With these words he caught by the hand and led to me a pale creature, with the traces of loveliness, but evidently in the last stage of mortal decay. She stood silent as a statue. In compassion, I took her hand, while the multitude gathered round us in curiosity. I now remembered Sabat, the Ishmaelite, and his story.
“She is mad,” said Sabat, shaking his head mournfully, and gazing on the fading form at his side. “Worlds would not restore her senses. But there is a time for all things.” He sighed, and cast his large eyes on heaven. “I watched her day and night,” he went on, “until I grew mad too. But the world will have an end, and then—all will be well. Come, wife, we must be going. To-night there are strange things within the walls, and without the walls. There will be feasting and mourning; there will be blood and tears; then comes the famine—then comes the fire—then the sword; and then all is quiet, and forever!”
He paused, wiped away the tears, then began again wilder than ever: “Heaven is mighty! To-night there will be wonders; watch well your walls, people of the ruined city! To-night there will be signs; let no man sleep but those who sleep in the grave. Prince of Naphtali, have you too sworn, as I have, to die?” He lifted his meager hand. “Come, thunders! come, fires! vengeance cries from the sanctuary. Listen, undone people! listen, nation of sorrow! the ministers of wrath are on the wing. Wo!—wo!—wo!”
In pronouncing those words with a voice of the most sonorous yet melancholy power, he threw himself into a succession of strange and fearful gestures; then beckoning to the female, who submissively followed his steps, plunged away among the multitude. I heard the howl of “Wo!—wo!—wo!” long echoed through the windings of the ruined streets, and thought that I heard the voice of the angel of desolation.
The seventeenth day of the month Tamuz, ever memorable in the sufferings of Israel, was the last of the Daily Sacrifice. Sorrow and fear were on the city, and the silence of the night was broken by the lamentations of the multitude. I returned to my chamber of affliction, and busied myself in preparing for the guard of the Temple, to withdraw my mind from the gloom that was beginning to master me. Yet when I looked round the room, and thought of what I had been, of the opulent enjoyments of my palace, and of the beloved faces which surrounded me there, I felt the sickness of the heart.
The chilling air that blew through the dilapidated walls, the cruse of water, the scanty bread, the glimmering lamp, the comfortless and squalid bed, on which lay in the last stages of weakness a patriot and a hero—a being full of fine affections and abilities, reduced to the helplessness of an infant, and whom in leaving for the night I might be leaving to perish by the poniard of the robber—unmanned me. I cast the simitar from my hand, and sat down with a sullen determination there to linger until death, or that darker vengeance which haunted me, should do its will.
The night was stormy, and the wind howled in long and bitter gusts through the deserted chambers of the huge mansion. But the mind is the true place of suffering, and I felt the season’s visitation in my locks drenched about my face, and my tattered robes swept by the freezing blasts, as only the natural course of things.
I was sitting by the bedside, moistening the fevered lips of Constantius with water, and pressing on him the last fragment of bread which I might ever have to give, when I, with sudden delight, heard him utter for the first time articulate sounds. I stooped to catch accents so dear and full of hope. But the words were a supplication—he prayed to the Christian’s God!
I turned away from this resistless conviction of his belief. But this was no time for debate, and I was won to listen again. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, but his language was the aspiration of the heart. His eyes were closed, and, evidently unconscious of my presence, in his high communion with Heaven, he talked of things of which I had but imperfect knowledge or none; of blood shed for the sins of man; of a descended Spirit to guide the servants of Heaven; of the unspeakable love that gave the Son of God to mortal suffering for the atonement of that human guilt which nothing but such a sacrifice could atone. He finished by the names dear to us both; and praying “for their safety if they still were in life, or for their meeting beyond the grave, declared himself resigned to the will of his Lord.”
I waited in sacred awe until I saw, by the subsiding motion of the lips, that the prayer was done, and then, anxious to gain information of my family, questioned him. But with the prayer the interval of mental power had passed away. The veil was drawn over his senses once more, and his answers were unintelligible. Yet even the hope of his restoration lightened my gloom; my spirits, naturally elastic, shook off their leaden weight; I took up the simitar, and pressing the cold hand of my noble fellow victim, prepared to issue forth to the Temple. The storm was partially gone, and the moon, approaching to the full, was high in heaven, fighting her way through masses of rapid cloud. The wind still roared in long blasts, as the tempest retired, like an army repulsed, and indignant at being driven from the spoil. But the ground was deluged, and a bitter sleet shot on our half-naked bodies. I had far to pass through the streets of the upper city, and their aspect was deeply suited to the melancholy of the hour.
Vast walls and buttresses of the burned and overthrown mansions remained, that in the spectral light looked like gigantic specters. Ranges of inferior ruins stretched to the utmost glance; some yet sending up the smoke of recent conflagration, and others beaten down by the storms or left to decay. The immense buildings of the hierarchy, once the scene of all but kingly magnificence, stood roofless and windowless, with the light sadly gleaming through their fissures, and the wind singing a dirge of ruin through their halls. I scarcely met a human being, for the sword and famine had fearfully reduced the once countless population.
But I often startled a flight of vultures from their meal; or, in the sinking of the light, stumbled upon a heap that uttered a cry, and showed that life was there; or from his horrid morsel, a wretch glared upon me, as one wolf might glare upon another, that came to rob him of his prey; or the twinkling of a miserable lamp in the corner of a ruin glimmered over a knot of felony and murder, reckoning their hideous gains and carousing with the dagger drawn. Heaps of bones, whitening in the air, were the monuments of the wasted valor of my countrymen, and the oppressive atmosphere gave the sensation of walking in a sepulcher.
I dragged my limbs with increased difficulty through those long avenues of death that, black, silent, and split into a thousand shapes of ruin, looked less like the streets of a city than the rocky defiles of a mountain shattered by lightnings and earthquakes. On the summit of the hill I found a crowd of unhappy beings, who came, like myself, actuated by zeal to defend the Temple from the insults to which its sanctity was now nightly exposed. Faction had long extinguished the native homage of the people. Battles had been fought within its walls, and many a corpse loaded the sacred floors, that once would have required solemn ceremonies to free them from the pollution of an unlicensed step.
And what a band was assembled there! Wretches mutilated by wounds, worn with sleeplessness, haggard with want of food; shivering together on the declivity, whose naked elevation exposed them to the whole inclemency of the night; flung like the dead, on the ground, or gathered in little knots among the ruined porticos, with death in every frame and despair in every heart.
I was sheltering myself behind the broken columns of the Grand gate, from the bitter wind which searched every fiber, and was sinking into that chilling torpor which benumbs body and mind alike, when a clash of military music and the tramp of a multitude assailed my ear. I started up and found my miserable companions mustered, from the various hollows of the hill, to our post on the central ground of Mount Moriah, whence the view was boundless on every side. A growing blaze rose up from the valley and flashed upon the wall of circumvallation. The sounds of cymbal and trumpet swelled; the light advanced rapidly; and going the circuit of the wall, helmets and lances of the cavalry were seen glittering through the gloom; a crowd of archers preceded a dense body of the legionary horse, at whose head rode a group of officers. On this night the fatal wall had been completed, and Titus was going its round in triumph. Every horseman carried a torch, and strong divisions of infantry followed, bearing lamps and vessels of combustible matter on the points of their spears. As the whole moved, rolling and bending with the inequalities of the ground, I thought that I saw a mighty serpent, coiling his burning spires round the prey that was never to be rescued by the power of man.
But the pomp of war below and the wretchedness round me, raised reflections of such bitterness that when Titus and his splendid troop reached the mountain of the Temple, one outcry of sorrow and anticipated ruin burst from us all. The conqueror heard it, and, from the instant maneuvering of his troops, was evidently alarmed; he had known the courage of the Jews too long not to dread the effect of their despair. And despair it was, fierce and untamable!
I started forward, exclaiming: “If there is a man among you ready to stake his life for his country, let him follow me.”
To the last hour the Jew was a warrior! The crowd seized their spears, and we sprang down the cliffs. As we reached the outer wall of the city, I restrained their exhaustless spirit until I had singly ascertained the state of the enemy. Titus was passing the well-known ravine near the fountain-gate, where the ground was difficult for cavalry, from its being chiefly divided into gardens. I flung open the gate, and led the way to the circumvallation. The sentinels, occupied with looking on the pomp, suffered us to approach unperceived; we mounted the wall, overthrew everything before us, and plunged down upon the cavalry, entangled in the ravine. It was a complete surprise.
The bravery of the legions was not proof against the fury of our attack. Even our wild faces and half-naked forms, by the uncertain glare of the torches, looked scarcely human. Horse and man rolled down the declivity. The arrival of fresh troops only increased the confusion; their torches made them a mark for our pikes and arrows; every point told, and every Roman that fell, armed a Jew. The conflict now became murderous, and we stabbed at our ease the troopers of the Emperor’s guard, through their mail, while their long lances were useless.
The defile gave us incalculable advantages, for the garden walls were impassable by the cavalry, while we bounded over them like deer. All was uproar, terror, and rage. We actually waded through blood. At every step, I trod on horse or man; helmets and bucklers, lances and armor, lay in heaps, and the stream of the ravine soon ran purple with the proudest gore of the legions.
At length, while we were absolutely oppressed with the multitude of dead, a sudden blast of trumpets and the shouts of the enemy led me to prepare for a still fiercer effort. A tide of cavalry poured over the ground; Titus, a gallant figure, cheering them on, with his helmet in his hand, galloped in their front; I withdrew my wearied followers from the exposed situation into which their success had led them, and posting them behind a rampart of Roman dead, awaited the charge. It came with the force of thunder; the powerful horses of the imperial squadron broke over our rampart at the first shock and bore us down like stubble. Every man of us was under their feet in a moment; and yet the very number of our assailants saved us. The narrowness of the place gave no room for the management of the horse; the darkness assisted both our escape and assault; and even lying on the ground, we plunged our knives in horse and rider, with terrible retaliation.
The cavalry at length gave way, but the Roman general, a man of the heroic spirit that is only inflamed by repulse, rushed forward among the disheartened troops, and roused them by his cries and gestures to retrieve their honor. After a few bold words, he again charged at their head. I singled him out, as I saw his golden helmet gleam in the torch-light. To capture the son of Vespasian would have been a triumph worth a thousand lives. Titus[46] was celebrated for personal dexterity in the management of the horse and lance, and I could not withhold my admiration of the skill with which he penetrated the difficulties of the field, and the mastery with which he overthrew all that opposed him.
Our motley ranks were already scattering, when I cried out my name and defied him to the combat. He stooped over his charger’s neck to discover his adversary, and seeing before him a being as blackened and beggared as the most dismantled figure of the crowd, gave a laugh of fierce derision, and was turning away, when our roar of scorn recalled him. He struck in the spur, and couching his lance, bounded toward me. To have waited his attack must have been destruction; I sprang aside, and with my full vigor flung my javelin; it went through his buckler. He reeled, and a groan rose from the legionaries who were rushing forward to his support. He stopped them with a fierce gesture, and casting off the entangled buckler, charged again. But the hope of the imperial diadem was not to be thus cheaply hazarded. The whole circle of cavalry rolled in upon us; I was dragged down by a hundred hands, and Titus was forced away, indignant at the zeal which had thwarted his fiery valor.
In the confusion I was forgotten, burst through the concourse, and rejoined my countrymen, who had given me over for lost, and now received me with shouts of victory. The universal cry was to advance, but I felt that the limit of triumph for that night was come; the engagement had become known to the whole range of the enemy’s camps, and troops without number were already pouring down. I ordered a retreat, but there was one remaining exploit to make the night’s service memorable.
Leaving a few hundred pikemen outside the circumvallation, to keep off any sudden attempt, I set every hand at work to gather the dry weeds, rushes, and fragments of trees from the low grounds into a pile. It was laid against the rampart. I flung the first torch, and pile and rampart were soon alike in a blaze. Volumes of flame, carried by the wind, rolled round its entire circuit. The Romans rushed down in multitudes to extinguish the fire. But this became continually more difficult. Jerusalem had been roused from its sleep, and the extravagant rumors that a great victory was obtained, Titus slain, and the enemy’s camp taken by storm, stimulated the natural spirit of the people to the most boundless confidence. Every Jew who could find a lance, an arrow, or a knife hurried to the gates, and the space between the walls and the circumvallation was crowded with an army which, in that crisis of superhuman exultation, perhaps no disciplined force on earth could have outfought.
Nothing could now save the rampart. Torches innumerable, piles of faggots, arms, even the dead, all things that could burn, were flung upon it. Thousands, who at other times might have shrunk, forgot the name of fear, leaped into the very midst of the flames, and tearing up the blazing timbers, dug to the heart of the rampart and filled the hollows with sulfur and bitumen; thousands struggled across the tumbling ruins, to throw themselves among the Roman spearsmen and see the blood of an enemy before they died.
War never had a bolder moment. Human nature, roused to the wildest height of enthusiasm, was lavishing life like dust. The ramparts spread a horrid light upon the havoc; every spot of the battle, every group of the furious living, and the trampled and deformed dead, was keenly visible. The ear was deafened by the incessant roar of flame, the falling of the huge heaps of the rampart, and the agonies and exultations of men, reveling in mutual slaughter.
In that hour came one of those solemn signs that marked the downfall of Jerusalem. The tempest, that had blown at intervals with tremendous violence, died away at once; and a surge of light ascended from the horizon and rolled up rapidly to the zenith. The phenomenon instantly fixed every eye. There was an indefinable sense in the general mind that a sign of power and providence was about to be given. The battle ceased; the outcries were followed by utter silence; the armed ranks stood still, in the very act of rushing on each other; all faces were turned on the heavens.
The light rose pale and quivering like the meteors of a summer evening. But in the zenith, it spread and swelled into a splendor that distinguished it irresistibly from the wonders of earth or air. It swiftly eclipsed every star. The moon vanished before it; the canopy of the sky seemed to be dissolved, for a view into a bright and infinite region beyond, fit for the career of those mighty beings to whom man is but the dust on the gale.
As we gazed, this boundless field was transformed into a field of battle; multitudes seemed to crowd it in the fiercest combat; horsemen charged and died under their horses’ feet; armor and standards were trampled in blood; column and line burst through each other. At length the battle stooped toward the earth, and with hearts beating with indescribable feelings we recognized in the fight the banners of the tribes. It was Jew and Roman struggling for life; the very countenances of the combatants became visible, and each man below saw a representative of himself above. The fate of Jewish war was there written by the hand of Heaven; the fate of the individual was there predicted in the individual triumph or fall. What tongue of man can tell the intense interest with which we watched every blow, every movement, every wound, of those images of ourselves?
The light now illumined the whole horizon below. The legions were seen drawn out in front of the camps, ready for action—every helmet and spear-point glittering in the radiance; every face turned up, gazing in awe and terror on the sky. The tents spreading over the hills; the thousands and tens of thousands of auxiliaries and captives; the little groups of the peasantry, roused from sleep by the uproar of the night, and gathered upon the knolls and eminences of their fields—all were bathed in a flood of preternatural luster. But the wondrous battle approached its close. The visionary Romans seemed to shake, column and cohort gave way, and the banners of the tribes waved in victory over the celestial field. Then human voices dared to be heard. From the city and the plain burst forth one mighty shout of triumph!
But our presumption was soon to be checked. A peal of thunder that made the very ground tremble under our feet rolled from the four quarters of the heaven. The conquering host shook, broke, and fled in utter confusion over the sapphire field. It was pursued, but by no semblance of the Roman.
An awful enemy was on its steps. Flashes of forked fire, like myriads of lances, darted after it; cloud on cloud deepened down, as the smoke of a mighty furnace; globes of light shot blasting and burning along its track. Then amid the double roar of thunder rushed forth the chivalry of heaven. Shapes of transcendent beauty, yet with looks of wrath that withered the human eye—armed sons of immortality descending on the wing by millions—mingled with shapes and instruments of ruin, for which the mind has no conception. The circle of the heaven was filled with the chariots and horses of fire. Flight was in vain; the weapons were seen to drop from the Jewish host; their warriors sank upon the splendid field. Still the immortal armies poured on, trampling and blasting, until the last of the routed were consumed.
The angry pomp then paused. Countless wings were spread, and the angelic multitudes, having done the work of vengeance, rushed upward, with the sound of ocean in the storm. The roar of trumpets and thunders was heard, until the splendor was lost in the heights of the empyrean.
We felt the terrible warning. Our strength was dried up at the sight; despair seized upon our souls. We had seen the fate of Jerusalem. No victory over man could now save us from the coming of final ruin!
Thousands never left the ground on which they stood; they perished by their own hands, or lay down and died of broken hearts. The rest fled through the night, that again wrapped them in tenfold darkness. The whole multitude scattered with soundless steps, and in silence like an army of specters.
In the deepest dejection that could overwhelm the human mind, I returned to the city, where one melancholy care still bound me to existence. I hastened to my comfortless shelter, but the battle had fluctuated so far around the walls that I found myself perplexed, among the ruins of a portion of the lower city, a crowd of obscure streets which belonged almost wholly to strangers and the poorer population.
The faction of John of Giscala, composed chiefly of the more profligate and beggared class, had made the lower city their stronghold, before they became masters of Mount Moriah; and some desperate skirmishes, of which conflagrations were the perpetual consequence, laid waste the principal part of a district built and ruined by the haste and carelessness of poverty. To find a guide through this scene of dilapidation was hopeless, for every living creature, terrified by the awful portents of the sky, had fled from the streets. The night was solid darkness. No expiring gleam from the burned rampart, no fires of the Roman camps, no torch on the Jewish battlements, broke the pitchy blackness. Life and light seemed to have perished together.
To proceed soon became impossible, and I had no other resource than to wait the coming of day. But to one accustomed as I was to hardships, this inconvenience was trivial. I felt my way along the walls, to the entrance of a house that promised some protection from the night, and flinging myself into a corner, vainly tried to slumber. But the rising of the storm and the rain pouring upon my lair drove me to seek a more sheltered spot within the ruin. The destruction was so effectual that this was difficult to discover, and I was hopelessly returning to take my chance in the open air when I observed the glimmer of a lamp through a crevice in the upper part of the building. My first impulse was to approach and obtain assistance. But the abruptness of the ascent gave me time to consider the hazard of breaking in upon such groups as might be gathered at that hour, in a period when every atrocity under heaven reigned in Jerusalem.
My patience was put to but brief trial, for in a few minutes I heard a low hymn. It paused, as if followed by prayer. The hymn began again, in accents so faint as evidently to express the fear of the worshipers. But the sounds thrilled through my soul. I listened, in a struggle of doubt and hope. Could I be deceived? and if I were, how bitter must be the discovery. I sat down at the foot of the rude stair, to feed myself with the fancied delight before it should be snatched from me forever.
But my perturbation would have risen to madness had I stopped longer. I climbed up the tottering steps; half-way I found myself obstructed by a door; I struck upon it, and called aloud. After an interval of miserable delay, a still higher door was opened, and a figure enveloped in a veil timidly looked out and asked my purpose. I saw, glancing over her, two faces that I would have given the world to see. I called out “Miriam!” Overpowered with emotion, my speech failed me. I lived only in my eyes. I saw Miriam fling off the mantle with a scream of joy, and rush down the steps. I saw my two daughters follow her with the speed of love; the door was thrown open, and I fell fainting into their arms.
Tears, exclamations, and gazings were long our only language. My wife hung over my wasted frame with endless embraces and sobs of joy. My daughters fell at my feet, bathed my cold hands with their tears, smiled on me in speechless delight, and then wept again. They had thought me lost to them forever. I had thought them dead, or driven to some solitude which forbade us to meet again on this side of the grave. For two years, two dreadful years, a lonely man on earth, a wifeless husband, a childless father, tried by every misery of mind and body; here—here I found my treasure once more! On this spot, wretched and destitute as it was, in the midst of public misery and personal wo, I had found those whose loss would have made the riches of mankind, beggary to me. My soul overflowed. Words were not made to tell the feverish fondness, the strong delight that quivered through me. I wept with woman’s weakness; I held my wife and children at arm’s length, that I might enjoy the full happiness of gazing on them; then my eyes grew dim, and I caught them to my heart, and in silence, the silence of unspeakable emotion, tried to collect my thoughts and to convince myself that my joy was no dream.
The night passed in mutual inquiries. The career of my family had been deeply diversified. On my capture in the great battle with Cestius, in which it was said that I had fallen, they were on the point of coming to Jerusalem to ascertain their misfortune. The advance of the Romans to Masada precluded this. They sailed for Alexandria, and were overtaken by a storm.
“In that storm,” said Miriam, with terror painted on her countenance, “we saw a sight that appalled the firmest heart among us, and which to this hour recalls fearful images. The night had fallen intensely dark. Our vessel, laboring through the tempest during the day and greatly shattered, was expected to go down before morn, and I had come upon the deck, prepared to submit to the general fate, when I saw a flame in the distance, and pointed it out to the mariners; but they were paralyzed by weariness and fear, and instead of approaching what I conceived to be a beacon, they left the vessel to the mercy of the wind. I watched the light; to my astonishment, I saw it advancing over the waves. It was a large ship on fire, and rushing down upon us. Then, indeed, there was no insensibility among our mariners; they were like madmen, through excess of fear—they did everything but make an effort to escape the danger.
“The blazing ship came toward us with terrific rapidity. As it approached, the figure of a man was seen on the deck, standing unhurt, in the midst of the burning. The Syrian pilot, hitherto the boldest of our crew, at this sight cast the helm from his hands in despair, and tore his beard, exclaiming that we were undone. To our questions, he would give no other answer than by pointing to the solitary being who stood calmly in the center of the conflagration, more like a demon than a man.
“I proposed that we should make some effort to rescue this unfortunate man. But the pilot, horror-struck at the thought, then gave up the tale that it cost him agonies even to utter. He told us that the being whom our frantic compassion would attempt to save, was an accursed thing; that for some crime, too inexpiable to allow of his remaining among creatures capable of hope, he was cast out from men, stricken into the nature of the condemned spirits, and sentenced to rove the ocean in fire, ever burning and never consumed!”
I felt every word, as if that fire was devouring my flesh. The sense of what I was, and what I must be, was poison. My head swam; mortal pain overwhelmed me. And this abhorred thing I was; this sentenced and fearful wretch I was, covered with wrath and shame; this exile from human nature I was; and I heard my sentence pronounced and my existence declared hideous by the lips on which I hung for confidence and consolation against the world.
Flinging my robe over my face to hide its writhings, I seemed to listen, but my ears refused to hear. In my perturbation, I once thought of boldly avowing the truth, and thus freeing myself from the pang of perpetual concealment. But the offense and the retribution were too real and too deadly to be disclosed, without destroying the last chance of happiness to those innocent sufferers. I mastered the convulsion, and again bent my ear.
“Our story exhausts you,” said Miriam; “but it is done. After a long pursuit, in which the burning ship followed us as if with the express purpose of our ruin, we were snatched from a death by fire, only to undergo the chance of one by the waves, for we were sinking. Yet it may have been owing even to that chase that we were saved. The ship had driven us toward land. At sea we must have perished, but the shore was found to be so near, that the country people, guided by the flame, saved us, without the loss of a life. Once on shore, we met with some of the fugitives from Masada, who brought us to Jerusalem, the only remaining refuge for our unhappy nation.”
To prevent a recurrence of this torturing subject, I mastered my emotion so far as to ask some question of the siege. But Miriam’s thoughts were still busy with the sea. After some hesitation, and as if she dreaded the answer, she said:
“One extraordinary circumstance made me take a strong interest in the fate of that solitary being on board the burning vessel. It once seemed to have the most striking likeness to you. I even cried out to it under that impression, but fortunate it was for us all that my heedless cry was not answered, for when it approached us I could see its countenance change; it threw a sheet of flame across our vessel that almost scorched us; and then perhaps thinking that our destruction was complete, the human fiend ascended from the waters in a pillar of intense fire.”
I felt deep pain at this romantic narrative. My mysterious sentence was the common talk of mankind. My frightful secret, that I had thought locked up in my own heart, was loose as the air. This was enough to make life bitter. But to be identified in the minds of my family with the object of universal horror, was a chance which I determined not to contemplate. My secret there was still safe; and my resolution became fixed, never to destroy that safety by any frantic confidence of my own.
While, with my head bent on my knees, I hung in the misery of self-abhorrence, I heard the name of Constantius sorrowfully pronounced beside me. The state in which he must be left by my long absence flashed upon my mind; I raised my eyes, and saw Salome. It was her voice that sounded, and I then first observed the work of wo in her form and features. She was almost a shadow; her eye was lusterless, and the hands that she clasped in silent prayer were reduced to the bone. But before I could speak, Miriam made a sign of silence to me, and led the mourner away; then returning, said:
“I dreaded lest you might make any inquiries before Salome, for her husband. Religion alone has kept her from the grave. On our arrival here, we found our noble Constantius worn out by the fatigue of the time, but he was our guardian spirit in the dreadful tumults of the city. When we were burned out of one asylum, he led us to another. It is but a week since he placed us in this melancholy spot, but yet the more secure and unknown. He himself brought us provisions, supplied us with every comfort that could be obtained by his impoverished means, and saved us from famine. But now,”—the tears filled her eyes and she could not proceed.
“Yes—now,” said I, “he is a sight that would shock the eye; we must keep Salome in ignorance as long as we can.”
“The unhappy girl knows his fate but too well. He left us a few days since, to obtain some intelligence of the siege. We sat, during the night, listening to the frightful sounds of battle. At daybreak, unable any longer to bear the suspense or sit looking at Salome’s wretchedness, I ventured to the fountain-gate, and there heard what I so bitterly anticipated—our brave Constantius was slain!”
She wept aloud, and sobs and cries of irrepressible anguish answered her from the chamber of my unhappy child.
The danger of a too sudden discovery prevented me from drying those tears, and I could proceed only by offering conjectures on the various chances of battle, the possibility of his being made prisoner, and the general difficulty of ascertaining the fates of men in the irregular combats of a populace. But Salome sat fixed in cold incredulity. Esther sorrowfully kissed my hand, for my disposition to give them a ray of comfort; Miriam gazed on me with a sad and searching look, as if she felt that I would not tamper with their distresses, yet she was deeply perplexed for the issue. At last the delay grew painful to myself, and taking Salome to my arms, and pressing a kiss of parental love on her pale cheek, I whispered, “He lives!”
I was overwhelmed with transports and thanksgivings. Precaution was at an end. If battle had been raging in the streets, I could not now have restrained the generous impatience of friendship and love. We left the mansion. There was not much to leave besides the walls; but such as it was, the first fugitive was welcome to the possession. Night was still within the building, which had belonged to some of the Roman officers of state, and was massive and of great extent. But at the threshold the gray dawn came quivering over the Mount of Olives.
We struggled through the long and winding streets, which even in the light were nearly impassable. From the inhabitants we met with no impediment; a few haggard and fierce-looking men stared at us from the ruins,[47] but we, wrapped up in rude mantles and hurrying along, wore too much the livery of despair to be disturbed by our fellows in wretchedness. With a trembling heart I led the way to the chamber, where lay one in whose life our general happiness was centered. Fearful of the shock which our sudden appearance might give his enfeebled frame, and not less of the misery with which he must be seen, I advanced alone to the bedside. He gave no sign of recognition, tho he was evidently awake, and I was about to close the curtains and keep, at least, Salome from the hazardous sight of this living ruin, when I found her beside me. She took his hand and sat down on the bed, with her eyes fixed on his hollow features. She spoke not a word, but sat cherishing the wasted hand in her own and kissing it with sad fondness. Her grief was too sacred for our interference, and in sorrow scarcely less poignant than her own, I led apart Miriam and Esther, who, like me, believed that the parting day was come.
Such rude help as could be found in medicine—at a time when our men of science had fled the city, and a few herbs were the only resource—had not been neglected even in my distraction. But life seemed retiring hour by hour, and if I dared to contemplate the death of this beloved being, it was almost with a wish that it had happened before the arrival of those to whom it must be a renewal of agony.
Still, the minor cares, which make so humble yet so necessary a page in the history of life, were to occupy me. Food must be provided for the increased number of my inmates, and where was that to be found in the circle of a beleaguered city? Money was useless, even if I possessed it; the friends who would once have shared their last meal with me were exiled or slain, and it was in the midst of a fierce populace, themselves dying of hunger, that I was to glean the daily subsistence of my wife and children. The natural pride of the chieftain revolted at the idea of supplicating for food, but this was one of the questions that show the absurdity of pride, and I must beg if I would not see them die.
The dwelling had belonged to one of the noble families extinguished, or driven away, in the first commotions of the war. The factions which perpetually tore each other, and fought from house to house, had stripped its lofty halls of everything that could be plundered in the hurry of civil feud, and when I took refuge under its roof it looked the very palace of desolation. But it was a shelter, undisturbed by the riots of the crowd, too bare to invite the robber; and even in its vast and naked chambers, its gloomy passages and frowning casements, congenial to the mood of my mind. With Constantius insensible and dying before me, and with my own spirit darkened by an eternal cloud, I loved loneliness and darkness. When the echo of the winds came round me, as I sat during my miserable midnights, watching the countenance of my son, and moistening his feverish lip with the water that even then was becoming a commodity of rare price in Jerusalem, I had communed with memories that I would not have exchanged for the brightest enjoyments of life. I welcomed the sad music, in which the beloved voices revisited my soul; what was earth now to me but a tomb? Pomp—nay, comfort—would have been a mockery. I clung to the solitude and obscurity that gave me the picture of the grave.
But the presence of my family made me feel the wretchedness of my abode. When I cast my eyes round the squalid and chilling halls, and saw wandering through them those gentle and delicate forms, and saw them trying to disguise, by smiles and cheering words, the depression that the whole scene must inspire, I felt a pang that might defy a firmer philosophy than mine—the despair that finds its only relief in scorn.
“Here,” said I to Miriam, as I hastened to the door, “I leave you mistress of a palace. The Asmonean blood once flourished within these walls; and why not we? I have seen the nobles of the land crowded into these chambers. They are not so full now, but we must make the most of what we have. Those hangings, that I remember, the pride of the Sidonian who sold them, are left to us still; if they are in fragments, they will but show our handiwork the more. We must make our own music; and in default of menials, serve with our own hands. The pile in that corner was once a throne sent by a Persian king to the descendant of the Maccabee; it will serve us at least for firing. The walls are thick; the roof may hold out a few storms more; the casements, if they keep out nothing else, keep out the daylight, an unwelcome guest, which would do anything but reconcile us to the state of the mansion, and now, farewell for a few hours.”
Miriam caught my arm, and said, in that sweet tone which always sank into my heart:
“Salathiel, you must not leave us in this temper. I would rather hear your open complaints of fortune than this affectation of contempt for your calamities. They are many and painful, I allow, tho I will not, dare not, repine. They may even be such as are beyond human cure, but who shall say that he has deserved better—or if he has, that suffering may not be the determined means of exalting his nature? Is gold the only thing that is to be tried in the fire?”
She waited my answer with a look of dejected love.
“Miriam, I need not say that I respect and honor your feelings, but no resignation can combat the substantial evils of life. Will the finest sentiments that ever came from human lips make this darkness light, turn this bitter wind into warmth, or make these hideous chambers but the dungeon?”
“My husband, I dread this language,” was the answer, with more than usual solemnity; “it is—must I say it?—even unwise. Shall the creatures of the Power by whom we are placed in life either defy His wrath or disregard His mercy? Might we not be more severely tasked than we are? Are there not thousands at this hour in the world who, with at least equal claims to the divine benevolence (I tremble when I use the presumptuous phrase), are undergoing calamities to which ours are happiness? Look from this very threshold; are there not thousands within the walls of Jerusalem, groaning in the pangs of unhealed wounds, mad, starving, stripped of every succor of man, dying in hovels, the last survivors of their wretched race? and yet we, still enjoying health, with a roof over our heads, with our children round us safe, when the plague of the first-born has fallen upon almost every house in Judea, can complain! Be comforted, my love; I see but one actual calamity among us; and if Constantius should survive, even that one would be at an end.”
I left my gentle despot, and hurried through the echoing halls of this palace of the winds. As I approached the great avenues leading from the gates to the Temple, unusual sounds struck my ears. Hitherto nothing in the sadness of the besieged city was sadder than its silence. Death was lord of Jerusalem, and the numberless ways in which life was extinguished had left but the remnant of its once proud and flourishing population.
But now shouts, and still more, the deep and perpetual murmur that bespeaks the movements and gatherings of a crowded city, astonished me. My first conception was that the enemy had advanced in force, and I was turning toward the battlements to witness, or repel the general fate, when I was involved in the multitude whose voices had perplexed me.
It was the season of the Passover. The Roman barrier had hitherto kept back the tribes; but the victory that left it in embers opened the gates; and from the most death-like solitude, we were once more to see the sons of Judea filling the courts of the city of cities.
Nothing could be more unrestrained than the public rejoicing. The bold myriads that soon poured in, hour by hour, many of them long acquainted with Roman battle and distinguished for the successful defense of their strongholds, many of them even bearing arms taken from the enemy, or displaying honorable scars, seemed to have come, sent by Heaven. The enemy, evidently disheartened by their late losses and the destruction of the rampart which had cost them so much labor, remained collected in their camps, and access was free from every quarter. The rumors of our triumph had spread with singular rapidity through the land, and even the fearful phenomenon that wrote our undoing in the skies stimulated the national hope. No son of Abraham could believe, without the strongest repugnance, that Heaven had interposed, and yet interposed against the chosen people.