XIII
DAUGHTER OF THE VOICE
To Deborah this was a year of mighty transformation. The traces of girlhood were worn from her face by the hardness of her daily life. Her sparkling eyes deepened and steadied their fire. Her features became more immobile and rigid under the stress of her one persistent thought and purpose. Even her body was changed. She was taller. The rounded contour of her form became more masculinely muscular. The graceful carriage of the maiden, brought up in the elegance of Elkiah's home, was somewhat lost in the heavier tread and more angular movement developed by bearing burdens with her humbler sisters in the rude encampment, and even by training at arms with the men.
Yet, if less fair and maidenly, she was more nobly beautiful than ever before. Could Dion have seen her, he would have thought her more like Athena than when he first saw her at Elkiah's gate. Hers was now a head for a helmet rather than for ornaments. Armor would have fitted her figure as well as robes.
To her people she had become the incarnation of patriotism. They gave her the sacred appellation, "The daughter of Jerusalem," the name by which the ancient prophets had designated the nation. Even old Mattathias gazed upon her as if to take from her face some sign of that diviner will he prayed daily to know. To the maiden's words he would listen as to the counsel of his battle-trained advisers.
On one subject, however, the venerable leader was inexorably opposed to her wishes. She asked that she might be permitted to wear the armor of the soldier, and join in the battles. The old priest replied in the words of the ancient law:
"The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all that so do are an abomination unto the Lord thy God."
To this prohibition he was led to make one conditional exception—that in the event of the Fort of the Rocks being taken by the enemy, any disguise which might enable her to escape the danger peculiar to a captured woman might be used.
"If," replied Deborah, "for the safety of one woman the letter of the law may be set aside, why not for the safety of Israel?"
"You are right, my daughter. Should Israel need you, robe yourself as you will, yet remember it will be as when a victim is arrayed for the sacrifice. But with our brave men about you surely there is no need for you to mingle in the common fray. Your womanly presence now encourages us more than a band of swordsmen."
"But if—if"—Deborah hesitated in speaking—"but if the Voice should bid me?"
"The Voice! The Voice!"
Mattathias bowed his head upon his breast. "The Bath-kol! The daughter of God's voice! I may not dispute that Monitor; for only those anointed of heaven can hear it."
"How may one know the Voice? Explain to me the sacred Bath-kol"—and Deborah leaned forward, her hand upon the patriarch's knee and her face upturned toward his in reverent and eager inquiry.
Mattathias put his hand upon her forehead. "Alas!" he said, "I fear that the Voice has not been heard by any in our generation, for the days are too full of evil. God's voice is wordless; or rather, shall I say, the Eternal Word is voiceless. The Divine Mind shines through the mind of man as the lightning through the clouds. But since Malachi fell asleep, no soul of man has been so pure that it could transmit the heavenly glory and interpret its meaning.
"Yet," he continued, after a pause, "it may be that the Lord still teaches His own by indirection, by what we call the Daughter of the Voice; the echo of the heavenly from earthly things. Some of our wisest rabbis have held that, after one has prayed, the first words that fall upon the ear, especially if they be sacred words from the Law, the Prophets, or the Psalms, may be such echoes of the Divine Will. But in these matters I am unskilled. I only know that if God may not speak to a soul so true as thine, beaten pure by affliction, as the oil is beaten for the lamps of the sanctuary, then, indeed, are we left without the light."
Such words confirmed a conviction already vaguely felt by Deborah. She recalled her tremendous emotion that night amid the ruins of the house of Ben Isaac. She knew nothing of those psychological laws by which she might have accounted for her experience without attributing it to Divine suggestion. She had often observed how the atmosphere, hot above the fire, becomes hazy and tremulous, so that objects seen through it are distorted; but she did not know that her overheated mind might render it just as uncertain a medium for thoughts.
A few days after her conversation with Mattathias, the venerable man, shaken by age, and by the strain of duties that would have broken the energy of the youngest and strongest, laid himself down to die.
Earth has witnessed few scenes so humanly sublime as that in the rock-formed chamber, where the priest and warrior committed his work to his children, and his soul to God.
His sons knelt around the couch. To them he gave special counsel, correcting the weakness or encouraging the peculiar strength which his prophetic soul saw in each. For Jonathan he invoked caution; for Simon, courage; for all, faith in the Presence of the Lord, "who," said he, "will surely appear for our deliverance. But by whose arm will He smite? I know not. And yet——"
He looked long upon Judas. He put his thin hands upon his son's head. Then his own uplifted face became strangely luminous—doubtless as once was that of Moses. His lips parted as if they were burdened with some glorious prophecy; but they uttered no further word. There issued from them only—his soul.
They laid the body of Mattathias back upon the couch. A light seemed for a while to glow about his head, and then to be absorbed into the marble whiteness of his features.
Never was funeral cortege of warrior or monarch more impressive than that which wound among the hills far away to Modin, watched by hostile eyes, and guarded by the sharp swords of a band of patriots who determined that their dead chieftain should not be deprived of burial in the sepulchre of his fathers. The mournful train was accompanied for a short distance from the Fort of the Rocks by the entire multitude of women and children, wailing with low outcries, rending their garments, and flinging handfuls of dust into the air until the armed procession was out of sight.
The soul of Deborah had been too mightily stirred by these occurrences to allow her to speak much with her people. A deep ravine hard by became sacred to her as a place of meditation. There was something in the very formation of this place that helped her thought. An enormous rock projected many feet from a precipitous palisade, and overhung the narrow width of the ravine. It seemed about to fall and crush her as she sat beneath it. Yet she knew that it could not fall, for the mass of visible stone was more than counterbalanced by a larger proportion of the rock imbedded out of sight, in the hillside.
"So," she said, "I am always under impending danger. A black shadow is always on my soul. But I can trust the unknown goodness of the Lord, which outweighs and prevents the threatening evil!"
There, as in her sanctuary, she one day sat down to think and pray. How wearied she was with her woman's work in the camp! Had there been about her the duties and affections of a home, it would have been different; for she was made to love, and love intensely. What a wealth of devotion she poured upon her blind brother! Yet his care did not furnish sufficient diversion for her excited brain and heart.
The form of her father was, alas! now only a memory. It was always with her; but it drained her soul, as the dry desert drinks up the streams that come from the mountains, and yet remains a desert, flowerless, fountainless.
Her brother Benjamin? Ah, it is hard to love where we do not respect; and while she would have given her life for his had emergency required, the thought of him made her more lonely, since even brotherhood was soiled with impiety and treason.
If Dion's friendship now and then flashed a pleasing thought through her mind, it was only like a warm glow in the dark cloud of her prevailing mood, and as quickly gone. Yet she was startled when she noted how frequently that brightness shot through the cloud; and she put herself under inner penance after each recollection of the noble-hearted Greek. Indeed, she tried to hate him for his offered love. It seemed incongruous, hypocritical, for a Greek to be so generous and good. A Greek! Her soul tortured itself with detestation of that whole racial type; yet somehow the man persisted in standing out from his race, as a vein of gold gleaming from its bed of baser earth. By strong effort she drove his image from her imagination. It was not probable that they would meet again; and if they did, he would see now no helpless girl appealing to his pity, but a woman, strong and vengeful, whose words would provoke his hatred of her as the embodiment of her hated people.
So, as she had said, her heart was empty—empty of all things that ought to furnish a woman's nature. She seemed to herself an unsexed soul, a mass of reckless, excited energy which could find repose only in outward action. Oh, to be a man, strong of arm, as tireless as daring! She looked with contempt upon her feminine attire, which she thought no longer fitted her changed nature.
If she might not march in the ranks of the soldiers, why could she not engage in the secret service of which she had heard Jonathan, the Crafty, speak as necessary to their defense? She might act as a spy. The little band of patriots could not hope to hold out ultimately against the overwhelming numbers that Antiochus would send, unless their valor were seconded by deep plotting.
To act the part she contemplated would require her to assume various attire. Would not heaven grant her dispensation from the letter of the law that made it a shame for a woman to put on a man's apparel?
Such thoughts surged through her soul as she sat in the ravine. At length she knelt and consecrated herself again—as she had done a hundred times—to her people's God. With mute lips and phraseless purpose she waited upon the Lord to know His will. Oh, for some assurance that it was right to follow her own intent!
The silence was for a time unbroken. At length a strange sound smote upon the ear. It was like nothing she had ever heard—a ringing note that seemed to come from the ground. Now another of different tone; and another still. These sounds were repeated in an order that suggested the notes of the music with which the players on instruments at the Temple accompanied the chanting of the familiar hymn:
"Awake! Awake, Deborah! Awake! Awake! utter a song!"
Neither harp, nor lute, nor tabret, nor cymbal could have produced these sounds. It was as if the rocks themselves had become mighty timbrels, and were stricken by some spirit of the woods. Surely this must be of superhuman agency: the noise was so unearthly, and the notes so clearly belonged to the words they suggested. It was not a voice; yet surely it was the Bath-kol, the Echo, the Daughter of the Voice, of which the now sainted Mattathias had spoken.
She prostrated herself among the gnarled roots of a great terebinth that projected from the side of the ravine as if they were the horns of an altar. So, too, her soul clung to her Lord. She prayed in words that His will might be her will. Perhaps in thought she prayed that her will might be His will—a distinction she was too unskilled in moral anatomy to note.
Again and again with ecstatic fervor she murmured her oft-repeated vow, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God!" She lay some moments in almost a trance of seraphic peace. This was changed to seraphic fury. Jehovah had accepted her. She was to be His messenger—a messenger of fire, of dagger, of deceit toward Israel's foes, as well as of consolation to His people.
She rose, and stood with hands clasped behind her, her face upturned to the glowing line of light that spanned the ravine. She drank in the brightness as heaven's approbation.
How long she remained in that attitude of rhapsody she did not know. The spell was suddenly broken.
"There she is! Here, Caleb, is Deborah! Give me your hand, or she will be gone ere we reach her," cried Mephibosheth to his blind friend, as, spying Deborah at a distance, the children tried to reach her. But thus startled, she walked too fast for the lame boy, encumbered as he was with the care of his comrade.
"Well, let her go. It is enough that she is safe," said Caleb.
The boys had spent an hour in a favorite haunt in a field of great boulders that lay just at the brink of the ravine. These stones were of volcanic origin, and a proportion of metal had entered into their composition. The lads soon found that when they were struck with smaller stones they emitted semi-musical sounds, and they were not long in playing upon them crude imitations of the tunes with which they were familiar. Caleb would sit by one that gave a deep ring, while Meph with a stone and his crutch could reach two others.
"I thought when we played 'Awake, Deborah!' we would start her," said Meph.
"So we did," replied Caleb, and reaching his hands up to his comrade's shoulders, with a spring and a boost, he was instantly astride them, a saddle that the good-natured cripple had often provided for his more unfortunate friend when the way was rough.
In the counsel of the Fort of the Rocks Deborah that night related to Judas, Simon and Jonathan the story of the strange sounds she had heard in the ravine.
Simon shook his head and remained silent, glancing solicitously at the girl, as a physician might study one suspected of dementia. Judas quickly avowed his belief that God was again speaking to His people as in the ancient days of faith. The after debate between these brothers was decided by the words of Jonathan, the Crafty.
"If," said Jonathan, "Simon be right in ascribing this to the maiden's madness, still it does not follow that Judas is wholly wrong. Does not the Lord use even our dreams, when our minds are astray from their waking wisdom? If He made the ass to correct the prophet, why should He not use the vagary of this most pious woman? We need such service as she proposes. My voice is that we put no restraint upon her becoming our spy, lest peradventure we be found to fight against the will of Him who, it may be, is impelling her to this duty."