But the young men would hold their hands no longer. Impatient of delay, and encouraged by a sign from their leader, they rushed in upon the prisoners. Esca shielded Mariamne with his body. Calchas, pale and motionless, calmly awaited his fate. Gioras, the son of Simeon, a prominent warrior amongst the Sicarii, hurling on him a block of granite with merciless energy, struck the old man bleeding to the earth; but while the missile left his hands—while he yet stood erect and with extended arms, a Roman arrow quivered in the aggressor’s heart. He fell upon his face stone dead at the very feet of his victim. That random shaft was but the first herald of the storm. In another moment a huge mass of rock, projected from a powerful catapult against the building, falling short of its mark, struck the prophet as he sat moaning on the ground, and crushed him a lifeless, shapeless mass beneath its weight. Then rose a cry of despair from the outer wall—a confused noise of strife and shouting, the peal of the trumpets, the cheer of the conquerors, the wild roar of defiance and despair from the besieged. Ere long fugitives were pouring through the court, seeking the shelter of the Temple itself. There was no time to complete the execution—no time to think of the prisoners. John of Gischala, summoning his adherents, and bidding the young men hasten for their armour, betook himself to his stronghold within the Sacred Place. The Sanhedrim fled in consternation, although Matthias and the braver of his colleagues died afterwards in the streets, as became them, under shield. In a few minutes the Court of the Gentiles was again clear, save for the prisoners, one of [pg 436]whom was bound, and one mangled and bleeding on the pavement, tended by Mariamne, who bent over her kinsman in speechless sorrow and consternation. The fragment of rock, too, which had been propelled against the Temple, lay in the centre, over the crushed and flattened body of the prophet, whose hand and arm alone protruded from beneath the mass. The place did not thus remain in solitude for long. Fighting their retreat step by step, and, although driven backward, contesting every yard with their faces to the enemy, the flower of the Jewish army soon passed through, in the best order they could maintain, as they retired upon the Temple. Among the last of these was Eleazar; hopeless now, for he knew all was lost, but brave and unconquered still. He cast one look of affection at his brother’s prostrate form, one of astonishment and reproof on his kneeling child; but ere he could approach or even speak to her, he was swept on with the resistless tide of the defeated, ebbing before the advance of the Roman host.
And now Esca’s eye kindled, and his blood mounted, to a well-known battle-cry. He had heard it in the deadly circus; he had heard it on the crumbling breach; he had heard it wherever blows rained hard and blood flowed free, and men fought doggedly and hopelessly, without a chance or a wish for escape. His heart leaped to the cheer of the gladiators, rising fierce, reckless, and defiant above all the combined din of war, and he knew that his old comrades and late antagonists had carried the defences with their wonted bravery, as they led the Roman army to the assault.
The Legion of the Lost had indeed borne themselves nobly on this occasion. Their leader had not spared them; for Hippias well knew that to-day, with the handful left him by slaughter and disease, he must play his last stake for riches and distinction; nor had his followers failed to answer gallantly to his call. Though opposed by Eleazar himself and the best he could muster, they had carried the breach at the first onset—they had driven the Jews before them with a wild headlong charge that no courage could resist, and they had entered the outskirts of the Temple almost at the same moment with its discomfited defenders. It was their trumpets sounding the advance that reached Mariamne’s ear as she stood in the Court of the Gentiles, awaiting the vengeance she had defied. And amongst this courageous band two combatants had especially signalised themselves by feats of reckless and unusual daring. The one was old [pg 437]Hirpinus, who felt thoroughly in his element in such a scene, and whose natural valour was enhanced by the consciousness of the superiority he had now attained as a soldier over his former profession of a gladiator. The other was a comrade whom none could identify; who was conspicuous no less from his flowing locks, his beautiful form, and his golden armour, than from the audacity with which he courted danger, and the immunity he seemed to enjoy, in common with those who display a real contempt for death.
As he followed the golden headpiece and the long brown hair, that made way so irresistibly through the press, more than one stout swordsman exulted in the belief that some tutelary deity of his country had descended in human shape to aid the Roman arms; and Titus himself inquired, and waited in vain for an answer, “Who was that dashing warrior, with white arms and shining corselet, leading the gladiators so gallantly to the attack?”
But old Hirpinus knew, and smiled within his helmet as he fought. “The captain is well rid of her,” thought he, congratulating himself the while on his own freedom from such inconveniences. “For all her comely face and winning laugh, I had rather have a tigress loose in my tent than this fair, fickle, fighting fury, who takes to shield and spear as other women do to the shuttle and the distaff!”
Valeria, in truth, deserved little credit for her bravery. While apprehension of danger never for a moment overmastered her, the excitement of its presence seemed to offer a temporary relief to her wounded and remorseful heart. In the fierce rush of battle she had no leisure to dwell on thoughts that had lately tortured her to madness; and the very physical exertion such a scene demanded, brought with it, although she was unconscious of its severity, a sure anodyne for mental suffering. Like all persons, too, who are unaccustomed to bodily perils, the impunity with which she affronted each imparted an overweening confidence in her good fortune, and an undue contempt for the next, till it seemed to herself that she bore a charmed life; and that, though man after man might fall at her side as she fought on, she was destined to fulfil her task unscathed, and reach the presence of Esca in time to save him from destruction, even though she should die the next minute at his feet.
The two first assailants who entered the Court of the Gentiles were Valeria, in her golden armour, and Hirpinus, brandishing the short deadly weapon he knew how to use [pg 438]so well. They were close together; but the former paused to look around, and the gladiator, rushing to the front, made for his old comrade, whom he recognised on the instant. His haste, however, nearly proved fatal. The heavily-nailed sandals that he wore afforded but a treacherous foothold on the smooth stone pavement, his feet slipped from under him, and he came with a heavy back-fall to the ground. Habet!23 exclaimed Hippias, from the sheer force of custom, following close upon his tracks; but he strained eagerly forward to defend his prostrate comrade while he spoke, and found himself instantly engaged with a score of Jewish warriors, who came swarming back like bees to settle on the fallen gladiator. Hirpinus, however, covered his body skilfully under his shield, and defended himself bravely with his sword—dealing more than one fatal thrust at such of his assailants as were rash enough to believe him vanquished because down. As more of the gladiators came pouring in, they were opposed by troops of the Jews, who, with Eleazar at their head, made a desperate sally from the Temple to which they had retired, and a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, that lasted several minutes, took place round Hirpinus in the centre of the court. When he at length regained his feet, his powerful aid soon made itself felt in the fray, and the Jews, though fighting stubbornly still, were obliged once more to retreat before the increasing columns of the besiegers.
Valeria, in the meantime, rushing through the court to where she spied a well-known form struggling in its bonds, came across the path of Eleazar, at whom she delivered a savage thrust as she met him, lest he should impede her course. The fierce Jew, who had enough on his hands at such a moment, and was pressing eagerly forward into the thickest of the struggle, was content to parry the stroke with his javelin, and launch that weapon in return at his assailant, while he passed on. The cruel missile did its errand only too well. The broad thirsty point clove through a crevice in her golden corselet, and sank deep in her white tender side, to drink the life-blood of the woman-warrior as she sped onward in fulfilment of her fatal task. Breaking the javelin’s shaft in her hands, and flinging the fragments from her with a scornful smile, Valeria found strength to cross the court, nor did her swift step falter, nor did her proud bearing betray wounds or weakness, till she reached Esca’s side. A loving smile of recognition, two strokes of [pg 439]her sharp blade, and he was free! but as the severed bonds fell from his arms, and he stretched them forth in the delight of restored liberty, his deliverer, throwing away sword and shield, seized his hand in both her own, and, pressing it convulsively to her bosom, sank down helpless on the pavement at his feet.
Mariamne turned from the still insensible form of Calchas to the beautiful face, that even now, though pale from exhaustion and warped with agony, it pained her to see so fair. Gently and tenderly she lifted the golden helmet from Valeria’s brows; gently and tenderly she smoothed the rich brown hair, and wiped away the dews of coming death. Compassion, gratitude, and an ardent desire to soothe and tend the sufferer left no room for bitterness or unworthy feeling in Mariamne’s breast. Valeria had redeemed her promise with her life—had ransomed the man whom they both loved so dearly, at that fatal price, for her! and the Jewess could only think of all she owed the Roman lady in return; could only strive to tend and comfort her, and minister to her wants, and support her in the awful moment she did not fail to see was fast approaching. The dying woman’s face was turned on her with a sweet sad smile; but when Mariamne’s touch softly approached the head of her father’s javelin, still protruding from the wound, Valeria stayed her hand.
“Not yet,” she whispered with a noble effort that steadied voice and lips, and kept down mortal agony; “not yet; for I know too well I am stricken to the death. While the steel is there it serves to stanch the life-blood. When I draw it out, then scatter a handful of dust over my forehead, and lay the death-penny on my tongue. I would fain last a few moments longer, Esca, were it but to look on thy dear face! Raise me, both of you. I have somewhat to say, and my time is short.”
The Briton propped her in his strong arms, and she leaned her head against his shoulder with a gesture of contentment and relief. The winning eyes had lost none of their witchery yet, though soon to be closed in death. Perhaps they never shone with so soft and sweet a lustre as now, while they looked upon the object of a wild, foolish, and [pg 441]impossible love. While one white hand was laid upon the javelin’s head, and held it in its place, the other wandered over Esca’s features in a fond caress, to be wetted with his tears. Her voice was failing, her strength was ebbing fast, but the brave spirit of the Mutian line held out, tameless and unshaken still.
“I have conquered,” gasped the Roman lady, in broken accents and with quick-coming breath. “I have conquered, though at the cost of life. What then? Victory can never be bought too dear. Esca, I swore to rescue thee. I swore thou shouldst be mine. Now have I kept my oath. I have bought thee with my blood, and I give thee—give thee, my own, to this brave girl, who risked her life to save thee too, and who loves thee well; but not so well, not half so well, as I have done. Esca, my noble one, come closer, closer yet.” She drew his face down nearer and nearer to her own while she guided his hand to the javelin’s head, still fast in her side. “I can bear this agony no longer,” she gasped, “but it is not hard to die in thine arms, and by thy dear hand!”
Thus speaking, she closed his grasp within her own, round the steel, and drew it gently from the wound. The blood welled up in dark-red jets to pour forth, as it cleared its channel, in one continuous stream that soon drained life away. With a quiver of her dainty limbs, with a smile deepening in her fair face, with her fond eyes fixed on the man she loved, and her lips pressed against his hand, the spirit of that beautiful, imperious, and wilful woman passed away into eternity.
Blinded by their tears, neither Esca nor Mariamne were, for the moment, conscious of aught but the sad fate of her who had twice saved the one from death, and to whom the other had so lately appealed as the only source of aid in her great need. Dearly as he loved the living woman by his side, the Briton could not refrain from a burst of bitter sorrow while he looked on the noble form of Valeria lying dead at his feet; and Mariamne forgot her own griefs, her own injuries, in holy pity for her who had sacrificed virtue, happiness, wealth, life itself in his behalf, whom she, too, loved more dearly than it behoves human weakness to love anything this side the grave.
But the living now claimed that attention which it availed no longer to bestow upon the dead. Calchas, though sadly bruised and mangled, began to show signs of restored life. The stone that stretched him on the pavement had, indeed, dealt a fatal injury; but though it stunned him for a time, [pg 442]had failed to inflict instantaneous death. The colour was now returning to his cheek, his breath came in long deep sighs, and he raised his hand to his head with a gesture of renewed consciousness, denoted by a sense of pain. Esca, careless and almost unaware of the conflict raging around, bent sorrowfully over his old friend, and devoted all his faculties to the task of aiding Mariamne in her efforts to alleviate his sufferings.
In the meantime, the tide of battle surged to and fro, with increasing volume and unmitigated fury. The Legion of the Lost, flushed with success, and secure of support from the whole Roman army in their rear, pressed the Jews, with the exulting and unremitting energy of the hunter closing in on his prey. These, like the wild beasts driven to the toils, turned to bay with the dreadful courage of despair. Led by Eleazar, who was ever present where most needed, they made repeated sallies from the body of the Temple, endeavouring to regain the ground they had lost, at least as far as the entrance to the Court of the Gentiles. This became, therefore, an arena in which many a mortal combat was fought out hand to hand, and was several times taken and retaken with alternate success.
Hippias, according to his wont, was conspicuous in the fray. It was his ambition to lead his gladiators into the Holy Place itself, before Titus should come up, and with such an object he seemed to outdo to-day the daring feats of valour for which he had previously been celebrated. Hirpinus, who had no sooner regained his feet than he went to work again as though, like the fabled Titan, he derived renewed energy from the kisses of mother Earth, expostulated more than once with his leader on the dangers he affronted, and the numerical odds he did not hesitate to engage, but received to each warning the same reply. Pointing with dripping sword at the golden roof of the Temple flashing conspicuously over their heads, “Yonder,” said the fencing-master, “is the ransom of a kingdom. I will win it with my own hand for the legion, and share it amongst you equally, man by man.” Such a prospect inspired the gladiators with even more than their usual daring; and though many a stout swordsman went down with his face to the enemy, and many a bold eye looked its last on the coveted spoil, ere it grew dark for ever, the survivors did but close in the fiercer, to fight on, step by step, and stroke by stroke, till the court was strewed with corpses, and its pavement slippery with blood.
[pg 443]During a pause in the reeling strife, and while marshalling his men, who had again driven the Jews into the Temple, for a fresh and decisive attack, Hippias found himself in that corner of the court where Esca and Mariamne were still bending over the prostrate form of Calchas. Without a symptom of astonishment or jealousy, but with his careless half-contemptuous laugh, the fencing-master recognised his former pupil, and the girl whom he had once before seen in the porch of the tribune’s mansion at Rome. Taking off his heavy helmet, he wiped his brows, and leaned for a space on his shield.
“Go to the rear,” said he, “and take the lass with thee, man, since she seems to hang like a clog round thy neck, wherever there is fighting to be done. Give yourselves up to the Tenth Legion, and tell Licinius, who commands it, you are my prisoners. ’Tis your only chance of safety, my pretty damsel, and none of your sex ever yet had cause to rue her trust in Hippias. You may tell him also, Esca, that if he make not the more haste, I shall have taken the Temple, and all belonging to it, without his help. Off with thee, lad! this is no place for a woman. Get her out of it as quick as thou canst.”
But the Briton pointed downward to Calchas, who had again become unconscious, and whose head was resting on Mariamne’s knees. His gesture drew the attention of Hippias to the ground, cumbered as it was with slain. He had begun with a brutal laugh to bid his pupil “leave the carrion for the vultures,” but the sentence died out on his lips, which turned deadly white, while his eyes stared vacantly, and the shield on which he had been leaning fell with a clang to the stones.
There at his very feet over the golden breastplate was the dead face of Valeria; and the heart of the brave, reckless, and unprincipled soldier smote him with a cruel pang, for something told him that his own wilful pride and selfishness had begun that work, which was completed, to his eternal self-reproach, down there.
He never thought he loved her so dearly. He recalled, as if it were but yesterday, the first time he ever saw her, beautiful and sumptuous and haughty, looking down from her cushioned chair by the equestrian row, with the well-known scornful glance that possessed for him so keen a charm. He remembered how it kindled into approval as it met his own, and how his heart thrilled under his buckler, though he stood face to face with a mortal foe. He remembered how fondly he clung to that mutual glance of [pg 444]recognition, the only link between them, renewed more frankly and more kindly at every succeeding show, till, raising his eyes to meet it once too often in the critical moment of encounter, he went down badly wounded under the blow he had thus failed to guard. Nevertheless, how richly was he rewarded when fighting stubbornly on his knee, and from that disadvantageous attitude vanquishing his antagonist at last, he distinguished amidst the cheers of thousands her marked and musical Euge! syllabled so clearly though so softly, for his special ear, by the lips of the proud lady, whom from that moment he dared to love! Afterwards, when admitted periodically to her house, how delightful were the alternations of hope and fear with which he saw himself treated; now as an honoured guest, now as a mere inferior, at another time with mingled kindness and restraint, that, impassible as he thought himself, woke such wild wishes in his heart! How sweet it was to be sure of seeing her at certain stated hours, the recollection of one meeting bridging over the intervening period so pleasantly, till it was time to look forward to another! She was to him like the beautiful rose blooming in his garden, of which a man is content at first only to admire the form ere he learns to long for its fragrance, and at last desires to pluck it ruthlessly from the stem that he may wear it on his breast. How soon it withers there and dies, and then how bitterly, how sadly, he wishes he had left it blushing where it grew! There are plenty more flowers in the garden, but none of them are quite equal to the rose.
It was strange how little Hippias dwelt on the immediate past—how it was the Valeria of Rome, not the Valeria of Judæa, for whom his heart was aching now. He scarcely reverted even to the delirious happiness of the first few days when she accompanied him to the East; he did not dwell on his own mad joy, nor the foolish triumph that lasted so short a time. He forgot, as though they had never been, her caprice, her wilfulness, her growing weariness of his society, and the scorn she scarcely took the trouble to conceal. It was all past and gone now, that constraint and repugnance in the tent, that impatience of each other’s presence, those angry recriminations, those heartless biting taunts and the final rupture that could never be pardoned nor atoned for now. She was again Valeria of the olden time, of the haughty bearing, and the winning eyes, and the fresh glad voice that sprang from a heart which had never known a struggle nor a fall—the Valeria whose every [pg 445]mood and gesture were gifted with a dangerous witchery, a subtle essence that seems to pervade the very presence of such women—a priceless charm, indeed, and yet a fatal, luring the possessor to the destruction of others and her own.
Oh, that she could but speak to him once more! Only once, though it were in words of keen reproach or bitter scorn! It seemed like a dream that he should never hear her voice again; and yet his senses vouched that it was waking cold reality, for was she not lying there before him, surrounded by the slain of his devoted legion? The foremost, the fairest, and the earliest lost, amongst them all!
He took no further note of Calchas nor of Esca. He turned not to mark the renewed charge of his comrades, nor the increased turmoil of the fight, but he stooped down over the body of the dead woman, and laid his lips reverently to her pale cold brow. Then he lifted one of her long brown tresses, dabbled as they were in blood, to sever it gently and carefully with his sword, and unbuckling his corselet, hid it beneath the steel upon his heart. After this, he turned and took leave of Esca. The Briton scarcely knew him, his voice and mien were so altered. But watching his figure as he disappeared, waving his sword, amidst the press of battle, he knew instinctively that he had bidden Hippias the gladiator a long and last farewell.
Shouting their well-known war-cry, and placing himself at the head of that handful of heroes who constituted the remnant of the Lost Legion, Hippias rallied them for one last desperate effort against the defenders of the Temple. These had formed a hasty barricade on the exigency of the moment from certain beams and timbers they had pulled down in the Sacred Place. It afforded a slight protection against the javelins, arrows, and other missiles of the Romans, while it checked and repulsed the impetuous rush of the latter, who now wavered, hesitated, and began to look about them, making inquiry for the battering-rams and other engines of war that were to have supported their onset from the rear. In vain Hippias led them, once and again, to carry this unforeseen obstacle. It was high and firm, it bristled with spears and was lined with archers; above all, it was defended by the indomitable valour of Eleazar, and the gladiators were each time repulsed with loss. Their leader, too, had been severely wounded. He had never lifted his shield from the ground where it lay by Valeria’s side; and, in climbing the barricade, he had received a thrust in the body from an unknown hand. While he stanched the blood with the folds of his tunic, and felt within his breastplate for the tress of Valeria’s hair, he looked anxiously back for his promised reinforcements, now sorely needed, convinced that his shattered band would be unable to obtain possession of the Temple without the assistance of the legions. Faint from loss of blood, strength and courage failing him at the same moment, an overpowering sense of hopeless sorrow succeeding the triumphant excitement of the last hour, his thoughts were yet for his swordsmen; and collecting them with voice and gesture, he bade them form with their shields the figure that was called “the tortoise,” as a screen against the shower of missiles that overpowered them from the barricade. Cool, [pg 447]confident, and well-drilled, the gladiators soon settled into this impervious order of defence; and the word of command had hardly died on his lips ere the leader himself was the only soldier left out of that movable fortress of steel.24
Turning from the enemy to inspect its security, his side was left a moment exposed to their darts. The next, a Jewish arrow quivered in his heart. True to his instincts, he waved his sword over his head, as he went down, with a triumphant cheer; for his failing ear recognised the blast of the Roman trumpets—his darkening eye caught the glitter of their spears and the gleam of their brazen helmets, as the legions advanced in steady and imposing order to complete the work he and his handful of heroes had begun.
Even in the act of falling, Esca, looking up from his charge, saw the fencing-master wheel half-round that his dead face might be turned towards the foe; perhaps, too, the Briton’s eye was the only one to observe a thin dark stream of blood steal slowly along the pavement, till it mingled with the red pool in which Valeria lay.
Effectual assistance had come at last. From the Tower of Antonia to the outworks of the Temple a broad and easy causeway had been thrown up in the last hour by the Roman soldiers. Where every man was engineer as well as combatant, there was no lack of labour for such a task. A large portion of the adjoining wall, as of the tower itself, had been hastily thrown down to furnish materials; and while the gladiators were storming the Court of the Gentiles, their comrades had constructed a wide, easy, and gradual ascent, by which, in regular succession, whole columns could be poured in to the support of the first assailants. These were led by Julius Placidus with his wonted skill and coolness. In his recent collision with Esca he had sustained such severe injuries as incapacitated him from mounting a horse; but with the Asiatic auxiliaries were several elephants of war, and on one of these huge beasts he now rode exalted, directing from his movable tower the operations of his own troops, and galling the enemy when occasion offered with the shafts of a few archers who accompanied him on the patient and sagacious animal.
The elephant, in obedience to its driver, a dark supple [pg 448]Syrian, perched behind its ears, ascended the slope with ludicrous and solemn caution. Though alarmed by the smell of blood, it nevertheless came steadily on, a formidable and imposing object, striking terror into the hearts of the Jews, who were not accustomed to confront such enemies in warfare. The tribune’s arms were more dazzling, his dress even more costly than usual. It seemed that with his Eastern charger he affected also something of Eastern luxury and splendour; but he encouraged his men, as he was in the habit of doing, with jeer and scoff, and such coarse jests as soldiers best understand and appreciate in the moment of danger.
No sooner had he entered the court, through its battered and half-demolished gateway, than his quick eye caught sight of the still glowing embers scattered by the Prophet of Warning on the pavement. These suggested a means for the destruction of the barricade, and he mocked the repulsed gladiators, with many a bitter taunt, for not having yet applied them to that purpose. Calling on Hirpinus, who now commanded the remnant of the Lost Legion, to collect his followers, he bade them advance under the testudo to pile these embers against the foundations of the wooden barrier.
“The defenders cannot find a drop of water,” said he, laughing; “they have no means of stifling a fire kindled from without. In five minutes all that dry wood will be in a blaze, and in less than ten there will be a smoking gap in the gateway large enough for me to ride through, elephant and all!”
Assisted by fresh reinforcements, the gladiators promptly obeyed his orders. Heaps of live embers were collected and applied to the wooden obstacle so hastily erected. Dried to tinder in the scorching sun, and loosely put together for a temporary purpose, it could not fail to be sufficiently inflammable; and the hearts of the besieged sank within them as the flame began to leap and the woodwork to crackle, while their last defences seemed about to consume gradually away.
The tribune had time to lean over from his elephant and question Hirpinus of his commander. With a grave sad brow and a heavy heart, the stout old swordsman answered by pointing to the ground where Hippias lay, his face calm and fixed, his right hand closed firmly round his sword.
“Habet!” exclaimed the tribune with a brutal laugh; adding to himself, as Hirpinus turned away sorrowful and [pg 449]disgusted, “My last rival down; my last obstacle removed. One more throw for the Sixes, and the great game is fairly won!”
Placidus was indeed now within a stride of all he most coveted, all he most wished to grasp on earth. A dozen feet below him, pale and rigid on the ground, lay the rival he had feared might win the first place in the triumph of to-day; the rival whom he knew to possess the favour of Titus; the rival who had supplanted him in the good graces of the woman he loved. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven Valeria; but he bore none the less ill-will against him with whom she had voluntarily fled. When he joined the Roman army before Jerusalem, and found her beautiful, miserable, degraded, in the tent of the gladiator, he had but dissembled and deferred his revenge till the occasion should arrive when he might still more deeply humiliate the one and inflict a fatal blow on the other. Now the man was under his elephant’s feet; and the woman left alone yonder, friendless and deserted in the camp, could not, he thought, fail eventually to become his prey. He little knew that those who had made each other’s misery in life were at last united in the cold embrace of death. He had arrived, too, in the nick of time, to seize and place on his own brows the wreath that had been twined for him by the Lost Legion and their leader. A little earlier and Hippias, supplied by himself with fresh troops, would have won the credit of first entering the Temple; a little later, and his triumph must have been shared by Licinius, already with the Tenth Legion close upon his rear. But now, at the glorious opportunity, there was nothing between him and victory save a score of Jewish spearmen and a few feet of blazing wood.
Leaning over to the unwilling driver, he urged him to goad the elephant through the flames, that its weight might at once bear down what remained of the barricade and make a way for his followers into the Temple. Ambition prompted him not to lose a moment. The Syrian unwound the shawl from his waist, and spread it over the animal’s eyes, while he persuaded it, thus blindfolded, to advance. Though much alarmed, the elephant pushed on, and there was small hope that the shattered smouldering barrier would resist the pressure of its enormous weight. The last chance of the besieged seemed to fail them, when Eleazar leaped out through the smoke, and, running swiftly to meet it, dashed under the beast’s uplifted trunk, and stabbed it fiercely with [pg 450]quick repeated thrusts in the belly. At each fresh stroke the elephant uttered a loud and hideous groan, a shriek of pain and fear, mingled with a trumpet-note of fury, and then sinking on its knees, fell slowly and heavily to the ground, crushing the devoted Zealot beneath its huge carcass, and scattering the band of archers, as a man scatters a handful of grain, over the court.
Eleazar never spoke again. The Lion of Judah died as he had lived—fierce, stubborn, unconquered, and devoted to the cause of Jerusalem. Mariamne recognised him as he sallied forth, but no mutual glance had passed between the father and the child. Pale, erect, motionless, she watched him disappear under the elephant, but the scream of horror that rang from her white lips when she realised his fate was lost in the wild cry of pain, and anger, and dismay, that filled the air, while the huge quivering mass tottered and went down. Placidus was hurled to the pavement like a stone from a sling. Lying there, helpless, though conscious, he recognised at once the living Esca and the dead Valeria; but baffled wrath and cherished hatred left no room in his heart for sorrow or remorse. His eye glared angrily on the Briton, and he ground his teeth with rage to feel that he could not even lift his powerless hand from the ground; but the Jewish warriors were closing in with fierce arms up to strike, and it was but a momentary glimpse that Esca obtained of the tribune’s dark, despairing, handsome face. It was years, though, ere he forgot the vision. The costly robes, the goodly armour, the shapely writhing form, and the wild hopeless eyes that gleamed with hatred and defiance both of the world he left and that to which he went.
And now the court was filling fast with a dun lurid smoke that wreathed its vapours round the pinnacles of the Temple, and caused the still increasing troops of combatants to loom like phantom shapes struggling and fighting in a dream. Ere long, bright tongues of flame were leaping through the cloud, licking the walls and pillars of the building, gliding and glancing over the golden surface of its roof, and shooting upwards here and there into shifting pyramids of fire. Soon was heard the hollow rushing roar with which the consuming element declares its victory, and showers of sparks, sweeping like storms across the Court of the Gentiles, proclaimed that the Temple was burning in every quarter.
One of the gladiators, in the wild wantonness of strife, had caught a blazing fragment of the barricade, as its remains were carried by a rush of his comrades, after the fall of [pg 451]Eleazar, and flung it into an open window of the Temple over his head. Lighting on the carved woodwork, with which the casement was decorated, it soon kindled into a strong and steady flame, that was fed by the quantity of timber, all thoroughly dry and highly ornamented, which the building contained; thus it had communicated from gallery to gallery, and from storey to storey, till the whole was wrapped in one glowing sheet of fire. From every quarter of the city, from Agrippa’s wall to the Mount of Olives, from the camp of the Assyrians to the Valley of Hinnom, awestruck faces of friend and foe, white with fear, or anger, or astonishment, marked that rolling column, expanding, swaying, shifting, and ever rising higher into the summer sky, ever flinging out its red forked banner of destruction broader, and brighter, and fiercer, with each changing breeze.
Then the Jews knew that their great tribulation was fulfilled—that the curse which had been to them hitherto but a dead letter and a sealed book, was poured forth literally in streams of fire upon their heads—that their sanctuary was desolate, their prosperity gone for ever, their very existence as a nation destroyed, and “the place that had known them should know them no more”! The very Romans themselves, the cohorts advancing in serried columns to support their comrades, the legions massed in solid squares for the completion of its capture, in all the open places of the town, gazed on the burning Temple with concern and awe. Titus, even, in the flush of conquest, and the exulting joy of gratified ambition, turned his head away with a pitying sigh, for he would have spared the enemy had they but trusted him, would fain have saved that monument of their nationality and their religion, as well for their glory as his own.
And now with the flames leaping, and the smoke curling around, the huge timbers crashing down on every side to throw up showers of sparkling embers as they fell—the very marble glowing and riven with heat—the precious metal pouring from the roof in streams of molten fire—Esca and Mariamne, half suffocated in the Court of the Gentiles, could not yet bring themselves to seek their own safety, and leave the helpless form of Calchas to certain destruction. Loud shouts, cries of agony and despair, warned them that even the burning Temple, at furnace heat, was still the theatre of a murderous and useless conflict. The defenders had set the example of merciless bloodshed, and the Romans, exasperated to cruelty, now took no prisoners and gave no quarter. John of Gischala and his followers, driven to bay by the legions, [pg 452]still kept up a resistance the more furious that it was the offspring of despair. Hunted from wall to wall, from roof to roof, from storey to storey, they yet fought on while life and strength remained. Even those whose weapons failed them, or who were hemmed in by overwhelming numbers, leaped down like madmen, and perished horribly in the flames.
But although steel was clashing, and blood flowing, and men fighting by myriads around it, the Court of the Gentiles lay silent and deserted under its canopy of smoke, with its pavement covered by the dead. The only living creatures left were the three who had stood there in the morning, bound and doomed to die. Of these, one had his foot already on the border-land between time and eternity.
“I will never desert him,” said Esca to his pale companion; “but thou, Mariamne, hast now a chance of escape. It may be the Romans will respect thee if thou canst reach some high commander, or yield thee to some cohort of the reserve, whose blood is not a-fire with slaughter. What said Hippias of the Tenth Legion and Licinius? If thou couldst but lay hold on his garment, thou wert safe for my sake!”
“And leave thee here to die!” answered Mariamne. “Oh, Esca! what would life be then? Besides, have we not trusted through this terrible night, and shall we not trust still? I know who is on my side. I have not forgotten all he taught me who lies bruised and senseless here. See, Esca! He opens his eyes. He knows us! It may be we shall save him now!”
Calchas did indeed seem to have recovered consciousness; and the life so soon to fade glowed once more on his wasted cheek, like an expiring lamp that glimmers into momentary brightness ere its flame is extinguished for ever.