“Why not leave it? For a hundred reasons. In the first place, I should be more wearied of every other. I should be the bird in the cage, fed, sheltered, and possibly a favorite. But what bird would not rather take the chance of the open air, even to be scorched by the summer and frozen by the winter? No; let me clap my pinions and sing my song under the free canopy of the skies, or be voiceless, and wingless, and—dead.”
“Boy, this is the natural language of your years. But the time must come when the spirit sinks and man requires other charms in life than the power of roaming.”
He hung his head over the harp and let his fingers stray among the strings. The moon was now touching the mountains.
“We must begone,” said I. “I owe you something for your night’s service, which shall be repaid by taking you into my household should the siege be raised; if not, you are but as you were.”
He was all nervous excitement at the offer—wept, laughed, danced, played a prelude upon the strings, kissed my hand, and finally bounded away before me. I called to him, repeating my wish that he should go no farther.
“Impossible,” said he; “you would be lost in a moment. If I had not crossed the ground hundreds of times, I should never be able to find my road. Half a mile forward it is all rampart, trench, and ravine. You would be stopped by a myriad of sentinels. Nothing on earth could get to the foot of yonder hills, but an army—or a minstrel.”
He ran on before me, and ran with a rapidity that tasked even my foot to follow. We soon came into the fortified ground, and I then felt his value. He led me over fosse and rampart, up the scarp and through the palisade, with the sagacity of instinct. But this was not all. I repeatedly saw the sentinels within a few feet of us, and expected to be challenged every moment, but not a syllable was heard. I passed with patrols of the legionary horse on either side of me; still not a word. I walked through the rows of tents, in which the troops were preparing for the duties of the morning. Not an eye fell upon me, and I almost began to believe myself, like a hero of the heathen fables, covered with a cloud.
The boy still continued racing along, until, on reaching the summit of a mound at some distance in front of me, he uttered a cry and fell. I had heard no challenge, and hurried toward him. A flight of arrows whizzed over my head, and the black visages of a mob of Ethiopian riders[51] came bounding up a hollow between us. It was not my purpose to fight, even if I had any hope of success against marksmen who could hit an elephant’s eye. I surrendered in every language of which I was capable. But the Ethiopians only shook their woolly heads, laid hands on me, and began an investigation of my riches creditable to polished society. Barbarians, with a tongue and physiognomy worthy only of their kindred baboons, probed every plait of my garments, with an accuracy that could have been surpassed only in the most civilized custom-houses of the empire. A succession of shrieks, which I mistook for rage, but which were the mirth of those sons of darkness, were the prelude to measures which augured more formidable consequences. A rope was thrown over my arms, and I was led toward the outposts.
Yet even the neighborhood of their Roman friends did not seem the most congenial to my captors. More than one consultation was held, in which their white teeth were bared to the jaw with rage, and their simitars were whirled like so many flashes of lightning about each other’s turbans, before they could decide whether my throat was to be cut on the spot, to get rid of an incumbrance, or whether they were to try how far the emptiness of my purse might not be made up by the reward for the capture of a spy in the trappings of a chieftain.
I gave up remonstrance where, if I had all the tongues of Babel, none of them seemed likely to answer my purpose, and reserving the nice distinction between an ambassador and a spy for more cultivated ears, quietly walked onward in the midst of this troop of thieves; the more insensible to honesty or argument, as they were privileged according to law. But our approach to the camp bred another difficulty. The troop felt an obvious disinclination to come too close to the legionaries. Untutored as the negroes were, they had acquired a knowledge of the official conscience, and they bowed to the mastery of the white in plunder as among the accomplishments of an advanced age!
All could not venture to the camp; yet who was to be entrusted with receiving the reward? The discussion was carried on chiefly by gesture, which sometimes proceeded to blows, and at last was wound up to such vigor that a brawny ruffian, to preserve the peace, seized the rope and, dragging me out the circle, began sharpening his simitar, to extinguish the controversy. But at the instant a horrid outcry arose, and a figure, hideous beyond conception, not a foot high, blacker than the blackest, and darting flames from its mouth, bounded in among us, mounted upon a wild beast of a horse that kicked and tore at everything. The Ethiopians shrieked with terror and scattered on all sides at the first shock, but the ground was so cut up by the military operations that they stumbled at every step. Some were unhorsed; some probably had their necks broken, and others carried home the tale, to spread it through the land of lions. I heard it long after, exciting the utmost amaze in a venerable circle round one of the fountains of the Nile.
I was now saved from being thus summarily made the victim of peace, but was as far as ever from freedom. While I was endeavoring to loose the rope, a patrol of the legionary horse came galloping from the camp, and I was seized with this badge of a bad character upon me. But the flying negroes were the more amusing objects. There was just light enough to see them rolling about the plain; turbans flying off in the air; and the few riders who could boast of keeping their seats, whirled away over brake and brier, at the mercy of their frightened horses. This display, which had been at first taken for the prelude to an assault on the lines, was now a source of pleasantry, and the horsemanship of the savages was honored with many a roar.
My case came next under consideration. “I was found at the edge of the Roman entrenchments, where to be found was to die; I was besides taken with the mark of reprobation upon me.”
I pleaded my own merits loudly, and appealed to the rope as evidence that I was not there by my own will. The legionaries were better soldiers than logicians, and my defense perplexed them until some one thought of inquiring what brought me there at all. The troop flocked round to hear my answer to this overwhelming question. I told my purpose in a few words.
The scale again turned in my favor, and I began to think victory secure, when a young standard-bearer, who was probably destined to rise in the state, declared, with a splenetic tongue and brow of office, that “in this land of cheating too much precaution could not be adopted against cheats of all colors; that the more plausible my story was, the more likely it was to be a falsehood; and finally, that as my escape might do some kind of mischief, while my hanging could do none whatever, it was advisable to hang me without delay.”
The orator spoke the words of popularity, and my fate was sealed. But a new difficulty arose. By whom was the sentence to be put in execution?—for the duty would have sullied the legionary honor for life. A trampled African, who lay groaning in a ditch beside me, caught the sound of the debate, dragged himself out, and offered, mangled as he was, to perform the office for any sum that their generosity might think proper to give. Never was man nearer to paying the grand debt than I was at that moment. The African recovered his vigor as by magic, and the young statesman took upon himself the superintendence of this service to his country. I raised my voice loudly against this violence to a “negotiator”; but the troopers of the imperial horse had been roused from their sleep on my account, and they were not to return, liable to the ridicule of having been roused by a false alarm. I still endeavored to put off the evil hour, when the trampling of a large body of cavalry was heard.
“The general!” exclaimed the young officer, who evidently had an instinctive sensibility to the approach of rank.
“Let Titus come,” said I, “or any man of honor, and he will understand me.”
I tore the badge of disgrace from my arms and stepped forward to meet the great son of Vespasian. My confidence alarmed the troop, and the standard-bearer made way for the man who dared to speak to the heir of the throne. But the general was not Titus; a broad, brutal countenance, red with excess, glared haughtily round. I recognized Cestius. A whisper from one of the officers put him in possession of the circumstances, and he rode up to me.
“So, rebel! you are come to this at last! You have been taken in the fact and must undergo your natural fate.”
“I demand to be led to your general. I scorn to defend myself before inferiors.”
“Inferiors!” He bit his livid lip. “Traitor, you are not now on the hill of Scopas at the head of an army.”
“Nor you,” said I, “on the plain at the head of an army—and so much the more fortunate for both you and them. But I scorn to talk to men whose backs I have seen. Lead me to your master, fugitive!”
The troops, unaccustomed to this plain speaking, looked on with wonder. Cestius himself was staggered, but the nature of the man soon returned, and in a voice of fury he ordered a body of Arab archers, who were seen moving at a distance, to be brought up for the extinction of a “traitor unworthy of a Roman sword.” The Arabs, exhilarated by the prospect of employment, came up, shouting, tossing their lances, and shooting their arrows. As a last resource, I solemnly protested against this murder, which I pronounced to be the work of a revenge disgraceful to the name of soldier; and taunting Cestius with his defeat, demanded that, if he doubted my honor, he should try on the spot “which of our swords was the better.”
He answered only by a glare of rage and a gesture to the archers, who instantly threw themselves into a half circle round me, with the expertness of proficients in the trade of justice, and bended their bows. Determined to resist to the last, I flung out upbraidings and scorn upon the murderer, which drove him to hide his head behind the troops. Another disturbance arose. Simitars waved, turbans shook, horses plunged; the deep order was broken, and at length a horseman, magnificently appareled and mounted, burst into the ring and looked fiercely round.
“What, you miscreants,” he shouted, “who dares to take command out of my hands? Down with your bows! Commit murder and I not present! The first man that pulls a string shall leave an empty saddle. Draw off, cutthroats, or if you want to do the world a service, shoot one another.”
I seemed to remember the voice, but I gazed in vain on the splendid figure. The turban that, blazing with gems, hung down on his forehead, and the beard that, black as the raven’s wing, curled full round his lip, completely baffled me. He looked at me in turn, thrust out a sinewy hand, and, clasping mine, exclaimed with a laugh:
“Prince, does the plumage make you forget the bird? What can have brought you into the hands of my culprits? I thought that you were drowned, burned, or a candidate for the imperial diadem by this time.”
I now knew him.
“My friend of the free-trade!” said I in a low tone.
He spoke in a fearless tone. “By no means. I have reformed—am a changed man—captain of the seas no more; but a loyal plunderer—in the service of Vespasian, and in command of a thousand Arab cavalry that will ride, run away, and rob with any corps in the service; and the word is a bold one.”
Our brief conference was broken up by the return of Cestius, who, outrageous at the delay and coming to inquire the cause, found fresh fuel for his wrath in the sight of the Arab captain turned into my protector. With an execration he demanded “why his orders had been disobeyed.”
The captain answered, with the most provoking coolness, that “no Roman officer, let his rank be what it might, was entitled to degrade the allies into executioners.”
The Roman grew furious with the slight in the face of the troops, who highly enjoyed it. The Arab grew more sarcastic, till Cestius was rash enough to lift his hand, and the Arab anticipated the blow, by dashing his charger at him and leaving the general and his horse struggling together on the ground. An insult of this kind to the second in command was, of course, not to be forgiven. The Arabs bent their bows to make battle for their captain, but he forbade resistance; and when the legionary tribune demanded his sword, he surrendered it with a smile, saying that “he had done service enough for one day in saving an honest man and punishing a ruffian,” and that he should justify himself to Titus alone.
My fate was still undetermined. But the legionaries soon had more pressing matters to think of. The clangor of horns and shouts came in the direction of the city. The plain still lay in shade, but I could see through the dusk immense crowds moving forward like an inundation. The legions were instantly under arms, and I stood a chance of being walked over by two armies!
But I was not to encounter so distinguished a catastrophe. Some symptoms of my inclination to escape attracted the eye of the guard, and I was marched to the common repository of malefactors in the rear of the lines.
My new quarters were within the walls of one of those huge country mansions which the pride of our ancestors had built to be the plague of their posterity; for those the enemy chiefly employed for our prisons. Their solid strength defied desultory attack; time made little other impression on them than to picture their walls with innumerable stains; and the man must be a practised prison-breaker who could force his way out of their depths of marble. But if my eyes were useless, my ears had their full indulgence. Every sound of the conflict was heard. The attack was furious, and must have often been close to the walls of my dungeon. The various rallying-cries of the tribes rang through its halls; then a Roman shout, and the heavy charge of the cavalry would roll along until, after an encountering roar and a long clashing of weapons, the tumult passed away, to be rapidly renewed by the obstinate bravery of my unfortunate countrymen.
I felt as a man and a leader must feel during scenes in which he ought to take a part, yet to which he is virtually as dead as the sleeper in the tomb. My life had been activity; my heart was in the cause; I had knowledge, zeal, and strength that might in the chances of battle turn the scale. I even often heard my name among the charging cries of the day. But here I lay within impassable barriers. A thousand times during those miserable hours I measured their height with my eye; then threw myself on the ground, and placing my hands over my ears, labored to exclude thought from my soul.
But my fellow prisoners were practical philosophers to a man; untaught in the schools, ’tis true, yet fully trained in that great academy worth all that Philosophy ever dreamed in—experience. In all my wanderings among mankind I never before had so ample an opportunity of studying variety of character. War is the hotbed that urges all our qualities, good and evil, into their broadest luxuriance. The generous become munificent; the mean darken into the villainous; and the rude harden into brutality. The camp is the great inn at which all the dubious qualities set up their rest, and a single campaign perfects the culprit to the height of his profession. There were round me in these immense halls about five hundred profligates, any one of whose histories would have been invaluable to a scorner of human nature.
Among the loose armies of the East those fellows exercised their vocation as regular appendages; often lived in luxury, and sometimes shot up into leaders themselves. But robbery in the Roman armies required master-hands. The temptation was strong, for the legionary was the grand ravager, and like the lion, he left the larger share of the prey to the jackal. Yet justice, inexorable and rapid, was his rule—in all cases but his own; and the jackal, suspected of trespassing within the legitimate distance from the superior savage, ran imminent hazard of being disqualified for all encroachment to come. Three-fourths of my associates had played this perilous game, and its penalties were now awaiting only the first leisure of the troops. Peace, at all times vexatious to their trade, had thus a double disgust for them, and the most patriotic son of Israel could not have taken a more zealous interest in the defeat of the legions.
But philosophy still predominated; if hope was at an end, hilarity took its place, and the prison rang with reckless exhibitions of practical glee, riotous songs, and mockeries. In the idleness of the lingering hours the professional talents of those sons of chance were brought into play. The mimic collected his audience, burlesqued the pompous officials of the army, and gathered his pence and plaudits as if he were under the open sky and could call his head his own. The nostrum-vender had his secrets for the cure of every ill, and harangued on the impotence of brand, scourge, and blade, if the patient had but the wisdom to employ his irresistible unguent. The soothsayer sold fate at the lowest price, and fixed the casualties of the next four-and-twenty hours—an easy task with the principal part of his audience. The minstrel chanted the pleasures of a life unencumbered by care or conscience; and the pilferer, with but an hour to live, exercised his trade with an industry proportioned to the shortness of his time.
In the whole gang I met with but one man thoroughly out of spirits. He had obviously been no favorite of fortune, for the human form could scarcely be less indebted to clothing. His swarthy visage was doubly blackened by hunger and exhaustion, and even his voice had a prison sound. Driven away from the joyous groups by the natural repulsion which the careless feel at visages that remind them of trouble, he took refuge in the corner where I lay, tormented by every echo of the battle. Not unwilling to forget the melancholy scenes in which every moment was draining the last blood of my country, I turned to the wretch beside me and asked the cause of his sorrows.
“Ingratitude,” was the reply. “This is a villainous world; a man may spend his life in serving others, and what will he gain in the end? Nothing. There is, for instance, the prince of Damascus wallowing in wealth; yet the greatest rogue under this roof has not a more pitiful stock of honor. Witness his conduct to me. He was out of favor with his uncle, the late prince; was not worth more than the raiment on his limbs, and as likely to finish his days on the gibbet as any of the knot of robbers that helped him to scour the roads about Sidon. In his distress he applied to me. I had driven a handsome share of the free-trade between Egypt and the north, and now and then gave him a handsome price for his booty. The idea of bringing his uncle to terms was out of the question. I named my price; it was allowed to be fair. I made my way into the palace, was exalted to the honors of cupbearer, and on my first night of office gave the old man a cup which cured him of drunkenness forever. And what do you think was my reward?”
“I could name what it ought to have been.”
“You conclude half the old man’s jewels at the least. No; not a stone—not a shekel. I was thrown into chains, and finally kicked out of the city, with a promise, the only one that he will ever keep, that if I venture there again I shall leave it without my head! There’s gratitude! There’s honor for you!
“My next example,” he continued, “was among the Romans. It must be owned that they pay well for secret services. But then, ingratitude infects them from top to toe. I had been three years in their employment, and if I made free with a few of their secrets in favor of others, it was only on the commercial principle of having as many customers as one can supply; still, I helped them to the knowledge of all that was going on.”
He had found a listener, and indulged his recollection; after a variety of events, in which he cheated everybody, he came to one that had some interest for myself.
“At last a showy adventurer changed the scene,” he continued. “Some insult had stirred up his blood, and in revenge he sailed away with the prefect’s galley and set up on his own account. Not a sail, from a shallop to a trireme, could touch the water from the Cyclades to Cyprus without being overhauled by the captain. I was set by the prefect upon his track, and got into his good graces by lending him a little of my information, of which he made such desperate use that the Roman swore my destruction as a traitor. To make up the quarrel I tried a wider game, and was bringing his fleet upon the pirates in their very nest when ill luck came across me. A pair whom to the last hour of my life nothing will persuade me to think anything but demons, sent expressly to do me mischief, spoiled one of the finest inventions that ever came into the head of man.
“The consequence was that the pirates, instead of being attacked, burned the Roman’s trireme round him, and would have burned himself, if he had not thought a watery end better than a fiery one, leaped overboard, and gone straight to the bottom. The whole blame fell upon me, and my only payment was the cropping of my ears and a declaration, sworn to in the names of Romulus and Remus, that if I ever ventured again within a Roman camp I should not get off so well. Ingratitude again! Never was a man so unfortunate.”
“Quite the contrary. It appears to me that seldom was man so lucky. If one in a hundred would have your tale to tell, not one in a thousand would have lived to tell it.” I had already recognized the Egyptian of the cavern.
“But justice, honor!”
“Say no more about them. Whatever the Romans may be in the matter of justice, your case is an answer to all charges on their mercy.”
He looked at me with a ghastly grimace, and as he threw back the long and squalid locks that covered his countenance, showed what beggary had done to the sleek features of the once superbly clothed and jeweled sea-rover.
“But what,” said I, “threw a man of your virtue among such a gang of caitiffs as are here?”
“Another instance of ingratitude. I had been for twenty years connected with one of the leading men of Jerusalem, and I will say that in my experience of mankind I have known no individual less perplexed with weakness of conscience. He had a difficult game to play between the Romans, whom he served privately, the Jews, whom he served publicly, and himself, whom he served with at least as much zeal as either of his employers. The times were made for the success of a man who has his eyes open and suffers neither the fear of anything on earth nor the hope of anything after it to shut them. He succeeded accordingly; got rid of some rivals by the dagger; sent others to the dungeon; bribed where money would answer his purpose; threatened where threats would be current coin; and by the practise of those natural means of rising in public affairs, became the hope of a faction. But on his glory there was one cloud—the prince of Naphtali!”
I listened attentively. I had deeply known the early hostility of Onias, but his devices were too tortuous for me to trace, and until the past night I had lost sight of him for years. I asked what cause of bitterness existed between those personages.
“A hundred, as generally happens where the imagination becomes a party and the accuser is the judge. The prince in his youth and before he attained his rank had the insolence to fall in love with the woman marked by Onias for his own. He had the additional insolence to win her; and the completion of his crimes was marriage. Onias thenceforth swore his ruin. Public convulsions put off the promise, and while he was driven to his last struggle to keep himself among the living, he had the angry indulgence of seeing the young husband shoot up without any trouble into rank, wealth, and renown.”
“But has not time blunted his hostility?” I asked.
“Time, as the proverb goes, blunts nothing but a man’s wit, his teeth, and his good intentions,” said the knave, with a sneer on his grim visage. “The next half of the proverb is that it sharpens wine, women, and wickedness. What Onias may have been doing of late I can only guess; but unless he is changed by miracle, he has been dealing in every villainous contrivance from subornation to sorcery. I had my own affairs to mind. But unless Satan owes him a grudge, he is now not far from his revenge.”
I thought of our meeting at the city gates, and alarmed at the chance of his discovering my family, anxiously asked whether Onias had obtained any late knowledge of his rival.
“Of that I know but little,” said he; “yet quick as his revenge may be, unless my honest employer manages with more temper than usual, he will rue the hour when he set foot on the track of the prince of Naphtali. If ever man possessed the mastery of the spirits that our wizards pretend to raise, the prince is that man. I myself have hunted him for years, yet he always baffled me. I have laid traps for him that nothing in human cunning could have escaped, yet he broke through them as if they were spider’s webs. I saw him sent to the thirstiest lover of blood that ever sat on a throne. Yet he came back, aye, from the very clutch of Nero. I maddened his friends against him, and he contrived to escape even from the malice of his friends, a matter which you will own is among the most memorable. I had him plunged into a dungeon, where I kept him alive for certain reasons, while Onias was to be kept to his bargain by the prisoner’s reappearance. Yet he escaped, and my last intelligence of him is that he is at this moment living in pomp in Jerusalem, the spot where I have been for the last month in close pursuit of him. Time or some marvelous power must have disguised him. And yet if I were to meet him this night——”
“Look on me, slave!” I exclaimed, and grasping him by the throat unsheathed my dagger. “You have found him, and to your cost. Villain! it is to you then that I owe so much misery. Make your peace with Heaven if you can, for it would be a crime to suffer you to leave this spot alive.”
He was dumb with terror. I held him with an iron grasp. The thought that if he escaped me, it must be only to let loose a murderer against my house, made me feel his death an act of justice.
“Let me go,” he at last muttered; “let me live; I am not fit to die. In the name of that Lord whom you worship, spare me!” He fell at my feet in desperate supplication. “You have not heard all; I have abjured your enemy. Spare me and I will swear to pass my days in the desert, never to come again before the face of man; to lie upon the rock, to live upon the weed, to drink of the pool until I sink into the grave!”
I paused in disgust at the abject eagerness for life in a wretch self-condemned! While I held the dagger before him, his senses continued bound up by fear. He gazed on it with an eye that quivered with every quivering of the steel. With one hand he grasped my uplifted arm as he knelt, and with the other gathered his rags round his throat to cover it from the blow. His voice was lost in horrid gaspings; his mouth was wide open and livid. I sheathed the weapon, and his countenance instantly returned into its old grimace. A ghastly smile grew upon it as he now drew from his bosom a small packet.
“If you had put me to death,” said the wretch, “you would have lost your best friend. This packet contains a correspondence for which Onias would give all that he is worth in the world; and well he might, for the man who has it in his hands has his life. The world is made up of ingratitude. After all my services—slandering here, plundering there, hunting down his opponents in every direction, till they either put themselves out of the world or he saved them the trouble—he had the baseness to throw me off. At the head of his troops he kicked me from his horse’s side, ordering me to be turned loose, ‘to carry my treachery to the Romans, if they should be fools enough to think me worth the hire.’ I took him at his word. I was watching my opportunity to enter Jerusalem and stab him to the heart when I was taken by some of the plunderers that hover round the camp, and am now probably to suffer for the benefit of Roman morality, as a robber and assassin, as soon as the legions shall have murdered every man and robbed every mansion in Jerusalem.”
The packet contained a correspondence of Onias with the Romans. A sensation of triumph glowed through me—I held the fate of my implacable enemy in my hand. I could now, with a word, strike to the earth the being whose artifices and cruelties had waylaid me through life, and the traitor to my country would perish by the same blow that avenged my own wrongs. My nature was made for passion. In love and hatred, in ambition, in revenge, my original spirit knew no bounds. Time, sorrow, and the conviction of my own outcast state had partially softened those hazardous impulses, and I found the value of adversity. Misfortune comes with healing on its wings to the burning temper of the heart, as the tempest comes to the arid soil; it tears up the surface, but softens it for the seeds of the nobler virtues; even in its feeblest work, it cools the withering and devouring heat for a time. I had yet to find with what fatal rapidity the heart gives way to its old overwhelming temptations.
“I spare your life,” said I, “but on one condition—that you henceforth make Onias the constant object of your vigilance; that you keep him from all injury to me and mine; and that when I shall seize him at last, you shall be forthcoming to give public proof of his treachery.”
“This sounds well,” said the Egyptian as he cast his eyes round the lofty hall, “but it would sound better if we were not on this side of the gate. All the talking in the world will not sink these walls an inch, nor make that gate turn on its hinges, tho for that, and for every other too, there is one master-key. Happy was the time”—and the fellow’s sullen eye lighted up with the joy of knavery—“when I could walk through every cabinet, chamber, and cell from the Emperor’s palace in Rome down to the Emperor’s dungeon in Cæsarea.”
I produced a few coins which I had been enabled to conceal, and flung them into his hand. The sum rekindled life in him; avarice has its enthusiasts as well as superstition. He forgot danger, prison, and even my dagger at the sight of his idol. He turned the coins to the light in all possible ways; he tried them with his teeth; he tasted, he kissed, he pressed them to his bosom. Never was lover more rapturous than this last of human beings at the touch of money in the midst of wretchedness and ruin. His transports taught me a lesson, and in that prison and from that slave of vice I learned long to tremble at the power of gold over the human mind.
It was past midnight and the noise of the criminals round me had already sunk away. The floor was strewn with sleepers, and the only waking figure was the sentinel as he trod wearily along the passages, when the Egyptian, desiring me to feign sleep that his further operations might not be embarrassed, drew himself along the ground toward him. The soldier, a huge Dacian, covered with beard and iron, and going his rounds with the insensibility of a machine, all but trod upon the Egyptian, who lay crouching and writhing before him. I saw the spear lifted up and heard a growl that made me think my envoy’s career at an end in this world. He still lay on the ground, writhing under the sentinel’s foot, as a serpent might under the paw of a lion.
I was about to spring up and interpose, but his time was not yet come. The spear hung in air, gradually turned its point upward, and finally resumed its seat of peace on the Dacian’s shoulder. That art of persuasion which speaks to the palm and whose language is of all nations had touched the son of Thrace; I heard the sound of the coin on the marble; a few words arranged the details. The sentinel discovered that his vigilance was required in another direction, broke off his customary round, and walked away. The Egyptian turned to me with a triumphant smile on his hideous visage, the gate rolled on its hinge, and he slipped out like a shadow.
At the instant my mind misgave me. I had put the fate of my family into the hands of a slave, destitute of even the pretense of principle. In my eagerness to save, might I not have been delivering them up to their enemy? He had sold Onias to me; might he not make his peace by selling me to Onias? The gate was still open. A few steps would put me beyond bondage. Yet I had come to claim Esther. If I left the camp, what hope was there of my ever seeing this child of my heart again? Would not every hour of my life be embittered by the chance that she might be suffering the miseries of a dungeon, or borne away into a strange land, or dying and calling on her father for help in vain?
Those contending impulses passed through my mind with the speed and almost with the agony of an arrow. The more I thought of the Egyptian, the more I took his treachery for certain. But the present ruin of all predominated over the possible sufferings of one, and with a heart throbbing almost to suffocation and a step scarcely able to move I dragged myself toward the portal.
I was not to escape! As I reached the gate a loud sound of trampling feet and many voices drove me back. By that curious texture of the feelings which prefers suffering to suspense I was almost glad to have the question decided for me by fortune, and flung myself on the ground among a heap of the undone, who lay enjoying a slumber that might be envied by thrones. The gate was thrown open and in another moment in burst a living mass of horror, a multitude of beings in whom the human face and form were almost obliterated; shapes gaunt with famine, black with dust, withered with deadly fatigue, and covered with gashes and gore.
The war had gone on from cruelty to cruelty. To the Roman the Jew was a rebel, and he had a rebel’s treatment; to the Jew the Roman was a tyrant, and dearly was the price of his tyranny exacted. Quarter was seldom given on either side. The natural generosity of the son of Vespasian had attempted for a while to soften this furious system. But the slaughter of the mission exasperated him; he declared the Jews a people incapable of faith, and proclaimed a war of extermination. The battle of the day had furnished the first opportunity of sweeping vengeance.
The people, stimulated by the arrival of Onias, had made a desperate effort to force the Roman lines. The attacks were reiterated with more than valor—with rage and madness; the Jews fought with a disregard of life that appalled and had nearly overwhelmed even the Roman steadiness. The loss of the legions was formidable; all their chief officers were wounded, many were killed. Titus himself, leading a column from the Decuman gate of the camp, was wounded by a blow from a sling; and the state of its ramparts, as I saw them at daybreak, torn down in immense breaches, and filling up the ditch with their ruins, showed the imminent hazard of the whole army. Another hour of daylight would probably have been its ruin. But Judea would not have been the more secure, for the factions, relieved from the presence of an enemy, would have torn each other to pieces.
The loss of the Jews was so prodigious[52] as to be accounted for only by their eagerness to throw away life. Not less than a hundred thousand corpses lay between the camp and Jerusalem. No prisoners were taken on either side, and the crowds that now approached were the wounded, gathered off the field, to be crucified in memory of the mission. The coming of those victims put an end to the possibility or the desire of sleep.
The immense and gloomy hall, one of those in use for the stately banquets customary among the leaders of Jerusalem, was suddenly a blaze of torches. The malefactors and captives were thrown together in heaps, guarded by strong detachments of spearmen that lined the sides, like ranges of iron statues, overlooking the mixed and moving confusion of wretched life between. Guilt, sorrow, and shame were there in their dreadful undisguise. The roof rang to oaths and screams of pain as the wounded tossed and rolled upon each other; rang to bitter lamentation, and more bitter still, to those self-accusing outcries which the near approach of violent death sometimes awakens in the most daring criminals. For stern as the justice was, it still was justice; the Jewish character had fearfully changed. Rapine and bloodshed had become the habits of the populace, and among the panting and quivering wretches before me begging a moment of life I recognized many a face that, seen in Jerusalem, was the sign of plunder and massacre.
Repulsive as my recollections were, I spent the greater part of the night in bandaging their wounds and relieving the thirst which scarcely less than their wounds wrung them. There were women, too, among those wrecks of the sword, and now that the frenzy of the day was past, they exhibited a picture of the most heart-breaking dejection. Lying on the ground wounded and with every lineament of their former selves disfigured, they cried from that living grave alternately for vengeance and for mercy. Then tearing their hair and flinging it, as their last mark of hatred and scorn, at the legionaries, they devoted them to ruin in the name of the God of Israel. Then passion gave way to pain, and in floods of tears they called on the names of parent, husband, and child, whom they were to see no more!
It was known that at daybreak the prisoners were to die, and the din of hammers and the creaking of wagons bearing the crosses broke the night with horrid intimation. At length the stillness terribly told that all was prepared. The night, measured by moments, seemed endless, and many a longing was uttered for the dawn that was to put them out of their misery. Yet when the first gray light fell through the casements and the trumpets sounded for the escort to get under arms, nothing could exceed the fury of the crowd. Some rushed upon the spears of the reluctant soldiery; some bounded in mad antics through the hall; others fell on their knees and offered up horrid and shuddering prayers; many flung themselves upon the floor, and in the paroxysm of wrath and fear perished.
Shocked and sickened by this misery, I withdrew from the gate, where the tumult was thickest, as the soldiery were already driving them out, and returned to my old lair, to await the will of fortune. But I found it occupied. A circle of the wounded were standing round a speaker, to whom they listened with singular attention. The voice caught my ear; from the crowd round him I was unable to observe his features, but once drawn within the sound of his words, I shared the general interest in their extraordinary power. He was a teacher of the new religion.
In my wanderings through Judea I had often met with those Nazarenes. Their doctrines had a vivid simplicity that might have attracted my attention as a philosopher, but philosophy was cold to their power. The splendor and strength of their preaching realized the boldest traditions of oratory. Yet their triumph was not that of oratory; they disclaimed all pretension to eloquence or learning, declaring that even if they possessed them, they dared not sully by human instruments of success the glory due to Heaven. They carried this self-denial to the singular extent of divulging every circumstance calculated to deprive themselves and their doctrines of popularity. They openly acknowledged that they were of humble birth and occupation, sinners like the rest of mankind, and in some instances guilty of former excesses of blind zeal, persecutors of the new religion, even to blood. Of their Master they spoke with the same openness. They told of His humble origin, His career of rejection, and His death by the punishment of a slave. To the scoffer at their hopes of a kingdom to be given by the sufferer of that ignominious death, they unhesitatingly answered that their hope was founded expressly upon His death, and that they lived and rejoiced in the expectation that they were, like Him, to seal their faith with their blood!
I had often seen enthusiasm among my countrymen, but this was a spirit of a distinct and a loftier birth. It had the vigor of enthusiasm without its rashness; the gentleness of infancy, with the wisdom of years; the solemn reverence of the Jew for the divine Will, free from his jealous claims to the sole possession of truth. The Law and the Prophets were perpetually in their hands, and they often embarrassed our haughty doctors and acrid Pharisees with questions and interpretations to which no reply could be returned but a sneer or an anathema. But in the power of conviction, in the master art of striking the heart and understanding with sudden light, like the bolt from heaven, I never heard, I never shall hear, their equals. To call it eloquence was to humiliate this stupendous gift; the most practised skill of the rhetorician gave way before it, like gossamer, like chaff before the whirlwind. It broke its way through sophistry by the mere weight of thought. It had a rapid reality that swept the hearer along. In its disdain of the mere decorations of speech, in the bold and naked nerve of its language, there was an irresistible energy—the energy of the tempest, giving proof in its untamable rushings of its descent from a region beyond the reach of man. I never listened to one of these preachers but with a consciousness that he was the depository of mighty knowledge. He had the whole mystery of the human affections bare to his eye. Among a thousand hearts one word sent conviction at the same instant. All their diversities of feeling, sorrow, and error were shaken at once by that universal language. It talked to the soul!
Of these overwhelming appeals, which often lasted for hours together and to which I listened overwhelmed, nothing is left to posterity but a few fragments, and those letters which the Christians still preserve among their sacred writings—great productions and giving all the impression that it is possible to transmit to the future. But the living voice, the illumined countenance, the frame glowing and instinct with inspiration!—what can transmit them?
“Here,” said I, as I often stood and heard their voices thundering over the multitude, “here is the true power that is to shake the temples of heathenism. Here is a new element come to overthrow or to renovate the world.”
I saw our holy law struggling to keep itself in existence, compressed on every side by idolatry; a little fountain feebly urging its way through its native rocks, but exhausted and dried up at the moment it reached the plain. But here was an ocean, an inexhaustible depth and breadth of power made to roll round the world, and be, at the will of Providence, the illimitable instrument of its bounty. I saw our holy law feebly sheltering under its despoiled and insulted ordinances the truth of Heaven. But here was a religion scorning a narrower temple than the earth and the heaven!