name of Matthan, for he was bold; the chief of the hills saw his followers flying from his side, for deadly was the spear of Matthan; but he was generous, and often the slave rejoiced in the breaking of his chains, and the peasant saw his flocks cover the valley again by the arm and the bounty of Matthan.

[Sidenote: A Countenance of Wrath and Wo]

“I saw him on the day when he returned; danger or sorrow had wrought a change in him like the passing from youth to age. His strength was gone, and his voice was broken, like the voice of him that treads on the brink of the timely grave. His noble father wept over him, but gave him welcome; and the palace was filled with rejoicing for the coming back of the first-born. Yet he took no delight in the feast, neither in the praises of men nor in the voice of the singer. He wandered through his father’s halls, even as the leopard, chained and longing to escape to the desert and the prey again. Disturbances were beginning to be heard in Jerusalem, and he fell into the hands of the evil one. Onias, the man of blood, betrayed him into the secret ways of conspiracy against our conquerors. His heart was bold and his temper high, and he was easily drawn into the desperate game by a villain who stirred up the generous spirit of our nobles, only to sell their blood to Rome.

“He grew more lonely day by day; withdrew from the amusements of his rank, and shut himself up in the wing of the palace, ending in this tower. In this room I have seen his lamp burning through the livelong winter nights, and grieved over the sleeplessness that showed he was among the unhappy.

[Sidenote: The Strangeness of a Bridegroom]

“At last a change was wrought upon him. He went forth; he took delight in the horse and the chariot, in the chase, and the feast, and the die. His father, that he might bless his posterity before he died, counseled him to take to wife Thamar, the noblest of the daughters of Hebron. The day of the marriage was appointed. On that day I saw him come from the council-hall, after receiving the congratulations of his friends. I saw him passing along to his chamber, but I dared not cross him on his way. He thought that he was alone, and then he gave way to his agony. Never did I behold such a countenance of wrath and wo. It was bloated with prodigal living, and it was now flushed with wine. He raved, he rent his bridal raiment and cast it from him; he wept; he knelt and cursed the hour he was born. I remained in my refuge, yet more in fear of his countenance than of his sword. He took letters from his bosom, read them, and then scattered their fragments in the air. He tottered toward me, and I dreaded his rage, but I saw at a glance that his mind was gone. He was talking to the air; he clasped his hands wildly; his face was covered with tears; he implored for mercy, and fell. I hastened to bear him to a couch; he saw me not, but cried out against himself as a betrayer and a murderer, the fugitive from honor, the criminal marked by the hand of Heaven.

“I called for help. His mountaineers rushed in; they repulsed me; and chiding him in their barbarian tongue, and seeming accustomed to those fits of sorrow, carried away in their arms the noble Matthan, crying like a child.

“The evening fell, and I saw him ride forth at the head of his kindred to bring home the bride. The wretchedness of the day had passed, and those who looked only on the lofty bearing and heard the joyous language of the leader of that train would have thought that sorrow had never touched his heart. I watched for his return with anxiety, for I deemed him unhallowed.

[Sidenote: The Coming of a Bride]

“But all was well; the bridal train returned. Matthan, glittering in jewels, came proudly, reining a steed white as the snow. The harp and trumpet, the chorus of the singers, the light of the torches, and the glitter of the youths and maidens who danced before the bride made me forget everything but the joy of seeing peace among us once more. But at the banquet the wonder of all was the bridegroom himself. Loud as the guests’ voices were, his voice was the loudest; he laughed at everything, as if he had never known a care in the world, or was never to know one again. The jest was never out of his lips; and when he pledged the cup to the health of the company or the fair bride—and often he pledged it that evening—he always said something that raised shouts of applause. I once or twice passed near him, but he had wiped every sign of grief from his features, and if he seemed to be mad with anything, it was with joy. The gallery rang with admiration, and not less with surprise, for he had shut himself up so long from the people that he was almost unknown, and the world is generally good-natured enough to invent a character for those who will take no trouble to make one for themselves. Some had set him down for intolerable haughtiness; others for fear of mixing in the growing tumults; others for a dealer in the black arts; and still others for a mere fool. But now opinions were altered, and every voice of his tribe was loud in wonder at the talents he had so long hid in retirement.

“I was standing in the train of the High Priest, near the central casement, through which you may now see the throne of Titus. My eyes, I know not why, strayed to this tower; I marked a feeble lamp, a form rushing backward and forward in gestures of violent sorrow. A foot beside me made me turn. There stood Matthan with his eyes fixed upon the tower. But his mind was gone. He looked like a man stricken into stone. He saw me not; he saw not the guests; he saw nothing but the feeble lamp, the hurrying form.

“The chorus of the singing women announced that the bride was about to come. I looked up at the tower; the lamp was twinkling its last, and the form was still seen wringing its hands. The hymn began that denotes the veiling of the bride; but my eyes were fixed on the dying light and the form, which now held a cup in its hand. A shriek was heard, so wild that the guests sprang from their seats in alarm and astonishment. My eye turned upon Matthan, but he had summoned up his strength, and tho I saw him shake in every limb, his proud lip wore a smile.

“Clasping his hand upon his brow, he abruptly turned from the window and demanded why the bridal attendants delayed the coming of the princess of Hebron. The lamp had now disappeared, and the tower was in darkness again. The portals were at length thrown open and the bride was led up to the canopy beneath which the bridegroom stood. He raised the veil. His countenance was instantly transformed into horror. He uttered no cry, but stood gazing. The bride let fall the veil again, and taking his hand, led him slowly and without a word down the hall.

[Sidenote: Matthan’s Death]

“None checked this strange ceremony; none dared to check it. We were deprived of all power by astonishment. The High Priest himself stood with his venerable hands lifted up to heaven, as if he felt that evil was come upon his house. The wedded pair walked in silence through the long range of chambers to the tower, and as they passed, the numberless attendants felt themselves bound by mysterious awe. But our senses at length returned, and Ananus, in the full dread of misfortune, yet bold to his dying hour, suffered none to go before him. We found the door of the tower barred, and long summoned Matthan to come forth and relieve our fears lest some desperate invention of sorcery had been played upon him. No answer was returned, and we forced the door.

“What a sight was there! Two corpses lay side by side. The blood still trickled from the bosom of the unfortunate Matthan. I raised the veil of the bride; the hue of poison was upon the lips, but they were not the lips of the princess of Hebron. The countenance was Arabian, and of exceeding beauty, but wan and wasted by sorrow.”

“Who, then, was his strange companion in the hall?” I asked.

The answer was given with a shudder. “I know not, but it seemed scarcely a being of this world. A new confusion arose. The mountaineers, on hearing of the death of their lord and still more of that noble creature in whom they honored the race of their chieftains, demanded vengeance: they were too fierce to listen to reason, and our attempts to explain the unhappy truth only kindled their rage. Simitars were drawn, blood was shed, and tho the barbarians were repelled, yet they plundered the wing of the palace and bore off the infant offspring of their dead mistress, the last scion of an illustrious tree that was itself so soon to feel the ax.

“I saw the unfortunate and guilty Matthan laid in the sepulcher of his fathers—the last that ever slept there, for his great sire, worthy of being laid in the monument of kings, was denied the honors of the grave by his murderers. Yet he sleeps in the noblest of all graves; his memory is treasured in the love and sorrows of his country.

[Sidenote: The Arabian Stranger]

“It was discovered that Matthan, during his wanderings in the desert, had wedded the daughter of a sheik. He loved her with the violence of his nature, but the prospects which opened to him on his return to his country made him shrink from the acknowledgment of his Arabian bride. Yet to live without her he found impossible, and he brought her to the tower. Surrounded by his mountaineers, this portion of the palace was inaccessible. His solitude and the lights seen through the casements were often thought to imply studies of the strange philosophy or evil superstitions that had begun to infect the noble youth of Palestine.

“But the necessity of sustaining his ambition by an illustrious marriage drove his fickle heart at last to treachery. The Arabian knew the intended marriage, and pined away before his eyes. Remorse and ambition alternately distracted him. The bridal procession was seen by the unhappy wife, and she swallowed poison. The rest is beyond my power to account for. But it is rumored among the attendants that strange sights have since been seen and sounds of a bridal throng heard in the chambers through which their last melancholy procession was made; tho, whether it be truth or the common fear of the peasantry, I know not, nor indeed wish too curiously to inquire.”

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Chapter LXII

A Prisoner in the Tower

[Sidenote: Confusion among Guests]

As the old man spoke, sounds arose not unsuited to his tale. But my faith in the legend did not amount to so sudden a realization, and I looked toward the banquet. There, from whatever motive, everything was in sudden disturbance. The guests were hurrying from the tables. Many had thrown the military cloak over their festal robes; some were in the adjoining apartments hastily equipping themselves with arms and armor. A group was standing round Titus, evidently in anxious consultation. In the spacious grounds below, horsemen were mounting and attendants hurrying in all directions. The calls of the clarion echoed through the courts; shortly after a large body of cavalry came wheeling round to the portal of the gardens, and Titus went forth, conspicuous among the bustling crowd for his manly composure. He gave some orders which were despatched by tribunes galloping as for their lives; then mounting his charger, rode slowly through the gates at the head of his stately company, himself the most stately of them all.

The woods surrounding the palace soon intercepted the view of the imperial troop; and after straining my eyes as long as I could see the glitter of a helmet by the waning moon, I turned to my casement to make that prayer for the peace of Jerusalem which had been nightly on my lips from the hour when they first could pronounce the name. From the dungeon has that supplication risen; from the mine; from the sands of the wilderness; from the shores of the farthest ocean; from the bosom of the rolling waters; from the fires of the persecutor; from the field before the battle; from the field covered with its dead; from the living grave of the monk; from the cavern of the robber; from the palace; even from the scaffold!

[Sidenote: The Red Illumination]

While I continued in this outpouring of the soul, with my eyes fixed on the cloudy world above, a pale reflection spread over the masses of rolling vapor; it lingered, faded, and night covered the earth; suddenly a fierce luster turned the low and heavy clouds into the color of conflagration.

“There is an attack on either the enemy’s camp or the city,” I exclaimed to my companion. “Daybreak it can not be, for the middle watch has not been half an hour sounded. Help me to escape; be but my guide through the chambers, and name your recompense.”

The steward wrung his helpless hands, and offered his life to my service, but described the precautions of my jailers so fully that I gave up the idea. Still I was tossed by anxious thoughts. I heard the treading of the guard until its recurrence irritated me. The moanings of the wind through the trees told that a storm was rising, and to get rid of the uneasy conflict between the desire of sleep and the difficulty of shutting out thought, I rose and watched the progress of the tempest.

The lightnings flashed in broad beams through the clouds, and the rain fell with the violence of the southern storm. But through the flash, deepening again, shone the red illumination above the city, and neither the roar of the wind nor the dash of the descending deluge could extinguish the shouts that, remote as they were, I knew to be shouts of battle. I measured the tower with my eye; I tried the strength of the bars; but the attempt only served to disturb my companion, who had survived his sorrows long enough to sleep as soundly as if there were not a wo on earth.

“I am glad,” said he, “that you awoke me, for I was dreaming the story of my unfortunate lord and his son over again.”

“The natural result of your having so lately renewed its recollection.”

[Illustration: “Titus rode at the head of his stately company, himself the most stately of them all.”

[see page 487.

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

[Sidenote: A Figure in the Gallery]

“Aye, there is perhaps scarcely a room under the palace roof where some heart is not trembling to-night with ghostly fear, nor a peasant’s thatch where the death of Matthan and the Arabian has not made pale faces; and where men tell of the bridegroom stricken in his hour of pride. But—— powers of Heaven preserve us! look there!”

I looked, but it was to the old man, whose countenance alarmed me with the idea that he had wrought his imagination to a hazardous extreme. I took his cold hand, and telling him that I felt unable to sleep, gently laid his stiffened limbs on the couch and bade him try to rest. But his eye stared through the casement till I followed its direction, yet with only the added belief that he was overcome by the common terrors of the household; for to me tenfold darkness lay upon every object from the ground to the battlements.

I accidentally glanced at the gallery, and there I saw a figure, slight and shadowy, passing backward and forward in front of a quivering lamp! My surprise was more startling than I would venture to communicate to my companion, already almost paralyzed with fear. But if I had conjured up a phantom to give force to the tale, none could have been more closely similar. The figure was enveloped in robes whose richness I could perceive even across the court; the gestures, the wild hurry of the pacings through the chamber, the general air of wo and distraction, were not to be mistaken. In the midst of the silence I heard the creaking of bolts and the fall of chains that seemed to be at my side. A single word followed, but that word was terribly comprehensive—“Death!” The sound was uttered in a sepulchral tone, that left the imagination free to shape the picture with what sullenness it willed!

But the sound was scarcely uttered when I heard a shriek, wild as ever told of wo; saw the figure sink down, and the lamp quiver and expire! The old man had seen what I had seen, but the natural feebleness of age left him a mere helpless prey to superstitious fear, and no attempt to explain these singular coincidences could calm him. He was convinced that the vengeance that had stricken his master’s house was still abroad, and that he had beheld its minister. Remonstrance was in vain, and he sank alternately into reveries and the stupefaction of spiritual terror.

[Sidenote: Naomi, the Specter]

I tended him with the more interest from my being not altogether unimpressed with the possibility that his alarms were just. I was no believer in the vulgar narratives of superstition. But nature has her mysteries!

While I sat beside the couch and watched the ebb and flow of life in a frame that I sometimes expected to see utterly give way, a jarring of bolts again struck my ear. I listened with a strange emotion. The old man had heard it, and in a new convulsion grasped both my hands and held me close. The sound returned; it increased; I saw the wall of the tower open and the figure stand before me.

“It is she; it is she!” shudderingly murmured my companion, fixing his eyes on it and holding me with the clasp of agony.

The heart beat loud within me; but I interposed myself between the corpse-like being whom I held in my arms and the unearthly visitant, and demanded “for what purpose it had come.” The figure started as I spoke; then gazing intently on me as I turned to the light, threw the mantle from its forehead and fell at my feet. The lovely Naomi was the specter! Yet perfectly guiltless of the ghostly potency of her presence and the unfilial alarm into which she had thrown her adopted father, whom she was delighted to find, but whom she candidly acknowledged “she never dreamed of finding there.”

“The tower contains a prisoner,” said she tremblingly, “who must be saved this night, for to-morrow at daybreak is his dreadful hour. I knew that he would be condemned, and we agreed on a signal, by which I was to learn when the time was fixed. I have watched all night for it, and almost betrayed myself by a cry of horror that I could not suppress at the sight of that signal just now. I had no resource but to bear my own message, and assist him myself in escaping from this place of sorrow.”

“But, my child, who is the prisoner, or where is he?”

She blushed and said: “One who saved me when the world was against me. He rescued me from the hands of barbarians—and could I leave him to perish?”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Finds a Prisoner]

“Lead on then, and without delay, for daybreak is not far. But how shall we find our way to his dungeon?”

“I paid high,” said she, “for my knowledge of this tower, and it has no concealments from me. Remove this bar.”

I drew out a slender iron rod; a door deep in the wall gave way and disclosed a winding stair, by which we descended. We found the prisoner writing, and so earnestly occupied that our footsteps did not interrupt him.

“There,” soliloquized he as he ran his eye down the epistle. “I think, my masters if not the better, some of you will be the wiser for my labors. Home truths are the truths, after all. Titus will learn what a set of incurable reprobates he has about him, and by this time to-morrow, when I shall care as little for mankind as mankind ever cared for me, I shall do the state service; from my gibbet turn reformer and make the scaffold popular. And now, for the farewell to my lady and my love.”

He sighed and threw down the pen.

“No, my Naomi, I can say nothing half so fond or half so bitter as my feelings would have me say at this moment. Would that I had never seen you, if we are to part so soon. Yet why should I regret to have known innocence and beauty in their perfection? No, my love, rosy was the hour when I first saw you, and proud is even the parting hour that tells me I could have loved so noble a being—but all is better as it is. How could I have borne to see you following the fortunes of a wanderer, of a man without a country or a name? Then farewell, my Naomi dearest, farewell; you were the gleam of sunshine in my cloudy day, the star in my dreary night, and while my heart beats you shall be there. Your name shall be the last upon my lips, and if there be thought beyond the grave, you shall be remembered, and—oh, how deeply—loved!”

[Sidenote: The Arab Captain Recognized]

I had been on the point of disturbing his meditation, but Naomi, with the fine avarice of passion, would not lose a syllable. She held me back, and implored me by her countenance to let her have the full confession of her lover’s faith. That beautiful countenance ran through all the shades of feeling, and was covered with blushes and tears while the unconscious worshiper poured out his devotion. But the time was flying; I insisted on interrupting this epicureanism of the soul; and when Naomi found that she must hear no more, she would allow none but herself the pleasure of the surprise. A sigh which swelled from the prisoner’s heart was echoed. He turned suddenly, and pronounced her name with a loudness of delight that nothing but the chance that protects the imprudent could have prevented from bringing the guard upon us. His quick eye soon caught me where I stood in shadow, and he sprang forward to overpower the intruder. But the lamp saved us from the encounter, and lifting his hands and eyes in amazement, he laughed as loudly as he had spoken.

“In the name of all the wonders of the world,” exclaimed he, “are you here too? Where are we to meet next? We have met already in water, fire, and earth, and nothing is left for us now but the clouds. Come, be honest, prince, and tell me whether it was not for the sake of some such experiment that you ventured here; for if another hour finds us within these four walls, we shall know the grand secret as assuredly as Titus wears a head and has a traitor at his elbow.”

It was the Arab captain! I was rejoiced to find that in attempting to save the life of Naomi’s lover, I was discharging a debt to the preserver of my own. To my mention of this service he replied with soldierlike frankness that “I owed him no obligation whatever; he had long hated the intolerable cruelty of Cestius, and the debt was on his side, as I had indulged him with an opportunity that every officer in the service would have been happy to use.”

Naomi hung upon me, pale, and anxiously listening to every sound abroad.

“This little trembler,” said he sportively, as he took her passive hand, “I am destined to meet always in alarm. I first found her flying from a troop of human brutes who were robbing the baggage of the Roman camp; I thought her worth something better than to keep goats on the Libanus and weave turbans for some Syrian deserter; she was of the same opinion, and fell in love with me on the spot.”

[Sidenote: Attempts to Escape]

Naomi exclaimed against this version of the story.

“No matter for the mode,” said he; “I give the facts. I dazzled her ambition by the promise of a palace—in the air; bribed her avarice by the display of a purse unconscious of gold; and bewitched her senses by a speech, a smile, and a figure that for the first time in my life I found to be irresistible.”

Naomi again protested, and the dialog might have consumed half the night without their discovering the lapse of time, had I not interposed and inquired what further means of escape were in our power. The lovely girl started from her waking dream and pointed to a ring in the wall. I tried it, but it resisted my force. At length we all strove at it together. But no door opened. Naomi wrung her hands.

“The unfortunate lord of this tower in former times,” said she, and the tears stood in her eyes, “always predicted that it would be fatal to his family. To escape his own fate, he pierced its walls with passages in every direction, but they did not save my noble, my unfortunate father.”

She sat down weeping while I tore at the ring, which finally broke off in my hands. The lover stood with folded arms, gazing in sad delight on the beautiful being from whom he was so soon to part forever, and whose face and form wore almost the shadowy loveliness of a vision.

The chance of their escape now devolved on me solely, for neither would have desired to disturb that strange and melancholy luxury of contemplation. But as the concealed door must be given up, the only resource was to return to my cell and thence make our way through the passage by which Naomi had arrived. A glance from the casement showed me the court filled with soldiery and lights moving through the palace. This hope was gone!

In the deepest doubt and fear I ventured up through the tower to discover whether my cell was not already in possession of the guard. I pushed back the door noiselessly; the cell was empty; even the old steward was gone. Imagination is a dangerous auxiliary in such a crisis, and it created out of this trivial change a host of alarms. He must have fled to give notice of my retreat, or to rouse the vigilance of the soldiery by the stories of the wonders that he had seen. Escape was hopeless. I even heard a confused whispering, which proved that we had fallen into the snare.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Discovers a Door]

There was now no alternative but to be seized and die, or to make a bold rush for life and take our chances. I carried the fainting Naomi up the stairs; and suppressing the infinite risk of the attempt to penetrate through a building in which its inmates were still awake and busy, and which was guarded by the vigilance of Roman patrols, I advised that we should do anything rather than remain where we were. She was timid and submissive; but to my surprise the bold seaman, the haughty leader of men, harder to be ruled than the elements, the gallant despiser of death but a day past, was now totally unnerved. The novelty of passion absorbed the spirit of the man; he lingered near his mistress, and gazed on her with an intenseness that told his world was there. To my questions he gave no answer, but obeyed without a word, or a glance turned from the exquisite countenance that sank and blushed under his gaze. If the actual power of enchantment had been wrought upon him, he could not have been more fixed, helpless, and charmed.

[Sidenote: Naomi Causes Consternation]

I heard the voice of pain, and thought of the ancient follower of the house of Ananus. My cooler judgment had acquitted him of betraying me into the enemy’s hands. A part of the cell was filled up with remnants of a canopy removed from the statelier apartments. The groan came from behind them. I flung them away, and saw a door open by which he must have entered. I returned, desired the captain and Naomi to follow, wrapped myself in a cloak, and sword in hand, led the way through the darkness. I had not gone far when I found myself treading on a human body. I sprang back, but the figure, more startled than I, rolled down a succession of steps before me, and falling against a door, burst it open. A strong light from within flashed up the stairs, and taking Naomi’s hand, I led her down this steep and narrow outlet of the grand gallery. As she came toward the light, a wild cry was given; a man rushed back, and exclaiming, “It is she risen from the grave, the Arabian!” darted through the vast hall, in which were still a number of domestics setting it in order after the banquet. Every eye instantly turned to the spot from which we emerged. Naomi’s white-robed form, followed by her lover’s and mine wrapped to the brow in our dark mantles, formidably verified the superstition.

The crowd were already prepared to witness a wonder on this night of wo; they fled or fell on their faces. The man, still rushing on, propagated terror before us; and through the long vista of lighted chambers, where to be seen might have been ruin, we moved unquestioned until we reached the portal. It, too, had been thrown open by some of the fugitives; the gardens were deserted; the troops had been drawn to another quarter of the palace. Before us was welcome solitude, and we were soon winding through the wood-paths by the light of the stars.

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Chapter LXIII

A Minstrel’s Power of Speech

[Sidenote: The Flight]

While we traversed the grounds, the heaving of the branches under the wind, which rose in strong gusts from time to time, and the rush of the rivulets from the hillsides, which retained the swell of the melting snows, prevented our hearing other sounds; but when we emerged from this little forest of every plant that yields fruit or fragrance and began to climb the surrounding ridge, the sights and sounds to which I had been so long accustomed broke upon us. To the south a long line of light showed where Jerusalem was struggling against a midnight assault, and the uproar of battle came wildly on the wind. The Roman camp-fires blazed round the promontory Scopas, like the innumerable crevices of a huge volcanic hill breathing flame from root to summit. But a more immediate peril lay behind us. The first height from which we could see the palace showed us the well-known fire-signals of the enemy flaming on its battlements. Our escape had been discovered. The signals were answered from every point of the horizon. Where a signal was, there was an enemy’s post; we could not advance a step without the most imminent chance of seizure, and in those times, death by the shaft or the sword was the instant consequence. The signals were followed by the trumpet, and every blast from the palace roof was answered for miles round.

The whole horizon was alive with enemies, and yet, if in every call captivity and death had not been the language, this circling echo of the noblest of all instruments of sound, coming in a thousand various tones from the varied distances, softened by the dewy softness of the night, and breathing from sources invisible, as if they were inspired only by the winds, or poured from the clouds, might have seemed sublime.

[Sidenote: Tracked by Bloodhounds]

But a new alarm rose in the direction of the forest, which now lay beneath us like a sea slightly silvered on its thousand billows by the sinking moon. The trampling of cavalry was distinctly heard in pursuit, and torches were seen rushing through the trees. The pursuit had turned into the very path by which we came, and the baying of a bloodhound up the ridge was guiding the cavalry to our inevitable capture if we remained. I was resolved not to be taken while I could fight or fly, and pointing out to my fellow fugitives the horsemen, as they scoured the foot of the hills, I plunged down into a ravine, where I could expect to find only some torrent too deep for us to pass. But it was at least protracted fate.

I had given Naomi into the hands of her lover, and while they slowly descended the precipice, returned to its edge to ascertain whether the enemy were still upon our steps. The rock toward the summit was splintered into a number of little pinnacles, grasping one of which, I clung, listening and gazing with indescribable nervousness. The sounds of pursuit had perished, or were so mingled with the common sounds of nature as to be unheard, and I was congratulating myself upon our total safety, and about to return to the spot where I had left my companions, when the torch-light shot up from the dell, immediately below me. I gave a hurried glance along the ravine, but Naomi was not there. A detachment of archers was climbing over the huge rocks that filled up its depth, and flashing torches through every hollow where a human being could lie.

To rescue my unfortunate charge was my first resolve, and I began to let myself down the abrupt side of the hollow before the torches disappeared. They at last seemed to be completely gone, but as I hung within a few feet of the path, a growl and a dash at my throat nearly overthrew my steadiness. I knew that a precipice of immense depth lay underneath, and in the utter darkness I could have no certainty that my next step might not carry me over it.

[Sidenote: Victims of the Cross]

My sole expedient was to grasp the rock with one hand and defend myself to the last with the other. The bloodhound had tracked me, and he flew again at my throat; but I was now prepared; I caught him in the bound and whirled him down the ravine. His howl, as he fell from crag to crag, betrayed me at once. A hundred torches rushed upward. I climbed the pinnacle, sprang from its top into a pine thicket, and winding over a long extent of broken ground, gradually lost torches and outcries together.

After a pause, to consider in what quarter final escape was most probable, a glimmering light through the thicket at a considerable distance toward the city determined me. My pursuers must be far behind; the loss of the bloodhound diminished still more their chance of reaching my track through a remarkably wild and broken district; and come what would, whether that light was kindled by friends or enemies, I should see them before they could discover me. I struggled on until I reached the base of a ridge, on whose farther side the light gleamed. To ascend it was beyond my powers, but by gliding along the base I found a crevice, which, enlarged whether by nature or the human hand, led through the hill. My way in darkness was brief; I had not gone a third of the distance when the light shone strongly through the cavern. At its mouth I stood overwhelmed—I had strayed into the memorable valley of the Crosses!

Thousands of men, besmeared with blood, dust, and clay, half naked, brandishing weapons still dripping with gore; whirling torches; shouting out roars of triumph; howling in desperate lamentation; kneeling and weeping over the dead with the most violent affliction; wrapping themselves in robes and armor; tearing away their raiment, and flinging sword and spear into the flames; throwing hundreds of corpses into one promiscuous burning, round which they danced with furious exultation; carrying away on litters of lances and branches, corpses that they seemed to hallow as more than mortal; every strange variety of human passion, wound up to its wildest height, was pictured before me, and all was thrown into the most living distinctness by the blaze of an immense central heap of timber.

[Sidenote: The Last of the Conflict]

The horrid cruelties of the execution had been heard of in Jerusalem, and the spirit of the people was roused to vengeance. With that imperishable courage which distinguished them above all nations, a scorn of hazard that in those unhappy days only urged them to their ruin, they determined to make the enemy pay in slaughter for the memory of their warriors. A multitude without a leader, but among whom served with the simple spear many a leader, poured out from the gates to attack an enemy flushed with victory, and secured in entrenchments, impregnable to the naked strength of my unfortunate countrymen. They divided into two armies, one of which assaulted the lines, while the other marched to the valley of the Crosses. The assault on the lines was repelled after long and desperate displays of intrepidity. It was the intelligence of this attack that had broken up the banquet. The Romans sustained heavy losses in the early part of the night; their outposts in the plain were sacrificed, and the chief part of their cantonments burned.

But the “army of vengeance,” a name given to it alike by Jew and Roman, accomplished its purpose with dreadful retribution. The legionaries posted to defend the valley were trampled down and destroyed at the first charge. Troop on troop, sent to extricate them, met with the same fate. One of the few prisoners described the valley, when his cohort reached its verge, as having the look of a living whirlpool, a vast and tempestuous rolling and heaving of infuriate life, into which the attempt to descend was instant destruction.

“Every cohort that entered it,” said the centurion, “was instantly engulfed and seen no more. Last night our legion, the fifteenth, lay down in their tents five thousand strong; to-night there are not ten of us on the face of the earth.”

The conflict was long, and the last of the enemy were under the Jewish sword when I reached the mouth of the fissure. But in the first intervals of the struggle, the remains of our tortured people had been taken down from the accursed tree, tended with solemn sorrow, and given up to their relatives and friends to be borne back to Jerusalem. The crosses were thrown into a heap and set on fire; the fallen legionaries underwent the last indignities that could be inflicted by scorn and rage; and when even those grew weary, were flung into the blazing pile.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Burns a Cross]

The fate of the noble Eleazar was still unknown, and to obtain the certainty of his preservation or to render the last honor to his remains, I forced my way toward the spot on which I had seen him awaiting death. But my searches were in vain; the witnesses on both sides were now where there is no utterance. Guard, executioner, and victim were clay; the battle had raged chiefly round that spot, and the ground, trampled and deep in blood, gave melancholy evidence of the havoc. There were painful and peculiar signs of the sacrifice that had extinguished the little group of the converts, and I poured oil and wine upon their hallowed ashes. A large fragment of a cross still stood erect in the midst of them.

“Was it upon thee, accursed thing,” I exclaimed, “that the life-blood of my brother was poured? Was it upon thee that the last breath was breathed in torture from the lips of virtue, heroism, and purity? Never shalt thou minister again to the cruelty of the monsters that raised thee there.”

Indignantly I tore up the beam, and dragging it to the pile by my single strength—to the wonder of the crowd, who eagerly offered their help, but whom I would not suffer to share in this imaginary yet consoling retribution—I rolled it into the flames amid shouts and rejoicings.

Daybreak was now at hand, and the sounds of the enemy’s movements made our retreat necessary. We heaped the last Roman corpse on the pile, covered it with the broken spears, helmets, and cuirasses of the soldiery, and then left the care of the conflagration to the wind. From the valley to Jerusalem our way was crowded with the enemy’s posts; but the keen eye and agile vigor of the Jew eluded or anticipated the heavy-armed legionaries, by long experience taught to dread the night in Judea, and we reached the Grand Gate of Zion as the sun was shooting his first rays on the pinnacles of the Temple.

[Sidenote: The Wild Host]

In those strange and agitated days, when every hour produced some extraordinary scene, I remember none more extraordinary than that morning’s marching into the city. It was a triumph, but how unlike all that bore the name! It was no idle, popular pageant; no fantastic and studied exhibition of trophies and treasures; no gaudy homage to personal ambition; no holiday show to amuse the idleness or feed the vanity of a capital secure in peace and pampered with the habits of opulence and supremacy. It was at once a rejoicing, a funeral, a great act of atonement, a popular preservation, and a proud revenge on the proudest of enemies.

On the night before, not an eye had closed in Jerusalem. The Romans, quick to turn every change to advantage, had suffered the advance of our irregular combatants only until they could throw a force between them and the gates. The assault was made, and with partial success; but the population, once roused, was terrible to an enemy fighting against walls and ramparts, and the assailants were, after long slaughter on both sides, drawn off at the sight of our columns moving from the hills.

We thus marched in unassailed, a host of fifty thousand men, as wild and strange-looking a host as ever trod to acclamations from voices unnumbered. Every casement, roof, battlement, and wall in the long range of magnificent mansions, leading round by the foot of Zion to Mount Moriah, was crowded with spectators. Man, woman, and child of every rank were there straining their eyes and voices, and waving hands, weapons, and banners in honor of their deliverers from the terror of massacre. Our motley ranks had equipped themselves with the Roman spoils wherever they could, and among the ragged vestures, discolored turbans, and rude pikes, moved masses of glittering mail, helmets, and gilded lances. Beside the torn flags of the tribes, embroidered standards were tossing with the initial of the Cæsars, or the golden image of some deity, mutilated by our scorn of the idolater.

[Sidenote: Ester’s Return]

The Jewish trumpets had scarcely sent up their chorus, when it was followed by the clanging of the Roman cymbal, the long and brilliant tone of the clarion, or the deep roar of the brass conch and serpent. Close upon ranks exulting and shouting victory came ranks bearing the honored dead on litters and bursting into bitter sorrow; then rolled onward thousands bounding and showing the weapons that they had torn from the enemy; then passed groups of the priesthood—for they, too, had long taken the common share in the defense—singing one of the glorious hymns of the Temple; then again followed litters, surrounded by the wives and children of the dead, wrapt in inconsolable grief. Bands of warriors, who had none to care for, the habitual sons of the field; armed women; chained captives; men covered with the stately dresses of our higher ranks; biers heaped with corpses; wagons piled with armor, tents, the wounded and the dead; every diversity of human circumstance, person, and equipment that belongs to a state in which the elements of society are let loose—in that march successively moved before the eye. With the men were mingled the captured horses of the legionaries; the camels and dromedaries of the allies; herds of the bull and buffalo, droves of goats and sheep; the whole one mighty mass of misery, rejoicing nakedness, splendor, pride, humiliation, furious and savage life, and honored and lamented death; the noblest patriotism and the most hideous abandonment to the excesses of our nature.

As soon as I could extricate myself from the concourse, I hastened to appease the anxieties of my family, who had suffered the general terrors of the night, with the addition of their own stake in my peril and that of Constantius. My first inquiry was for Esther. To my great delight, she had returned, but was still in nervous alarm. On the night of her being led through filial zeal to meet Septimius, she was seized by a party of armed men and by them conveyed to a dungeon, where questions had been put to her tending to charge me at once with magic and correspondence with the enemy. But this persecution ceased, and she found herself as unexpectedly set at liberty as she had been seized. At the gate of her prison the minstrel had met her, and through the midst of the city, then in its fiercest agitation, had with singular dexterity conducted her safely home.

[Sidenote: A Minstrel’s Acquirements]

A service of this kind was not to go unrewarded, and he had been suffered to remain under our roof until my return. But by that time he had made his ground secure by such zealous service and so many graceful qualities, that even Miriam, sensitive and sagacious as she was, desired that he should be retained.

From his knowledge of the various dialects of Asia and his means of unsuspected intercourse, few events could occur of which he had not obtained some previous knowledge. His adroitness in availing himself of his knowledge I had already experienced in my escape from the gates, and it was to him that was due the flight of the negroes. A stray charger, a mask, and the common juggler’s contrivance of breathing flames, made up the demon that defrauded the Ethiopian exchequer. But his dexterity in the arts of elegance and taste was singular; his pencil was dipped in nature, and the sketches, which he was perpetually making of the wild and picturesque population that now filled our streets, were incomparable. He sculptured, he modeled, he wove; he wrought the gold filigree and chainwork, for which our artists were famous, with a skill that the most famous of them have envied. His knowledge of languages seemed the natural result of his wanderings, but it was extraordinarily various and pure. The dance and song were part of his profession; but from the little imperfect harp in use among the minstrels he drew tones that none other had ever delighted me with—sounds of such alternate spirit and sweetness, such tender and heart-reaching power, that they were like an immediate communication of mind with mind.

And the charm of those acquirements was enhanced by the graceful carelessness with which he made his estimate of their value. To my questions how he could at his age have mastered so many attainments, his reply was that with his three teachers “everything might be learned; common sense alone excepted, the peculiar and rarest gift of Providence! Those three teachers were Necessity, Habit, and Time. At his starting in life Necessity had told him that, if he hoped to live, he must labor; Habit had turned the labor into an indulgence; and Time gave every man an hour for everything unless he chose to sleep it away.”

[Sidenote: Constantius’ Absence]

But he had higher topics, and the sagacity of his views, in a crisis that was made to shake the wisdom of the wise, often held me in astonishment. The fate of Constantius deeply perplexed me. He had now been absent long, and no tidings of him could be heard among the returning warriors further than that he had joined them in the march to the valley of the Crosses, had distinguished himself by the intrepidity of his attack on the legionary guard at the entrance, and was seen for a short time with a captured standard in his hand leading on the people. Unable to endure the silent anguish of those round me, silent only through fear of giving me pain, I had determined on passing the walls again to seek my brave and unfortunate son among the fallen. But Miriam’s quick affection detected me, and with weeping prayers she implored that “I should not risk a life on which hung her own and those of her children.”

The sound of the lyre came suddenly upon the air, and to dissipate the cloud that was gathering on my mind, I wandered to a balcony where, in the evening light and the pleasant breathing of the breeze, the minstrel was touching the strings to the song that had first attracted me. I flung my wearied frame on a couch and listened until memory became too keen, and I waved my hand to him to change the strain. He obeyed, but his heart was in the harp no more; his touch faltered, the song died away, and he approached me with a soothingness of voice and manner that none would have desired to resist.

“My prince,” said he, “you are unhappy, and if your sorrows can be lightened by any service of mine, why not command me?”

He waited; but I was too much absorbed in gloomy speculation.

“I can pass the gates,” he timidly continued, “if such be my lord’s will.”

I made a sign of dissent, for the enemy, since their late surprise, had begun to urge the siege with increased vigilance. Yet my anxiety for the fate of Constantius, and scarcely less for that of Naomi and her lover, must have been visible.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Prejudices]

He still lingered nigh, watching the indications which inward struggle so forcibly paints upon the external man.

“Prince of Naphtali,” said he in a steadier tone, “among my teachers I forgot to mention one, and that one the most effective of all—Self-determination! not the mere disregard of personal risk, but the intrepidity of the mind. I loved knowledge, and I pursued it without fear. Nature is boundless, wise, and wonderful—but prejudice bars up the gate of knowledge. The man who would learn must despise the timidity that shrinks from wisdom, as he must hate the tyranny of opinion that condemns its pursuit. Wisdom is like beauty, to be won only by the bold.”

I looked up at the young pronouncer of the oracle. His countenance, animated by the topic, wore an expression of power, in which I should never have recognized the delicate and dejected being that he always appeared, except in some moment of sportiveness, come and gone with the quickness of lightning.

“Minstrel, apply this to our people or their bigoted and ignorant leaders. I have no prejudices.”

“All men have them, my prince, and the only distinction is that in some they are mean, dark, and malignant; in others they are lofty, generous, and sensitive; yet they are but the stronger for their nobleness. The mind itself struggles to throw off the vile and naked fetter. But how many forget the incumbrance of the chain of gold in its preciousness!”

He hesitated, and then, with a still more elevated air, again began:

“You despise, for instance, the little ingenuities of our profession, and I own that in general they deserve nothing else. But if there were to come before you some true lover of nature, a disciple of that sublimer philosophy which holds the secrets of her operations, a master of those superb influences which rule the frame of things, and yet more, guide the fates of men and nations—would not your prejudices—and noble ones they are—lead you to repel the offer of his mysteries?”

[Sidenote: The Minstrel’s Attire]

Thoughts tending to those mysteries had so often occurred to me, and my mind was by its original constitution so fond of the abstruse and the wild, that I listened with interest to the romance of philosophy. The figure before me was not unsuited to the illusion; slight, habited in the fanciful dress of his art, a tunic of purple cloth, bound round the waist with a girdle; the turban, a mere band of scarlet silk, lightly laid upon his curls. There was in all this nothing that was not to be seen at every hour in the streets, but round his waist, instead of the usual girdle of the minstrels, he wore to-night a large golden serpent, embossed and colored with a startling resemblance to life, and a broad golden circlet wrought with devices of serpents clasping his brow. The countenance was vividness itself, not without that occasional wandering and touch of melancholy that showed where early care has been, yet redeeming the gloom by a smile that had the sweetness and suddenness of the sunbeam across an April shower.

The evening music of the Roman camps roused me as their ranks were drawn out for the customary exercise. I turned from them to glance upon the battlements, that were now crowded with stragglers of the tribes inhaling the air of the fields and like myself gazing on the movements of the enemy. The thought pressed on me how soon and how terribly all this must end; what were the multitudes to be that now lived and breathed beneath my glance? The thought was too painful. I turned from earth to look upon the east, where the evening star was lying on a rosy cloud, like a spirit sent to bring back tidings from this troubled world.

“There, boy,” said I, “will your wisdom tell me the story of that star? Are its people as mad as we? Is there ambition on one side and folly on the other? Are their great men the prey of a populace, and their populace the fools of their great men? Have they orators to inflame their passions; lawyers to beggar them in pursuit of justice; traders, to cheat them; heroes, to give them laurels at the price of blood; and philosophers, to be the worst plagues among them?”

[Sidenote: The Rulers of the Empire]

“Even that knowledge,” said the minstrel, “may not be beyond the flight of the human intellect; but prejudices must be first overcome; we must learn to scorn idle names, defy idle fears, and use the powers of nature to give us the mastery of nature! There are virtues in plants, in metals, even in words, that to seek, alarms the feeble, but to possess, constitutes the mighty. There are influences of the air, of the stars, of even the most neglected and despised things, that may be gifted to confer the sovereignty of mankind.”

I listened with the passive indulgence of one listening under a spell; his voice had the sweetness and the flow of song, and his language was made impressive by gestures of striking intelligence and beauty. He pointed to the skies, to the flowers, to the horizon, that glowed like an ocean of amber; and his fine countenance assumed a changing character of loftiness, loveliness, or repose as he gazed on the sublime or the serene.

“Boy,” said I faintly, “are not such the studies by which the pagan world is made evil?”

He smiled. “No! Light is not further from darkness than wisdom from the superstition of the pagan. Rome is filled with the madness that falls upon idolatry for its curse—that has fallen since the beginning of the world—that shall fall until its end. She is the slave of ghostly fear. This hour, among the proudest, boldest, wisest, within the borders of paganism, there lives not a man unenslaved by the lowest delusion. The soothsayer, the interpreter of dreams, the sacrificer, the seller of the dust of the dead, the miserable pretender to magic—those are the true rulers of the haughty empire—those are the scepter-bearers to whom the Emperor is a menial—those are the men of might who laugh at authority, set counsel at naught, and are sapping the foundations of the state, were they deep as the center, by sapping the vigor of the national mind.”

[Sidenote: The King of Metals]

While he spoke he was with apparent unconsciousness sketching some outlines on one of the large marble slabs of the wall. My eyes had followed the sun until the balcony, darkened by an old vine, was in the depth of twilight. To my surprise, the marble began to be covered with fire, but fire of the softest and most silvery hue. The surprise was increased by seeing this glowworm luster kindle into form. I saw the portrait of Constantius, and by his side Naomi and her lover. As the lines grew clearer still, I saw them in chains and in a dungeon! The extraordinary information which the minstrel had the means of obtaining made me demand in real alarm whether the picture told the truth, and that if it did, I should be instantly acquainted with whatever might enable me to save them.

“And trifles like those fires can excite your astonishment?” he replied; “what if I were to tell you of wonders such as it has not entered into the mind of the world to imagine, yet which are before us in every hour of our lives, are mingled with everything, are grasped in our insensate hands, are trodden by our careless feet? See these crystals”—he scraped a portion of the niter exuding from the wall—“in these is hidden a power to which the strength of man is but air—to which the bulwarks round us are but as the leaf on the breeze—at whose command armies shall vanish, mountains shake, empires perish—the whole face of society shall change; yet by a sublime contradiction, combining the greatest evil with the greatest good—the most lavish waste of life with the most signal provision for human security!”

[Illustration: “Judea must fall!”

[see page 511.

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

[Sidenote: The Supremacy of Man]

“Look on this metal,” said he, pointing to some of the leaden ornaments of the balcony, “and think what is the worth of human judgment. Who would give the pearl or the diamond, the silver or the gold, for this discolored dross? Yet here is the king of metals—the king of earth; for it can create, subdue, and rule all that earth produces of power. Within this dross are treasures hidden, more than earth could buy—truth, knowledge, and freedom. It can give the dead a new life and the living a new immortality. It can sink the haughtiest usurper that ever sinned against man into the lowest scorn. It can raise the humblest son of obscurity into preeminence, and even without breaking in upon the seclusion that he loves, set him forth to every future age crowned with involuntary glory. It can flash light upon the darkest corners of the earth—light never to be extinguished. It can civilize the barbarian; it can pour perpetual increase of happiness, strength, and liberty round the civilized. It can make feet for itself that walk through the dungeon walls; wings that the uttermost limits of the world can not weary; eyes to which the darkest concealments of evil are naked as the day; intellect that darts through the universe and solves the mightiest secrets of nature and of mind! But in it, too, is a fearful power of ruin.”

He gazed on me with a glance that seemed to shoot fire.

“Holding the keys of opulence and empire,” he continued, “it can raise men and nations to the most dazzling height—but it can stain, delude, and madden them until they become a worse than pestilence to human nature.”

While he spoke, his form assumed a grandeur commensurate with his lofty topics; the power of his voice awoke with the awaking power of his mind. My faculties succumbed under his presence, and I could only exclaim:

“More of those wonders; give me more of those noble evidences of the supremacy of man!”

“Man!” said my strange enlightener; “look upon him as he is, and what more helpless thing moves under the canopy of heaven? The prey of folly, the creature of accident, the sport of nature, the surge whirls him where it will; the wind scorns his bidding; the storm crushes him; the lightning smites him. But look upon man when knowledge has touched him with her scepter.”

The circlet on his brow seemed to quiver and sparkle with inward luster; the golden serpent that clasped his robe seemed to writhe and revolve. I felt like one under fascination. A strange sense of danger thrilled through me, yet mixed with a dreamy and luxurious sense of enjoyment. The air seemed heavy with fragrance, and I sat listening in powerless homage to a lip molded by beauty and disdain.

“Man, the sport of nature!” said he, pointing to a bead of dew that hung glittering on a leaf of the vine. “Say man, the sovereign of nature! With but so feeble an instrument as this dew-drop he might control and scorn the wind and the wave! Or would you defy the storm in darkness, without sun or star speed through the unknown ocean, and add a new world to the old? Within this fragment lies the secret.”

He struck off a brown splinter from the stone of the balcony.

[Sidenote: Exiled—Desperate—Undone]

“Or would you behold regions to which the stars that now blaze above our heads are but the portal,” he said; “kingdoms of light never penetrated by mortal vision; generations of worlds? By what splendid influence, think you, that the miracle is to be wrought? Even by this dust!”

He took up a few grains of the sand at his feet and poured them into my robe. He saw his time.

“Would you,” exclaimed he, “be master of those magnificent secrets? Then bind this girdle round you and invoke the name that I shall name.”

I shuddered; the arts of the diviner flashed upon me. But I had listened too long not to be enfeebled by the temptation. I felt the passion which lost us paradise—the thirst of forbidden knowledge. Still I resisted. The young deceiver pressed me with more distinct promises.

“In your fate,” said he, “the fate of your nation is bound up. Has it not been declared that a great deliverer is to come, by whom the face of the enemies of Judah is to be withered, and the scepter of the earth given to the hand of Israel? Pledge yourself to me and be that deliverer! You shrink! Know then—that even while I speak, every creature of your blood is in chains; your house is desolate; your fortunes are overthrown; you are cut off root and branch; you are exiled—desperate—undone!”

I felt a dreadful certainty that his words were true. My heart bled at the picture of ruin. I wavered. The temptation tingled through my veins.

“What were the sacrifice of myself,” thought I, “wretched and sentenced as I was, to the preservation of beings made for happiness? Or was I to hesitate, let the risk be what it might, when virtue, patriotism, and boundless knowledge were added to that preservation? For the trivial honors that man could give to man, the highest intellects of the earth had been influenced, but the honors of the restorer of Judah were an immortal theme—the old splendors of triumph were pronounced vain and dim, the old supremacy of thrones weakness, to the domination and grandeur of the sovereign who should sway the returning tribes of Zion.”

[Sidenote: Judea Must Fall]

The figure approached me, and in a voice that sank with subtle force through every nerve pronounced the vow that I was to utter. I was terror-struck; a cloud came over my sight; strange lights moved and glittered before me. I felt the unspeakable dread that my faculties should betray me, and that I should unconsciously yield to a temptation which yet I had no strength to withstand.

While I sat helpless and almost blind, I was aroused by a majestic voice. I looked up. Eleazar was at my side. I would have flung myself into his arms; I would have cast myself at his feet, but an indescribable sensation told me that my noble brother was to be so approached no more.

“Well and wisely hast thou resisted,” were his solemn words, “for in thee are the last fortunes of thy people. Judea must fall; but fallen with her as thou shalt be, and desolate, despairing, and wild as shall be thy sojourn, the last blow of ruin to both would be given hadst thou yielded to the adversary.”

I glanced at the minstrel. His visage was horror; he stood deformed, like one dead in the moment of torture. I closed my eyes against the hideous spectacle. A sound of hurrying steps made me open them, after how long an interval I know not. I was alone!

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Chapter LXIV

The Destruction of Jerusalem

[Sidenote: To the Tower of Antonia]

The sounds of the footsteps increased. Overwhelmed as I was by the trial that my mind had just undergone, I sat nearly unconscious of external things till I was roused by a strong grasp from behind and saw myself surrounded by armed men. I was passively bound; and indifferent to fortune, was flung into a litter and conveyed to the Tower of Antonia. In this vast circle of fortifications, the citadel of the former Roman garrison, the Jewish government was now held, or rather Onias lorded it over the population. He had discovered my dwelling, and the first fruit of his knowledge was my seizure and that of my family. He was now playing the last throw of that desperate game to which his life had been given. Power was within his reach, yet there I stood to thwart him once more, and he was resolved to extinguish the first source of his danger. Yet I was popular, and with all his daring, he desired to cast the odium of my death on the Sanhedrin. I was to be tried on the ground of treating with the enemy; my family were seized, to shake my courage by their peril, and I was to be forced to an ignominious confession as the price of saving their lives.

At the mouth of a dungeon a torch was put into my hands. I was left to make my way, and the iron door was closed that had shut out many a wretch from light and life. At the bottom of the steps I found a man sleeping tranquilly on the stone. The glare of the torch disturbed him; he started up, and, looking in my face, exclaimed in the buoyant and cheerful tone by which I should have recognized him under any disguise:

[Sidenote: The Captain Tells of Constantius]

“By Jupiter! I knew that we were to meet! If I had to sleep to-night at the bottom of the sea, I should wager my simitar to a straw that our bodies would be found lying side by side. I presume we mount the scaffold together to-morrow for the benefit of Jewish morality. Well, then, since our fates are to be joined, let us begin by—supping together.”

It was the captain! He laid his store on the ground; but I was heartsick, and could only question him of Naomi, and the misfortune which had betrayed him into the hands of the tyrant.

“Our history is the briefest in the world,” was the answer; “we found ourselves pursued, and we fled. The pursuers followed faster than my fair mistress could run, or I could carry her. So we were overtaken before we could clear the rocks, and our captors were forthwith carrying us to the Roman camp, in great joy at their prize. But it was intended to be an unlucky day for the legions. We came across a Jewish troop, headed by a fine, bold fellow, who dashed upon the captors and fluttered them like a flight of pigeons. Nothing could promise better than the affair, for my new captor turned out to be an old friend, and one of the most gallant that ever commanded a trireme. Many a day the Cypriot and I chased (Nemesis forgive us for it!) the pirates through the Cyclades: I, however, did not know then what pleasant personages the brothers of the free-trade might be.”

He smiled, and the sigh that followed the smile told how little he had since found to compensate for his old adventures.

“A Cypriot. Your captor was my son, my Constantius!” I exclaimed.

“The very man. When he had found me out under my Arab trappings, he was all hospitality, and invited me to share the honors of his princely father’s house. His troop soon scattered every man to his home, and I was gazing at the head of an incomparable knave and early acquaintance, Jonathan, nailed up over the gate for some villainy which he had not been as adroit as usual in turning to profit, when Constantius, myself, and that lovely girl, whom I shall never see more”—he bent his brows at the recollection—“were seized by the guard, separated, and sent, I suppose, alike to the dungeon.”

[Sidenote: The Egyptian’s Papers]

Shortly after midnight I was brought before the tribunal. Onias was my accuser, and I was astonished at the dexterity, number, and plausibility of his charges—magic, treachery, the betrayal of my army, the refusal to push the defeated enemy to a surrender, lest by the cessation of the war my ambition should be deprived of its object; and last and most astonishing, the assassination of my kinsman, Jubal, through fear of his testimony!

I made my defense with the fearlessness of one weary of life. Some of the charges I explained; others I promptly repelled. To the imputation of treachery I answered in a single sentence.

“Read that correspondence with the enemy and judge which is the traitor.”

I took the Egyptian’s papers from my sash and flung them on the table. The aspect of my accuser at the words was one that might have made his sternest hater pity him. He gasped, he trembled, he gnashed his teeth in rage and terror, and finally took refuge in the ranks of his followers. But the judges themselves were in visible perplexity; they looked over the papers, held them to the lamps, and examined them in all imaginable ways, until the chief of the Sanhedrin rising, with a frown that fixed all eyes on me, flung the papers at my feet. The deepest silence was round me as I took up the rejected proofs. To my astonishment they were utterly blank!

[Sidenote: The Secret of the Signet]

I now recollected that on my entrance I had been pressed upon by the crowd. In that moment the false papers must have been substituted. I saw the Egyptian gliding away from the side of Onias, and saw by the countenance of my accuser that the tidings of the robbery had just reached him. He now declaimed against me with renewed energy. He was eloquent by nature; the habit of public affairs had given his speaking that character of practical vigor and reality which is essential to great public impression; his fortunes hung in the scale—perhaps his life; and he poured out the whole collected impulse in a torrent of the boldest and most nervous declamation upon my head. Still my name was high; my rank was not to be lightly assailed; my national services were felt; and even the corrupt judicature summoned for my ruin were not so insensible to popular feeling as to violate the forms of law to crush me. The trial lasted during the night. I had the misery to see my wife, my children, Constantius, Naomi, my domestics, my fellow warriors, every human being whom there was a chance of perplexing, or terrifying into testimony, brought forward against me.

As a last resource, on the secret suggestion of the Egyptian, who had his own revenge to satisfy, the adventures of the pirates’ cavern were declaimed upon, and the captain was summoned from his cell. His figure and noble physiognomy made him conspicuous, and a general murmur of admiration arose on his advance to the tribunal. Miriam was at my side. I felt her tremble; her color went and came, and she drank in every tone of his voice with an intense anxiety. But when, in answer to the questions of Onias, he detailed his story, and in answer to the charge of his being an enemy denied that he was either Roman or Greek, Miriam’s spirit hung upon every word.

“A soldier’s best pedigree,” said he, concluding, “is his sword. I know no more than that I was reared in the house of a Cypriot noble, to whom I had been brought by a trader of Alexandria. My protector made me a sailor, and would have made me his heir, but Roman insolence disgusted me, and I left my command, bearing with me no other inheritance than a heart too proud for slavery, my simitar, and this signet, which I have worn from my infancy.”

He took from his bosom a large sculptured gem fastened to a chain of pearls. Miriam put forth her trembling hand for it, read with a starting eye her own name and mine, and exclaiming, “My son! my son!” tottered forward and fell fainting into his arms.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Farewell]

I flew to them both, and never did a wo-worn heart beat with keener joy than when I, too, clasped my son, my long-lost, my first-born. Yet the cloud gathered instantly. Had he not come to take the earliest embrace of his parents in the crisis of their fate—the promise of an unbroken lineage, found only in the day when my country was in the jaws of destruction—the father awaking to those loveliest and happiest ties of nature only when the ax of the traitor or the sword of the enemy was uplifted to cut them asunder forever—the prince, the patriot, the warrior, summoned to the first exercise of his noble rights and duties—when in the next hour a heap of dust might be all that was left of his family and his people!

I clung to my son with a fondness thirsting to repay its long arrear. His desertion in the hands of strangers; the early hardships; the loss of a mother’s love and a father’s protection; the insults and privations that the struggler through the world must bear; the desperate hazards of his life; even the errors into which necessity and circumstance had driven him, rose up in judgment against me; I reproached myself even for the accident, perhaps the irresistible accident, that gave my infant to the roaring waters. But the tears and exclamations of the people round us recalled us. I might then have walked from the hall without any man’s daring to lay a hand upon me, for the public feeling, touched by the discovery of my son, was loud for my instant liberation. But I was not to be satisfied with this imperfect justice, and I demanded that the tribunal should proceed.

[Sidenote: “Shed Not the Innocent Blood”]

The presence of my family was felt too strong for the fears of my persecutor, and he demanded that they should retire. An impression, like the warning of a superior spirit, instantly told me that the parting was forever! The same impression was evidently on their minds, for their parting was like an eternal farewell. The whole group at once gathered round me. Constantius and Salome knelt before me for final forgiveness. My son and his betrothed bowed their heads to ask my blessing. Miriam and Esther came last, and silently hung upon my neck, dissolved in tears of matchless anguish and love. I lifted my eyes and heart to Heaven, and tho oppressed with the terrible conviction of my own fate, put forth my hands and blessed them in the name of the God of Israel. I saw them pass away. My firmness could bear no more; I wept aloud. But with my sorrow there was given a hope—a light across the gloom of my soul. When I saw their stately forms solemnly move along through the fierce and guilty multitude, and the distant portal shut upon them, I thought of the sons and daughters of the great patriarch passing within the door of the ark from the midst of a condemned world.

The night wore on; the people, exhausted by the length of a trial, protracted for the purpose, had left the hall nearly empty; and Onias, now secure of a tribunal that dreaded nothing but the public eye, urged the decision. The judges were his creatures through corruption or fear; his followers alone remained. Sure to be crushed, the fluctuations of hope were gone; and I listened to the powerful and high-wrought harangue of my enemy without a feeling but of admiration for his extraordinary powers, or of pity for their perverter. While he stood, drinking in with ears and eyes the wonder and homage of the audience, I myself called for sentence.

“Scorning,” said I, “to reason with understandings that will not comprehend, and consciences that can not feel, I appeal from the man of blood to the God of mercies; from the worse than man of blood, from the corrupter of justice, to HIM who shall judge the judge; to Him who shall yet pass sentence on all in the sight of earth and heaven.”

The chief of the tribunal rose; my condemnation was upon a lip quivering and pale; he had already in his hand the border of the robe which he was to rend, in sign that the accused was rent from Israel.

A confusion at the portal checked him, and the words resounded: “Shed not the innocent blood!” The voice was as a voice from the sepulcher, melancholy, but searching to the very heart. The guard gave way, and a man, covered from head to foot with a sepulchral garment, rushed up the immense hall. At the foot of the tribunal he flung off the garment, and disclosed a face and form that well might have ranked him among the dwellers of the grave.

“I have come from the tombs,” exclaimed he; “I had lain down to die in the resting-place of my fathers, in the valley of Jehoshaphat. A man in white raiment stood beside me and commanded me to come and bear witness of the truth. The Romans were round me—he led me through them; the battlements were before me—he led me through them; riot, fury, and frenzy stood in my path through your city—he led me through them; and lo! here I come, and proclaim by his command: ‘Shed not the innocent blood.’”

[Sidenote: Onias the Accused]

Onias stood paralyzed. No memory of mine could recall the haggard features of the stranger. The chief of the tribunal in manifest confusion required his name.

“My name,” he answered, with a wild wave of his hand, “is nothing—air—is gone. What I was, is past; what I shall be, the tomb alone must tell; but what I am, is the witness, commissioned to proclaim Onias the betrayer of the blood of your nobles, the slave of Rome, the traitor to his country, the apostate to his religion.”

All hands were lifted up in astonishment. Onias, sick at heart, made a feeble gesture of denial.

“Dares the traitor deny his own handwriting?” was the indignant reply. “Let him read his treason, committed within these twelve hours.”

He stalked over to the guilty Onias and held his letters to the Roman general before his shrinking eye.

While my eyes were fixed on the portal through which had vanished my last hope of happiness, I was startled by an outcry, and I saw the gleam of steel at my throat. Onias, in despair of smiting me by the arm of the law, had made a frenzied effort to destroy me by his own. Quick as lightning the stranger threw himself between us and grasped the assassin; they struggled—they were involved in the large and loose robe and fell together. I sprang forward to separate them. But the deed was done. Onias lay rolling upon the ground; the dagger was in the stranger’s grasp, and it was crimson to the hilt. I could feel no vindictiveness against the dying, and I offered him my hand. He threw a violent expression of scorn into his stiffening features, and cried at convulsive intervals:

“No compassion—no hypocrisy for me—I die as I lived. I hated you, for you thwarted me.—You have the best of the game now; but if I had lived till to-morrow, I should have been lord of Jerusalem.—The Romans will settle all.—You and yours would have been in my power.—You shall perish.—That boy is your son; he was brought to me in his infancy; I hated you as my rival; and I swore that you should never see your first-born again. I sold him to the Alexandrian.—You shall not live to triumph over me; your dungeon shall be your tomb; another night, and you sleep no more, or sleep forever.”

He gathered his mantle over his face and died.

His followers, after the first consternation, demanded vengeance on the stranger. But it was now my time to protect him, and I declared that no man should strike him but through me.

[Sidenote: The Last of Jubal]

“This is noble and generous,” interrupted he, “but useless. I, too, am dying; but I rejoice that I am dying by the wound meant for you. Have I at last atoned? Have you forgotten? Can you forgive? Then, prince of Naphtali, lay your hand upon this heart, and while it beats believe that there you are honored. Time has changed me; misery has extinguished the last trace of what I was. Farewell, my kinsman, friend, chieftain—and remember—Jubal.”

I caught him in my arms; my heart melted at his sufferings, his generous attachment, his heroic devotion, his deep repentance.

“You have more than atoned,” I exclaimed; “you are more than forgiven. Live, my manly, kind, high-hearted Jubal; live for the honor of your race—of your country—of human nature.”

He looked up with a smile of gratitude, and faintly uttering, “I die happy,” breathed in my arms the last breath of one of the most gallant spirits that ever left the world.

Loud shouts abroad and blazes that colored the roof with long columns of lurid light put an end to the deliberation of the tribunal. The enemy were assaulting the citadel, and the mockery of justice was summarily closed by returning me to my dungeon, to await times fitter for the calmness of judicial murder.

[Sidenote: The Dungeon’s Heat]

The assault continued for some hours; but to my cell, sunk in the very foundations of the fortress, day never came; and I lay, still buried in darkness, when I heard sounds like the blows of pickaxes, and from time to time the fall of heavy bodies, followed by a roar. The air grew close, and chill as the dungeon had been, I experienced a sensation of heat still more painful. The heat increased rapidly. I tried to avoid it by shifting my place in the vault. But the evil was not to be baffled—the air grew hotter and hotter. I flung myself on the pavement to draw a cool breath from the stones; they began to glow under me. I ran to the door of the dungeon; it was iron, and the touch scorched me. I shouted, I tore at the walls, at the massive rings in the floor, less perhaps from the hope of thus escaping than from the vague eagerness to deaden present pain by violent effort. But I tore up the pavement and broke down the fragments of the walls in vain. The walls themselves began to split with the heat; smoke eddied through the crevices of the immense stones, and the dungeon was filled with fiery vapor. My raiment encumbered me; I tore it away, and on the floor saw it fall in ashes. I felt the agonies of suffocation; and at last, helpless and hopeless, threw myself down, like my raiment, to be consumed.

I had scarcely touched the stone when I felt it shake and vibrate from side to side. A hollow noise like distant thunder echoed through the vault; the walls shook, collapsed, opened, and I was plunged down a chasm, and continued rolling for some moments in a whirl of stones, dust, earth, and smoke.

When it subsided, I found myself lying on the green sward, in noonday, at the bottom of a valley, with the tower of Antonia covered with the legionaries, five hundred feet above me. The remnants of huge fires round pillars of timber explained the mystery. The enemy had undermined the wall, and by burning the props, had brought it down at the moment of the assault. Onias, the planner of the attack, for which he was to be repaid with the procuratorship of Judea, had placed me in the spot where ruin was to begin, and cheered his dying moments with the certainty that, acquitted or not, there I must be undone!

[Sidenote: Preparations]

I long lay confused and powerless beside my dungeon! But the twilight air revived me, and I crept through the deserted entrenchments of the enemy until I reached one of the gates, where I announced my name, and was received with rejoicings. The heart of my countrymen was heroic to the last, and deeply was its heroism now demanded; for the whole force of the enemy had been brought up for final assault, and when I entered, every portion of the walls was the scene of unexampled battle. Where the ground suffered the approach of troops, the enemy’s columns, headed by archers and slingers innumerable, rushed to the rampart, climbing up the breaches, with their shields covering their heads. Against the towers were wheeled towers filled with troops, who descended on the wall and fought us hand to hand. We felt the continued blows of the battering-rams, shaking the battlements under our feet. Where the ground repelled direct assault, there the military machines poured havoc, and those were the most dreaded of all.

The skill of man, exerted for ages on the arts of compendious slaughter, has scarcely produced the equals of those horrible engines. They threw masses of unextinguishable fire, of boiling water, of burning oil, of red-hot flints, of molten metal, from distances that precluded defense, and with a force that nothing could resist. The catapult shot stones of a hundred-weight from the distance of furlongs, with the straightness of an arrow, and with an impulse that ground everything in their way to powder. The fortitude that scorned the Roman spear, and exulted in the sight of the columns mounting the scaling-ladders, as mounting to sure destruction, quailed before the tremendous power of the catapult. The singular and ominous cry of the watchers, who gave notice of its discharge, “The son cometh,” was a sound that prostrated every man upon his face, until the crash of the walls told that the blow was given.

[Sidenote: “Wo to the City!”]

Every thought that I had now for earth was in the tower of Antonia! But there the legions rendered approach impossible, and I could only gaze from a distance and see, in the bitterness of my soul, the enemy gradually forcing their way from rampart to rampart. It was in vain that I strove to collect a few who would join me in a desperate attempt to succor its defenders. I was left alone, and sitting on the battlements, I took the chance of some friendly spear or stone.

Through all the roar I heard the voice of Sabat, the Ishmaelite: the eternal “Wo!—wo!—wo!” loud as ever, and in appalling unison with the hour. He now came rushing along the wall with the same rapid and vigorous stride as of old, but his betrothed no longer followed him. She was borne in his arms! The stones from the engines thundered against the wall; they tore up the strong buttresses like weeds; they struck away whole ranks of men, and whirled their remnants through the air. They leveled towers and swept battlements away with their defenders at a blow. But Sabat moved unshrinking on his wild mission. His cry now was terrible prophecy.

“A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegroom and the bride, a voice against this whole people.”

He stopped before me, and pointing to the face of his bride, said with a sudden faltering and tears: “She is gone; she is dead. She died last night. I promised to die too. She follows me no more. It is I that must follow her.”

Death was in his face, and my only wonder was that a form so utterly reduced could live and move. I offered him some provision from the basket of a dead soldier at my feet. For the first time he took it, thanked me, and ate. Not less to my surprise, he continued gazing round him on the movements of the enemy, on the temple, the tower of Antonia, and the hills. But his station was eminently perilous, and I pointed out one of the military engines taking its position to play upon the spot where we were. He refused to stir.

“The look may be long,” said he, “when a man looks his last.”

[Sidenote: The Conflict of Heaven and Earth]

I heard the roar of the engine, and leaped from the rampart to escape the discharge. Sabat stood, and again began his cry: “Wo to the city, and to the holy house, and to the people!” The discharge tore up a large portion of the battlement. Sabat never moved limb or feature. The wall was cut away on his right and left, as if it had been cut with an ax. He stood calmly on the projecting fragment with his lips to the lips of his bride. I saw the engine leveled again, and again called to him to escape. He gave me no answer but a melancholy smile; and crying out, with a voice that filled the air: “Wo to myself!” stood. I heard the rush of the stone. It smote Sabat and his bride into atoms![55]

The fall of our illustrious and unhappy city was supernatural. The destruction of the conquered was against the first principles of Roman polity, and to the last hour of our national existence, Rome held out offers of peace, and lamented our frantic determination to be undone. But the decree was gone forth from a mightier throne. During the latter days of the siege, a hostility to which that of man was as the grain of sand to the tempest that drives it on, overpowered our strength and senses.

Fearful shapes and voices in the air; visions startling us from our short and troubled sleep; lunacy in its most hideous forms; sudden death in the midst of vigor; the fury of the elements let loose upon our unsheltered heads; we had every terror and evil that could beset human nature, but pestilence; the most probable of all in a city crowded with the famishing, the diseased, the wounded, and the dead. Yet, tho the streets were covered with the unburied, tho every wall and trench was streaming with gore, tho six hundred thousand corpses lay flung over the rampart, naked to the sun—pestilence came not; for if it had come, the enemy would have been scared away. But the “abomination of desolation,” the pagan standard, was fixed, where it was to remain until the plow passed over the ruins of Jerusalem!

[Sidenote: The Last Sign]

On one night, that fatal night! no man laid his head upon his pillow. Heaven and earth were in conflict. Meteors burned above us; the ground shook under our feet; the volcano blazed; the wind burst forth in irresistible blasts, and swept the living and the dead in whirlwinds, far into the desert. We heard the bellowing of the distant Mediterranean, as if its waters were at our side, swelled by a new deluge. The lakes and rivers roared and inundated the land. The fiery sword shot out tenfold fire. Showers of blood fell. Thunder pealed from every quarter of the heaven. Lightning, in immense sheets, of an intensity and duration that turned the darkness into more than day, withering eye and soul, burned from the zenith to the ground, and marked its track by forests on flame, and the shattered summits of the hills.

Defense was not thought of, for the mortal hostility had passed from the mind. Our hearts quaked for fear, but it was to see the powers of heaven shaken. All cast away the shield and the spear, and crouched before the descending judgment. We were conscience-smitten. Our cries of remorse, anguish, and horror were heard through the uproar of the storm. We howled to the caverns to hide us; we plunged into the sepulchers to escape the wrath that consumed the living; we would have buried ourselves under the mountains! I knew the cause, the unspeakable cause, and knew that the last hour of crime was at hand. A few fugitives, astonished to see one man among them not sunk into the lowest feebleness of fear, came round me, and besought me to lead them to some place of safety, if such were now to be found on earth. I told them openly that they were to die, and counseled them to die in the hallowed ground of the Temple. They followed me through streets encumbered with every shape of human suffering, to the foot of Mount Moriah. But beyond that, we found advance impossible. Piles of cloud, whose darkness was palpable, even in the midnight in which we stood, covered the holy hill. Still, not to be daunted by anything that man could overcome, I cheered my disheartened band, and attempted to lead the way up the ascent. But I had scarcely entered the cloud when I was swept downward by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower round me.

[Sidenote: “Let Us Go Hence”]

Now came the last and most wondrous sign that marked the fate of Israel. While I lay helpless, I heard the whirlwind roar through the cloudy hill, and the vapors began to revolve. A pale light, like that of the rising moon, quivered on their edges, and the clouds rose and rapidly shaped themselves into the forms of battlements and towers. The sound of voices was heard within, low and distant, yet strangely sweet. The luster brightened, and the airy building rose, tower on tower, and battlement on battlement. In awe that held us mute, we knelt and gazed upon this more than mortal architecture, which continued rising and spreading, and glowing with a serener light, still soft and silvery, yet to which the broadest moonbeam was dim. At last it stood forth to earth and heaven, the colossal image of the first Temple, the building raised by the wisest of men, and consecrated by the visible glory.

All Jerusalem saw the image, and the shout that, in the midst of their despair, ascended from its thousands and tens of thousands, told what proud remembrances were there. But a hymn was heard that might have hushed the world. Never fell on my ear, never on the human sense, a sound so majestic, yet so subduing; so full of melancholy, yet of grandeur. The cloudy portal opened, and from it marched a host such as man had never seen before, such as man shall never see but once again; the guardian angels of the city of David!—they came forth glorious, but with wo in all their steps; the stars upon their helmets dim; their robes stained; tears flowing down their celestial beauty.

“Let us go hence,” was their song of sorrow; “Let us go hence,” was answered by the sad echoes of the mountains. “Let us go hence,” swelled upon the night to the farthest limits of the land. The procession lingered long on the summit of the hill. Then, the thunder pealed; and they rose at the command, diffusing waves of light over the expanse of heaven. Their chorus was heard, still magnificent and melancholy, when their splendor was diminished to the brightness of a star. The thunder roared again; the cloudy temple was scattered on the winds; and darkness, the omen of her grave, settled upon Jerusalem!

I was roused from my consternation by the voice of a man.

[Sidenote: A Glance toward the Temple]

“What!” said he, “sitting here, when all the world is stirring? Poring over the faces of dead men, when you should be the foremost among the living? All Jerusalem in arms, and yet you scorn your time to gain laurels?”

The haughty and sarcastic tone was familiar to my recollection; but to see, as I did, a Roman soldier within a few feet of me was enough to make me spring up, and draw my simitar, careless of consequences.

“You ought to know me,” said he, without moving a muscle; “for tho it is some years since we met, we have not been often asunder. And so here you have been sitting these twelve hours among corpses, to no better purpose than losing your time and your memory together!”

I looked round; the sun was in his meridian. The little band that I had led to the foot of the mountain were lying dead, to a man.

“Are you not a Roman?” I exclaimed.

“No; but I conclude that nearly as much absurdity and mischief may be committed under these trappings as under any other, and therefore I wear them. But you may exchange with me if you like. This cuirass and falchion will help you to money, riot, violence, and vice—and what more do nine-tenths of mankind ask for in their souls? Take my offer and you will be on the winning side; another thing that men like. But be expeditious, for before this sun dips his forehead in the Asphaltites, the bloodshed and robbery will be over.”

His laugh, as he uttered the words, was bitterness itself, and I felt my flesh instinctively shudder. But a glance toward the Temple told me that the words were true. The legions had forced their way to the foot of the third and weakest rampart, which I now saw flying in pieces under the blows of the battering-rams. They must have marched by the very spot where I had sat since midnight, and I probably escaped only by being taken for one of the dead. I wrung my hands in agony. He burst into a wild roar of derision.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Beholds Epiphanes]

“What fools you lords of the creation are! What is the loss of life to the naked wretches that you see running about like frightened children on those battlements, or to the clothed wretches that you see ready to massacre them, for the honor and glory of a better-clothed wretch?—a dinner too much will revenge them on the Emperor of the earth. The spear or the arrow comes, and quick as thought their troubles are at an end. Man!—the true misery is to live, to be constrained to live, to feel the wants, wearinesses, and weaknesses of life, yet to drag on existence; to be—what I am.”

He tore the helmet from his forehead, and, with a groan of agony, flung it to a measureless distance in the air. In amaze and terror I beheld Epiphanes! The same Greek countenance, the same kingly presence, the same strength and heroic stature, and the same despair, were before me that, in the early years of my wo, I had seen on the shores of the Dead Sea.

“I told you,” said he, with a sudden return to calmness, “that this day would come; and to tell you so required no spirit of prophecy. There is a time for all things, long-suffering among the rest; and your countrymen had long ago come to that time. But one grand hope was still to be given; they cast it from them! Ages on ages shall pass before they learn the loftiness of that hope or fulfil the punishment of that rejection. Yet, in the fulness of time, shall the light break in upon their darkness. They shall ask, Why are we the despised, the branded, the trampled, the abjured, of all nations? Why are the barbarian and the civilized alike our oppressors? Why do contending faiths join in crushing us alone? Why do realms, distant as the ends of the earth, and diverse as day and night—alike those who have heard our history, and those who have never heard of us but as the sad sojourners of the earth—unite in one cry of scorn? And what is the universal voice of nature but the voice of the King of nature?”

I listened in reverence to language that pierced my heart with an intense power of truth, yet with a pang that made me writhe. I longed, yet dreaded, to hear again the searching and lofty accents of this being of unwilling wisdom.

“Man of terrible knowledge,” said I, “canst thou tell for what crime this judgment shall come?”

Awe was written upon his mighty brow, and his features quivered as he slowly spoke.

“Their crime? There is no name for it. The spirits of heaven weep when they think of it. The spirits of the abyss tremble. Man alone, the man of Judea alone, could commit that horror of horrors.”

He paused and prostrated himself at the words; then rising, rapidly uttered: “Judge of the crime by its punishment. From the beginning, Israel was stubborn, and his stubbornness brought him to sorrow. He rebelled, and he was warned by the captivity of a monarch or the slaughter of a tribe. He sinned more deeply, for he was the slave of impurity; then was his kingdom divided; yet a few years saw him powerful once more. He sinned more deeply still, for he sought the worship of idols. Then came his deeper punishment, in the fall of his throne and the long captivity of his people. But even Babylon sent back the forgiven.

“Happy, I say to you, happy will be the hour for Israel—for mankind, for creation—when he shall take into his hand the records of his fathers, and, in tears, ask, What is that greater crime than rebellion? than blasphemy? than impurity? than idolatry? which, not seventy years, nor a thousand years, of sorrow have seen forgiven; which has prolonged his wo into the old age of the world—which threatens him with a chain not to be broken but by the thunder-stroke that breaks up the universe!”

“And still,” said I, trembling before the living oracle,—“still is there hope?”

“Look to that mountain,” was the answer, as he pointed to Moriah. Its side, covered with the legions advancing to the assault, shone in the sun like a tide of burning brass. “It is now a sight of splendid evil!” exclaimed he. “But upon that mountain shall yet be enthroned a Sovereign before whom the sun shall hide his head, and at the lifting of whose scepter the heaven and the heaven of heavens shall bow down! To that mountain shall man, and more than man, crowd for wisdom and happiness. From that mountain shall light flow to the ends of the universe, and the government shall be the Everlasting!”

[Sidenote: The Roar of Assault]

The roar of the assault began, and my awful companion was recalled to the world.

[Sidenote: In Front of the Sanctuary]

“I must see the end of this battle,” said he, in his old mixture of sarcasm and melancholy; “man’s natural talent for making himself miserable may go far, but he is still the better for a teacher. On the top of that hill there are twenty thousand men panting for each other’s blood like tigers; and yet without me they would leave the grand business undone, after all.”

“But one word more,” I cried, giving my last look to the tower of Antonia, on which the eagles now glittered.

He anticipated me.

“All are safe—they are in the hands of Septimius, who will deal with them in honor. He solicited the command, that he might provide for their security. They comfort themselves with the hope that you will return. But return you never will. They will be happy in the hope—until sorrow is too long shut out to find room when it comes; they love you, and will love you long, but there is an end of all things. And now, farewell!”

“And now, onward,” said I. “But every spot is crowded with the Roman columns. How am I to pass those spears?”

He laughed wildly, flung his arm round me, as of old, and ran, with the speed of a stag, round the foot of the hill to an unobstructed side. The ascent was nearly perpendicular; but he bounded up the crags without drawing a breath, placed me on a battlement, and was gone!

[Sidenote: The Mark of Ruin]

Below me war raged in its boundless fury. The enemy had forced their way, and the exasperated Jews, contemptuous of life, fought them with the rage of wild beasts. When the lance was broken, the knife was the weapon; when the knife failed, they tore with their hands and teeth. Masses of stone, torches, even dead bodies, everything that could minister to destruction, were hurled from the roofs on the assailants, who were often repulsed with deadly havoc. But they still made way; the courts of the Gentiles, of the Israelites, and of the priests were successively stormed; and the legions at length established themselves in front of the Sanctuary. A howl of wrath, at the possible profanation of the Holy of Holies, rose from the multitude. I rushed from the battlement, and showing myself to the people, demanded “who would follow me?” The crowd exulted at the sight of their well-known chieftain; and in the impulse of the moment we poured on the enemy, and drove them from the court of the Sanctuary. Startled by the sudden reverse, the Roman generals renewed their proposal for a surrender, and Titus himself, at the most imminent hazard, forced his way to the portal, and besought me to surrender and save the Temple.

But Jerusalem was marked for ruin. While I was in the very act of checking the shower of spears, I heard the voice of one of those extraordinary beings who, by mad predictions of the certain succor of Heaven, kept up the resistance while there was a man to be slaughtered. He was standing on the roof of a vast cloister, surrounded by a crowd of unfortunate men, whom his false prophecies were infuriating against the offer of life. I recognized the impostor, or the demon, by whom the Roman mission had been destroyed. The legionaries pointed in vain to the flames already rising round the cloisters. The predictions grew bolder still, and the words of truth were answered by showers of missiles. The flames suddenly burst out through the roof, and the whole of its defenders, to the number of thousands, sank into the conflagration. When I looked round after the shock, this fearful being, without a touch of fire on his raiment, was haranguing in a distant quarter, and whether man or fiend, urging the multitude to their fate!

This was the day of days, the ninth day of the month Ab, the anniversary of the burning of the Temple by the king of Babylon. One thousand one hundred and thirty years, seven months, and fifteen days were past, from its foundation by our great King Solomon! My attack had repelled the legionaries, and Titus, exhausted and dispirited, began to withdraw the routed columns from the front of the Temple. It was the fifth hour; the sun was scorching up their strength, and I looked proudly forward to victory and the preservation of the Temple!

[Sidenote: The Enemy—Fire]

As I was standing on the portal of the court of the Sanctuary, and gazing at the rout of the troops toward the tower of Antonia, I heard a voice close to my ear: “I told you that this day would end in nothing without me.” I turned, but he was already far away among the crowd; and before I could even speak, I saw him, torch in hand, bound into the Golden window, beside the veil of the Holy Place. The inner Temple was instantly in a blaze. Our cries and the sight of the flames brought back the enemy at full speed. I saw that the fatal hour was come, and collecting a few brave men, took my post before the veil, to guard the entrance with my blood.

But the legions rushed onward, crying out that “they were led by the Fates,” and that “the God of the Jews had given His people and city into their hands.” The torrent was irresistible. Titus rushed in at its head, exclaiming, that “the Divinity alone could have given the stronghold into his power, for it was beyond the hope and strength of man.” My devoted companions were torn down in an instant. I was forced back to the veil of the Holy of Holies, fighting at random in the midst of the legionaries, who now saw no enemies but each other. In the fury of plunder they deluged the Portico and the Sanctuary with blood.

The golden table of Pompey, the golden vine, the trophies of Herod, were instantly torn away. Subordination was lost. The troops trampled upon their officers. Titus himself was saved only by cutting his way through those madmen. But I longed to die, and give my last breath and the last drop of my veins to the seat of Sanctity and Glory. I fought—I taunted—I heaped loud scorn on the profaners—I was covered from head to foot with gore; but it was from the hearts of Romans—I toiled for death; but I remained without a wound. Yet, wo to the life that came within the sweep of my simitar. The last blow that I struck was at an impious hand, put forth to grasp the veil that shut the Holy of Holies from the human gaze. The hand flew from the body, and the spoiler fell groaning at my feet. He sent up an expiring look, and I knew the countenance of my persecutor, Cestius!

[Sidenote: The Ruin of the Temple]

But a new enemy had come, conqueror alike of the victor and the vanquished—fire.[56] I heard its roar round the sanctuary. The Romans, appalled, fled to the portal; but they were doomed. A wall of fire stood before them. They rushed back, tore down the veil, and the Holy of Holies stood open. The blaze melted the plates of the roof in a golden shower above me. It calcined the marble floor; it dissipated in vapor the inestimable gems that studded the walls. All who entered lay turned to ashes. So perish the profaners! But on the sacred Ark the flame had no power. It whirled and swept in a red orb round the untouched symbol of the throne of thrones. Still I lived, but I felt my strength giving way: the heat withered my sinews—the flame extinguished my sight.

Bleeding, blind, frantic, I still fought until I sank under a heap of dead. In defiance of all prediction, I now believed my death inevitable. At once I heard the shouts of the conquerors and the fall of the pillars of the Temple. I welcomed the living grave! In all the wildness of the uproar I heard the voice: “TARRY THOU TILL I COME!” The world disappeared from before me!

* * * * *

Here I pause. I had undergone that portion of my unhappy career which was to be passed among my people. My life as father, husband, and citizen was at an end. Thenceforth I was to be a solitary being.

My fate had yet scarcely fallen upon me, but I was now to feel it in the disruption of every gentler tie that held me to life. I was to make my couch with the savage, the outcast, and the slave. I was to see the ruin of the mighty and the overthrow of empires. Yet in the tumult that changed the face of the world, I was still to live and be unchanged. Every sterner passion that disturbs our nature was to reign in successive tyranny over my soul. And fearfully was the decree fulfilled.

[Illustration: “I heard the shouts of the conquerors, and the fall of the pillars of the Temple.”

[see page 532.

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

[Sidenote: Salathiel the Eternal Wanderer]

In revenge for the fall of Jerusalem, I traversed the globe to seek out an enemy of Rome. I found in the northern snows a man of blood; I stirred up the soul of Alaric and led him to the rock of Rome. In revenge for the insults heaped on the Jew by the dotards and dastards of the city of Constantine, I sought out an instrument of compendious ruin: I found him in the Arabian sands, and poured ambition into the soul of the enthusiast of Mecca. In revenge for the pollution of the ruins of the Temple, I roused the iron tribes of the West, and at the head of the crusaders expelled the Saracens. I fed full on the revenge, and I felt the misery of revenge!

A passion for the mysteries of nature seized me. I toiled with the alchemist; I wore away years in perplexities of the schoolmen; and I felt the guilt and emptiness of unlawful knowledge.

A passion for human fame seized me. I drew my sword in the Italian wars—triumphed—was a monarch—and learned to curse the hour when I first dreamed of fame!

A passion for gold seized me. I felt the gnawing of avarice—the last infirmity of the fallen mind. Wealth came, to my wish and to my torment. In the midst of royal treasures I was poorer than the poorest. Days and nights of misery were the gift of avarice. I felt within me the undying worm. In my passion I longed for regions where the hand of man had never rifled the mine. I found a bold Genoese, and led him to the discovery of a new world. With its metals I inundated the old, and to my own misery added the misery of two hemispheres!

But the circle of the passions, a circle of fire, was not to surround my fated steps forever. Calmer and nobler aspirations were to rise in my melancholy heart. I saw the birth of true science, true liberty, and true wisdom. I lived with Petrarch, among his glorious relics of the genius of Greece and Rome. I stood enraptured beside the easel of Angelo and Raphael. I conversed with the merchant kings of the Mediterranean. I stood at Mentz beside the wonder-working machine that makes knowledge imperishable and sends it with winged speed through the earth. At the pulpit of the mighty man of Wittenberg I knelt; Israelite as I was, and am, I did voluntary homage to the mind of Luther!

[Sidenote: The Future]

But I must close these thoughts, as wandering as the steps of my pilgrimage. I have more to tell—strange, magnificent, and sad.

But I must wait the impulse of my heart. Or, can the happy and the high-born, treading upon roses, have an ear for the story of the Exile, whose path has for a thousand years been in the brier and the thorn!

FINIS

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