CHAPTER XIV.

THE THEATER OF GIANTS.

“Once more we look and all is still as night, All desolate! Groves, temples, palaces Swept from the sight and nothing visible, ... Save here and there An empty tomb, a fragment like a limb Of some dismembered giant.”

“Og, the King of Bashan, came out against us to battle at Edrei, and the Lord said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land, into thy hand. And we took ... three-score cities of the Kingdom of Og, in Bashan.”—Deut. iii.

“Bashan is the land of sacred romance.” “His mission [Paul’s, Gal., 1: 15] to Bashan seems to have been eminently successful. Heathen temples were converted into churches, and new churches built in every town.” “In the fourth century nearly the whole of the inhabitants were Christian.” “The Christians are now nearly all gone.” “Nowhere else is patriarchal life so fully exemplified.” “Bashan is literally crowded with towns, the majority of them deserted, but not ruined.” “Many are as perfect as if finished only yesterday.”—PORTER’S “_Giant Cities_.”

For a brief period the delightful seasons, the famed rivers, the stately surrounding mountains, the paradisiacal plains, the antiquities, the pleasure gardens and palaces of the city of Damascus, whose name by interpretation is “change,” offered sought-for gratification to the knight and his bride. Harrimai died suddenly after the elopement of his child, the only person on earth whom he truly loved, the only one that had ever successfully defied his mandates. He had purposed disinheriting her for her act, but before he could execute that purpose, death disinherited him. Some said that he died of a broken heart; the physicians said he was taken off by a fit; Sir Charleroy said he died because his proud will was crossed. Rizpah inherited a fortune that helped both her and her husband to forget the old priest’s maledictions by enabling them to enjoy all there was to be enjoyed in Damascus, “the eye of the East.” They gave up unreservedly to pleasure, and centered the world more and more in themselves. Sir Charleroy did this easily, reasoning that, having had so many pains, he was entitled to compensating pleasures. He heard from England; and the news was to the effect that there had been changes and changes in his native land. Many of those he once knew, including his mother, were dead; and he himself was forgotten as dead. Sententiously, bitterly he summed up his feelings: “They thought me dead, and, my mother and her fortune being gone, did not care to find out whether I was dead or not; therefore let them think as they thought.” Rizpah feared the lashings of conscience, and, having given up every thing once dear to enter the life she had, courted forgetfulness of the past, pleasure for the present. The two had within themselves exuberant youth, a wealth of possibilities of happiness; the elements that, like the abundance of the volcano, paints the sky gorgeously when rising heavenward; like it, in the downward course, followed by darkness and disaster. The two, differing in almost every thing but fervor of temperament, were in accord in pursuit of change; they persuaded themselves that they were growing to be like each other, when they were only exalting the one thing, love of excitement, in which they were alike.

Damascus, naturally, in time, became uninteresting and vapid to them both. They wore it out; they wanted new scenes. They heard that a caravan of Mohammedan pilgrims was to pass through their city on the way to Mecca to procure besim balm and holy chaplets, and promptly determined to journey with it; but not to Mecca. The caravan was to pass through Bashan, and the two excitement-seekers desired to visit the latter land of wonders. They readily garbed themselves as Mohammedans, though once they would have loathed such garbing as a defilement. They desired company toward Bashan, and since the time they defied their consciences in order to be wedded to each other, their consciences had been wont to be very submissive in the face of their desires. They explained to themselves the absence of qualms of conscience in the face of a pretense of being Moslems, as the result of a growth toward liberality on their part. The explanation made them comfortably complacent, although the fact was that they had passed far beyond liberalism toward nothingism.

Passing Musmeth and Khubat of the Argob, they tarried after a time at Edrei, just inside the shore line of that mysterious black, lava sea, the Lejah. They were in a country where nature, art and desolation had done their greatest. Following a passing impulse seemed to them to have brought them thither, but one believing in God’s constant providence will readily believe that they were led thither as to a school. There were omen and prophecy confronting them. These fervent souls had gone from hymen’s altar filled with romancings, under a glow of prismatic auroras, never pausing to perceive that from each wedding time there winds a troop of serious years burdened with many a commonplace duty. Their love had been volcanic, their impulses ecstatic, their aims toward things filled with commotion. The wine in their cup was to leave dregs; after the fire there was to be ashes, and it was fitting that they contemplated a specimen of great desolation and dreariness, the result of great fires and great storms. So they were within that wonder of the world, three hundred and fifty square miles of awful plain, filled with ruined towns and cities. Heaved up here and there by jutting basalt rocks, the plain seemed filled with black ice-bergs; ridged at intervals the plain suggested an ocean wave-tossed. Therein is many a cave and cranny place, fit abode for the wild beast or robber; fit abode for ghosts, if one seeks to believe there are such. But therein were only a few green spots, oases, to bid the traveler welcome. Ere long the knight and his consort wore out the Lejah, and, in so doing, in part, wore out themselves. They had a fullness of the pleasure of the kind which lacks recreation. As it was, they stayed there longer than it was well for them to stay.

Rizpah, the passion flower of Gerash, experiencing the supreme exaction of womanhood now, began to droop. Months spent in pursuit of excitement, the great change in her manner of life, as well as the oppressive desolations of her surroundings, had drawn heavily upon her resources physically. Reaction after exaltation, and nervous discord after nervous tension are natural results, always.

The knight discerned the change of temper, and as an anxious novice went about correcting the matter. He knew little concerning woman, except that love of her intoxicates; delighting in the intoxication he sought to stimulate Rizpah’s flagging energies by pushing her onward into the feverish brilliancy that was so delightful to himself. It was an attempt to cure physical impoverishment by the renewal of its causes. She was at times complacent, because incompetent to resist; passive, because enervated. He was most selfish, though not realizing the fact, when trying to be most tender. In fact, the twain were on the rim of a test period in their married life and being unskilled in its common places, unfitted to stand the test. Sir Charleroy had recourse to the only physician he deemed adequate; one whom on account of his dress he called “Old Sheepskin.” This was a guide, with a motly group of Druses assistants, and an unpronouncible name.

“Come, Rizpah, ‘Old Sheepskin Jacket’ has put on his red tunic and leathern girdle to carry us a camel voyage in-sea; if we do not give the man a job he’ll fall to stealing again.”

Rizpah languidly shook her head.

“But we must patronize the man to keep up what little honesty he has, and he has some. He told me but yesterday he’d rather work than rob—though the pay be less, so is the danger less.”

The knight was telling the truth as well as trying to be facetious.

Again Rizpah replied with a weary shake of the head, her hands rising deprecatingly, then falling into her lap as if almost nerveless.

“But, Rizpah, while we are here we ought to fully explore the changeless cities of this dead, black, lava sea. There are none other like this on earth! ’Tis nature’s desperate effort to outrun phantasmagoria.”

Rizpah shook her head and waved her hands; this time vehemently, as if to repel a horror.

“What? A fixed no?”

“No more excursions into this counterpart of hades for me.”

“Well, so be it to-day, at least,” with surrendering tones, the knight replied.

“To-day? All days! Oh, God, remove me from this nightmare!”

So exclaiming, the woman covered her eyes, shuddered and wept hysterically.

Sir Charleroy was almost overcome with sudden amazement. The tears, the terror, the complete change before him, were beyond his comprehension. After a time he again spoke: “Why, this is a sudden freak or frenzy. I thought Rizpah fascinated here!”

“I’ve had my notice from the dread spirits that infest the place to go! Didst thou note what dark and threatening clouds dipped down like vultures upon me when we were last there?” vehemently Rizpah replied.

“I only saw a threatening of rain that came not. It seldom rains in the Lejah.”

“There was rain enough in my poor, shivering, weeping heart!”

“But, I wonder, Rizpah, thou didst not tell me of these feelings before!”

“I could not confide then; I was too jealous!”

“Jealous? What a word! But of whom, me?”

“I can never forget that thy union with me has made thee alien to thy people and in part neglectful of the faith for which thou didst once fight bravely. I can not forget that the Teutonic knight was the devotee of a bepraised Lady Mary. I thought of this that black day, and I felt as if those dry, grim clouds were her frowns. It was thou, my Christian husband, who named the Lejah, ‘Tartarus,’ and it has been such for some time to me. Its sight has constantly burned me with remorse! That day it seemed to me thy Mary pitied thee and blamed me! I writhed under the thought! I, for a moment, hated her. I felt like climbing some height, and, club in hand with defiant curses, challenging her right to have a finer care of thee than I have. I’d have done it, if thou hadst not been here to laugh at the folly of my frenzy. Ah, husband, if she is or was all that thou dost depict her, she can not love me, and thou must contrast us to my disparagement. I can not forget that thou wert a Christian soldier; sworn to war for her and her son; now thou art wedded to me, a daughter of her and His persecutors!”

“Why, Rizpah, thy changing moods are appalling; thou dost beat the magicians who conjure up the dead, since thou dost create out of nothing the most hideous ghosts to haunt thyself—Maya! Maya!”

“Oh, yes, I know ‘Maya,’ wife of Brahm, by interpretation ‘illusion.’ A myth, as a gibe, has a sharp point, effective because so difficult to parry. But, alas, ridicule, though it easily tear to pieces delusion, is powerless to disperse the gloom that sits in a soul as mine.”

“I’ll not ridicule my Rizpah, but I would bring her light.”

“Ah? That is, resurrect the peace thou didst murder?”

“Show me one wound my hand has made and I’ll abjectly beg all pardons, attempt any atonement!”

“Dost thou, knight, remember the ruins of the Christian church of Saint George, at Edrei?”

“Certainly.”

“And thy conversation there?”

“Yes, that Saint George was England’s patron saint famed for having slain the dragon which imperiled a king’s daughter.”

“More thou didst say; thou didst expatiate on the princess, saying her name was Alexandra, meaning, ‘friend of mankind’; further, thou saidst there was a queenly woman by name, Mary, daughter of the King of Kings, friend beyond all women of humanity, for whom every true knight was willing to be a Saint George.”

“True enough; but to what purport now is this reminiscence?”

“Thou saidst Saint George was loyal to the death to his faith, and died a martyr!”

“True again. What of it?”

“Was the Teutonic knight thinking of himself as a martyr because wed to a Jewess? I followed thy thoughts, though they were not all spoken. How naturally that day thou didst tell me of thy visions which thou hadst between Gerash and Bozrah when wounded nigh to death. The English saint, knight, very loyal to creed, rebuked in his dreams, by the beating of mighty wings, the departing of his heart’s rose! Oh, why didst thou not tell me this before it was too late! I would have helped thee escape the ingenuous Jewess Thou didst awaken then with dread bleeding, to find thyself pillowed upon the bosom of a simple-hearted loving girl; I now awaken, wounded indeed, but with none to staunch the wounding! Why, de Griffin, didst thou keep this secret so long? Why unfold it now?”

“I’d be the Saint George of Rizpah and slay her dragon, gloom.”

“Poor comfort to offer since the gloom is beyond thy powers! Flout my mood as thou mayst; what use? I vainly denounce it. Thou hast had thy dream; now I’m having mine. I’ll not mock thy insights; thou canst not by bantering jeer change mine. My Lejah omens assure me that I’m to have a rain of tears and more; some way thy Mary will be their cause.”

“Rizpah errs; the queen I revere was a living epistle of good will; her character the joy and inspiration of all women, especially of those in tribulation. But enough! Rizpah, being a Jew, should abhor the necromancy of omens!”

“Jew! Ah, yes; I was once! But the valiant English knight lured me into his Christian love and my race’s hate. I had once the luxurious faith of a pious girl; all feeling, all flowers; too young to reason, but young enough to love the good and beautiful unto salvation. The knight poisoned the blossoms before they ripened by the acids of ridicule! There is a loss beyond repair and a bitter memory, that of a broken promise; under our love-star thou didst swear thou wouldst never lightly treat my believing. Venus has set, Mercury is rising; but wisdom brings a burning glare. The promise that the knight failed to keep was made when I was, he said his idol; now I’m only his wife!”

“Rizpah exchanges the glory of the rose for the bitter gray of the wormwood.”

“I’m thy handiwork; now mock the result, if to do so comforts thee.”

“My handiwork!”

“Yes, fool!”

“These words are awful.”

“I think so and I hate them; though I can not check them. I hate my temper and even myself when in such present moods. De Griffin, pray as thou didst never pray before, that I do not learn to hate thee. I pity thee, because I’ve some love left.”

“Pity?”

“Yes, when I imagine thee wriggling beneath the malignant detestation of which I know I shall soon be capable.”

“My wife, in God’s dear name, banish these moods! They are impious, unnatural; the crisis of thy being falsely accuses thy heart. Be calm!”

“Calm? ‘Be calm!’ Very good; calm me, please, if thou canst. Oh, why didst thou make me thus?”

“The God of all peace forgive me if I did, Rizpah.”

“Thou wert the elder and shouldst have known?”

“What?”

“That to unsettle a woman’s faith, if she be such as I, is to let loose a bundle of blind vagaries and to tumble her, like a drifting wreck, on unknown shores.”

“Oh, wife, as thou hopest for heaven and lovest our unborn child, restrain these moods. Thou’lt mark the one to be, with germs of all evil; for such outbursts of mothers re-act with awful effect upon their offspring. Thou knowest how the old nurse, at Damascus, killed a babe in an instant, merely by giving it her breast after she had yielded to an outbreak of passion. Such tempers hurl poison through all the being!”

“Alas, knight, that all this prudence ever comes just a little too late!”

“What could I have done better?”

“Left the little maid of Harrimai’s home free from thy enchantments and to the quiet of her people’s state.”

“But I loved thee so. That atones for all.”

“Thou thoughtst thou lovedst, but ’twas my form which fascinated thee, not my mind nor soul!” Rizpah’s face became ashen pale, her eyes had a far-off gaze and were steelly, as she began plaintively to repeat the words, “‘_There were giants in the earth.... They saw the daughters of men, Adamish, that they were fair and they took them for wives of all they chose, and they bore children and it repented the Lord that He had made man, for He saw that the wickedness was great in the earth._’ Thou wast my giant-lofty. Thou stolest my heart and body. Now for a flood to punish the sin, and my tears are already its first droppings.”

“We are wed; shall we not now make the best of it? Even when into this mystic alliance unmated lives converge, they can still with wisdom extract from it at least peace. Go fervently, firmly, back to the faiths of thy girlhood; become again all thou wert, except that thou be ever mine.”

“Ah, ha! how little, after all, thou knowest of woman’s heart? Thou wouldst command it do and be; and go and come, wouldst thou? Thinkst thou, thou canst make such heart as mine wild with the strange intoxications of unholy fire, filling the brain above it with all the clouds, weird longings, doubtings and misgivings, that fume up from that fire, and then send that heart back without a compass, chart, sail or helm, to find the haven? Send it lashed by remorse part of the time, part of the time half dead to all feeling, and all the time blind, to hunt up lost creeds.”

“But God provided an ark; let us ask Him to aid us build one in a home, with happy parents and happy children. Thou readst to me, but yesterday, the Prophets’ beautiful description of a lamp burning with oil supplied from two palm trees; one on either side. I’ll interpret; the trees are parents, the lamp the light of home, manifest in posterity, reproduction; a prophecy of the resurrection.”

“Beautiful mysticism. But the giantesque men rose to play at lust, just beside Sinai of the law.”

“Not so I, the Teutonic knight, now the husband. Rizpah; thy desperate misery appeals to all my manhood. I swear to thee I’d turn my heart’s blood into the oil to cause our home to glow with the serene light of holy happiness.”

“Words, words; how sad, because so beautiful, yet so vain!”

“Oh Rizpah,” cried the knight, too anxious to be angry, though the woman’s words were stinging, “thy looks startle me! Pray God to rest and hold thy worried soul.”

“Pray? I have tried, often of late, to pray, but I do not know how. I fear thou hast stolen even that power from me! Ugh! the last time I prayed, my words seemed like black cormorants rising with loads of carrion; then falling struck dead by the sun, into great black caves, such as abound in our Lejah hell! I heard my words flung back at me in mockery. Pray? I dare not, lest God strike me dead for a hypocrite and a heretic!”

“But my poor, dear wife,” soothingly said Sir Charleroy, “He is merciful.”

“Oh, yes, to the good and the faithful; I’m neither! I gave Him up for a man, as the Adamish men gave him up for women. I madest thou my God, and now have none other; for He of the heavens is very holy, but very jealous!”

“Rizpah, Rizpah, do not thus give way to these wild imaginations.”

“Give way? Alas, all is already given away; soul and body were on an idolatrous altar long ago. I’m buried in the ashes!”

“But Rizpah, trust my love: I’ll help thee back to peace and usefulness.”

“Bah! the masculine great I——”

“Heavens! woman, is there any love in a heart that so hurls javelins?”

“I don’t know! I suppose so, for I pity thee.”

“Pity me?”

“Yes; when I think as I do at times, that thy wife is turning into a devil, a very devil! Sir Charleroy de Griffin, knight of St. Mary, dost hear me? A devil, a raging devil, and one that will pity while she assails.” The last sentence was almost screamed, then the woman fell on the rug of their apartment and wept convulsively. After a little there was the silence of exhaustion, of chagrin, of shame. Sir Charleroy stood by the prostrate form and with words half commanding said: “Let us ride out a little way.” He was trying a new strategy.

“No, no, no! Thou’lt take me to the Lejah, and I shall see that dread omen again.”

“What?” As he questioned he raised the woman tenderly from the floor.

“The lava desert, in long rolling waves, black and drear.”

“Ah, Rizpah, thou knowest that it was only thy unreined fancy, heated by morbid broodings, that changed the eternally-fixed furrows of the plain, overshadowed by running clouds into threatening billows! God and the sun are above all clouds and behind every anxious heart. Look up; look in, until thy soul finds Him; then the horror of darkness will die away.”

“Oh, how thy comfortings hurt me, because I do not believe in thee, nor believe thee! Thou sayst that thou didst abandon thy Christian, perfect queen of women, for me. I know thou must be chagrined at the bad exchange! I can not honor nor trust the faithfulness of one so fickle. No matter for that, but what comes after is worse. Those black sky-drapings were over the Lejah that day because I was there. I know—I know there’s a tide of sorrow rolling toward me. I see it as I saw those black, serpent-like, lava waves. But, oh, the suspense! It’s awful; let the worst come if only soon!” The knight, sworn to protect helpless women, saw himself disarmed and powerless to aid the one woman of earth for whom he would have died.

Two giants at bay in Giant Land, where another mold of gianthood had died leaving nothing but monuments to attest the greatness of the failure. The two knew only this, that they were very miserable and powerless, by any means accustomed, to extricate themselves.

Sir Charleroy wished and wished, in his soul, that his patron saint and queen of women would appear and tell both what to do. He unconsciously was turning his mind’s eye in the right direction. Husband and wife both believed there was a right way, a pattern of right, and an ideal of heaven, but they could not lay hold of them. Giant, crusader and husband, each in turn strove in his day at the same spot, and at the same point failed.

Sir Charleroy, in mind, went out along a strangely beset line of thinking. Sometimes he pitied himself, and that brought the balm of conceit. He remembered it was a fine thing to be a martyr, forgetting that some, rewardless, suffer as sinners. Sometimes he heard those beatings of mighty wings, as if some wondrous holy one were departing. Then he became very penitent and full of the entreatings of prayer. Either mood was brief enough to him not yet converted; a very Peter in vacillations. Whether he would finally follow the beating wings or sit down nigh to the gates of certain insanity, the gates that those who over-much pity themselves are sure to reach, was the issue in his life then. The bugles of war call few to the heroism of the field, but millions are daily called by God’s bugle to the better achievements which make for glory amid the duties of common life. That latter bugle was calling him, but he was slow to obey, or understand even.

The events recorded in the foregoing pages roused Sir Charleroy to an anxious effort to do something to change the currents of his wife’s thoughts. Necessity quickened his discernment, and though he had had but little experience in dealing with those ill in the body or mind, he quickly concluded that a change of place and a change of pursuit would be beneficial. In truth, his own feelings attested this much. He himself was weary of the pursuit of excitement as a sole and constant occupation.

“Shall we leave the Lejah, Rizpah?” he questioned, a few days after the outbreak before mentioned.

“Yes, I say!—I’m leaving it! See here,” and she pointed to her cheeks, once ruddy, now haggard. “Oh, Charleroy, take me away or death will!”

“Enough! We’ll go. But where?”

“Any place under heaven; say the word and I’ll run out of the place instantly, leaving all here.”

“What, our effects!”

“Any thing to get away. I feel like a child approached by some monster terror, hour by hour! For days I’ve been transfixed by my fear or I would have run away, even alone, before this. Now thy words break the spell! Come, let us go before I’m overcome again!”

“There, now, be calm. No more of this undue nervousness. We’ll go, and soon. What says Rizpah to Bozrah, southward of Bashan?”

“Yes, to Bozrah; historic Bozrah!” and the face of the woman brightened as she went on: “It was the fairy land of my youth. I’ve wanted to go there since I was a wee little thing, scarce able to walk.” Then the woman unbent and talked with the rapture of a child:

“Oh; I’ve wanted to see Bozrah all my life, since the days when my old nurse used to talk me to sleep with stories of Og and his bedstead nine cubits long, and how our little Hebrew, Moses, overcame those Rephaim.”

“Thy prophets and psalmists, as well as thy nurses, were wont to go into rapturous descriptions of the lofty oaks, loftier mountains, ragged plains, marvelous pastures and goodly herds of the Hauran and Trachonitis.”

Rizpah continued in gleeful strain: “Oh, those herds; if I can’t see old Og, I’d like to see the famous bulls of Bashan! Show me something huge, no matter how huge, if alive and not black! I’m becoming infatuated with the strong and the large. If ever I lose my soul it will be by worshiping, pagan-like, something mightier than I can imagine; of body or muscle. Yes, yes, I’ll be a thorough pagan since I can not be a Jew nor a Christian! Now, I forewarn thee.” So saying she laughed merrily. The knight was rejoiced to hear the musical, natural laughter again, and encouraged the play of her wit, which attested a mind unbending to rest.

“Woman-like, adoring the huge when the grand can not be found. Thank God, the giants are all dead; there are none at Bozrah, at least. I’ll not fear the little dirty Arabs, or pigmy Druses as supplanters.”