CHAPTER XXIX.

TWO DEAD HEARTS UNITING TWO LIVING ONES

“Let us alone regret, ... ... Sorrow humanizes our race. Tears are the showers that fertilize the world; And memory of things precious keepeth warm The heart that once did hold them. They are poor that have lost nothing; they are far more poor Who, losing, have forgotten; they most poor Of all who lose and wish they might forget.”—JEAN INGELOW.

Under Miriamne’s adroit and patient guidance Sir Charleroy and his attendants made goodly progress until they reached ancient Jabbock, bordering Giant Bashan; but at that point the knight made a stubborn stand, persisting that he would proceed no further Bozrah-ward.

“I smell Mohammedanism coming to me from the East, and, having had enough of the Saracens in my day, I’ll tarry away from their haunts——

“I must go, beloved, to the tomb of my dear defender, Ichabod. I must go to Gerash to do the pious offices of a mourner.”

The maiden brought forward every reason her ingenuity could invent opposed to the proposed deflection in course. She enlisted the Druses guides, whom she had employed to accompany them hitherto, to aid her in raising objections, and they magnified the obstacles in the way to Gerash with commendable loyalty to their employer, the maiden, if not with strict regard to truth. They all encamped, and the debate was the sole occupation for hours.

“Now, Miriamne, hitherto my good spirit, thou wouldst lure me to perdition! I’ve been in the Lejah. I’m certain that black lava-sea is hell’s mouth, and Bozrah’s its porch!”

“So be it; but if we go carrying the heavenly consciousness of doing our Father’s will, we may carry heaven to those gates.”

“It’s not my duty to go thither. I passed through that purgatory once. Its horrors blasted my life! To return thither would be presumption.”

“But you have forgotten the sunrise coming to you. Each day, for months, as you have journeyed eastward, you have gained in health of body and mind.”

“Dost thou mean that God blesses those who plunge headlong to destruction, as the possessed swine that ran violently into the sea?”

“Can not my father let faith silence the disquietings of his wild fancies? The memory of a past pain, though a persistent, is often a false teacher.”

“Oh, I do remember. Some memories seem to scorch the very substance of my brain! I pray when such come that God give me eternal forgetfulness. I’d rather be an idiot than have the power of coherent thinking filled with such reminiscences!”

“Ah, if we all, always, had the wisdom, while gazing into our dark, deep pools, to gaze until we saw at their bottoms the image of the sky above!”

“Well said, daughter! Bozrah is a dark pool! I saw there only an image of the sky, and that very far away!”

The day of the foregoing they were wandering along the flowery banks and over the forest-covered hills that undulated away from Jabbock’s ravine. As they moved along the maiden plucked a hyacinth blossom and affectionately fastened it on her father’s bosom; just where he was wont to wear, when in England, his knight’s cross.

“Rizpah once placed a lotus there; it made me drunk; a votary of pleasure, mad; but Miriamne, her daughter, places there the flower of serene, deathless affection! Sweet, thou art my good angel, the flower says to Gerash!”

“Why, father! I do not understand!”

“Apollo unwittingly caused the death of a beautiful youth, the friend of his heart, whose name was Hyacinthus. So says tradition, and it’s so charming, I more than half believe it! Apollo, in loyal love, made a flower grow from the grave of his friend. This is it! See; here’s the color of the dead youth’s blood. This blossom is the flower of deathless friendship and I love it.”

“A touching story, I’ll remember it; but it seems to me the flower says, ‘Bozrah,’ my father.”

“Take this leaf, girl; here.”

“And what of this?”

“There, on that leaf, behold those signs, ‘Ai’ ‘Ai’.”

“I think some markings are there like what you say, though never ’till now did I so trace them.”

“That’s the Greek cry of woe. The perfumes of these flowers, in every field of Gerash, remind me of my duty. I must go to the tomb of the man that died in my defense.”

“A pious sentiment; but duty to the living can not be pushed aside by such a call. You have other and living friends?”

“Yes, thou art my friend, lover, angel; but I’ll keep thee with me, my lamb.”

“Rizpah and your sons!”

“Rizpah my friend? that would be amusing, if it were not such a grim sarcasm. Oh, what a miserable race she led me!”

“Misery, like joy, in wedded life, is won or lost by the deed of two; not one. I shall not acquit my mother; but were not there two to blame?”

“Two? no; only one. I could not be peaceful with a panther.”

“Be not too severe, and think a little; did not you, after all, do much to make your wedded wife what she was at her worst?”

“What, I? Thou dost not think that?”

“Yes; I know the story of your espousal; your flight from Gerash, and then your after conflicts. You knew before you determined against all opposing, in the face of reasons most grave, and without any thought of your adaptation to each other, to wed, that your tempers, tastes, and trainings were in almost every thing apart.”

“Well, we loved each other sincerely; our marriage vows were honestly taken.”

“Marriage; that settled it forever! Did you as honestly keep as you took the vows, for better or worse?”

“Now that were impossible. Did you ever see your mother in rage, her muscles rising in a sort of serpentine wavings from her feet upward? Ugh! I hear her sibilant, hissing words of scorn, now. They’ll haunt me forever. She was a lotus in love, and a boa in wrath.”

“I may have seen her so, but out on the love that lets such visions displace memories of the best things; a daughter, nurtured by her, can not; a husband sworn on hymen’s altar, dare not forget.”

“I tried to set her right, Miriamne.”

“Not always with kindness unfailing. I’ve seen the scourge-marks on her heart. I’ve heard her moan as a wounded dove; no, more piteously, as a deserted wife and mother. You tried to set her right by forcing her to your faith, that, too, when the girl-wife was weak and exhausted by early maternity. You have been wont ever to pity profoundly the holy mother who recoiled fainting from the spectacle of her son scourged to crucifixion. That pity is a fine feeling; but since Mary’s day is passed, it is finer to evince a manly tenderness for living women moving toward their Calvary. How you waste your emotions on the dead! Mary Hyacinthus, Ichabod, have all, Rizpah nothing.”

“See here, daughter; let me look down into thy eyes. I’m of a mind to think the sun has gotten into thy brain. It gets into every body’s in this country.” So saying, he turned her face toward his own. It was a bungling effort on his part to parry her thrusts with ridicule, the last weapon of the defeated.

She was a little indignant, but yet too earnest to be diverted, and so followed up her advantage.

“You were the stronger, every way, and fenced well against your other self. The woman erred, sometimes grievously, perhaps, and you had your sweet retaliations. How sweet you can tell. Each blow at her, fell on me, my brothers and yourself. Oh, it’s the climax-revenge to lay open with giant thrusts, monstrous and keen, vein and nerve. One may mar a good purpose by pursuing it cruelly. Were not your efforts to set my mother right severe, sometimes?”

“Did the eloquent Hospitaler put these fine words together for thee, girl?” testily questioned Sir Charleroy.

“No matter who sent them, if they be true words. If you get angry, I’ll be wounded. You need not try hard to hurt me. I will strive to be all filial, while all loyal; but not more so to father than to mother.”

“Well, but she was a rheumatism to me.”

“So be it; still she was part of you. Does one dismember a limb that aches, or give it tenderer care than all others?”

“‘It is better,’ said Solomon, ‘to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and angry woman.’ I got heartily weary of an ache that ached because it ached.”

“I’ll place Joseph by Solomon.”

“Pray, how?”

“He espoused Mary and was with her, yet apart; thus showing God’s idea of the needs of weary mothers in their trying hours, when giving their strength to another being. Joseph was kept as a lover only, until after Jesus was born, that his services might have a lover’s tenderness. I have heard that the manhood of Jesus reflected the sweetness of Mary; Joseph kept his wife in those days sweet, so the kindness of that noble spouse lived after all, an immortal influence. Joseph, through Mary in part, determined the bodily traits of the child Jesus; the latter influences all time.”

“Why, truly, thou hast found a beautiful flower, Miriamne, and I’m wondering that I never saw it before in Mary’s life. But, finally, I tell thee I loved Rizpah as my soul at first.”

“Oh, yes; you both loved with almost volcanic ardor. My mother told me so; but this very power and inclination of passionate loving gave you each for the other power of dreadfully hurting.”

“Well, we’ll speak further of this, perhaps, another time. The hyacinth lures me to Ichabod’s tomb.”

“The rose, emblem of Mary, flower of wedded love, is sweeter than the hyacinth. Go home to Bozrah, father, I beseech you, so you may prove yourself still a Knight of Saint Mary.”

“Home? I’ve none! Bozrah is grim ruins within, without. There, as only fit and in fit dwellings, abide the cormorant and hyena. All hopes that ever centred in that place for me were but dancing satyrs at the last; all loves but eagles with hot-iron beaks, which devoured the hearts that fed them, then fled away! I hate Bozrah!”

“You have a wife and children there. I a mother. Where the brood is, there is home. Bozrah has no gloom for us, save such as we make for it. It may be a glad place yet. Remember that Kidron and Golgotha were made all beautiful by the fidelity of Mary and the cross-bearing of Jesus.”

“Miriamne, this parley is useless. Once for all, hear me. Before I wed thy mother I took upon my soul an impious, almost desperate, vow, that I’d possess her though the possessing ruined me. The strong, hopeful Knight of the Cross was domineered over by his love. Before this I had some commendable principles and a little piety. What am I now, after long driftings about through wasted years of prime? I’m the wreck of a man; less! a part of a wreck, trying to get made over in a meaner pattern out of the fragments left. Thy mother unmade me!”

“Adam said something like that of Eve.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Miriamne. The Jewish maiden Zainab gave Mohammed, of Bozrah, the poisoned lamp which ruined his health; the Jewish Rizpah has such a lamp. See me, wrinkled, hair whitened, all too soon; chivalry, morality and piety dragged out of me bit by bit. I stand here the caricature of what I was or what I should be. I’m fit for neither war nor courtship. I’d make a pretty show attempting to court Rizpah! I’ve forgotten how such things are done, and, besides, I’m not the original Sir Charleroy she wed. Let her find him, or his counterfeit, and be happy. The original Sir Charleroy and Rizpah loved each other desperately, but these that I know hate each other as desperately. I tell thee it would be legalized adultery for these latter two to live under the same roof, pleading as justification the vows of the other two! Miriamne, I tell thee that thou mayst tell it on the house tops, or hill tops, as I’ll cry it through eternity, if permitted, Sir Charleroy and Rizpah, of Gerash and Bozrah, died long ago! The devil stole their bodies, put an imp’s spirit in each, and then parted them forever. If they ever meet it will be by the fiend’s device, that he may revel over their warrings with each other! Ah, ha! What the Roman arena was to the blood-thirsty populace, such to the fiends the homes of the world when full of tumults!”

And Miriamne, alarmed by the outbreak, tried to calm her father:

“Oh, father, you will need mercy some day; merit it by bestowing it. You suffer an unforgiving spirit to inflame your passion!”

“Forgiving? What’s the use? I’ve vainly tried mercy!”

“Try once more. The injured have resource so long as they have power to forgive. Remember Him who in the great extremity cried: ‘_They know not what they do!_’ Trust Rizpah once more!”

“I do not see the shadow of a peg on which to hang a trust.”

“You, a Teutonic Knight of St. Mary!”

“Thank God Mary was not a Rizpah!”

“Mary had the trust of Joseph in those dire days, when nothing but a miracle could prove her integrity. She presents not only woman’s goodness but that which even the loftiest wife needs, the constancy beyond measure of her husband.”

“Joseph was advised by an angel. I not.”

“As you love your mother, honor the woman who mothers your children. They bear your image, yet she alone, with a sublime self-forgetting, struggles to have them grow up honorably, purely, and in the fear of God.”

“She wants to make them Israelites.”

“Perhaps so, and perhaps the Christian examples she has seen give her no reason to wish otherwise. But after all, her way is better than to have left them as their father left them, to become infidels or nothing. Oh, father, do not think me bold. I speak because I love you; as perhaps no other might care or presume to give utterance.”

“Well, girl, I guess I’m a double man; for, determined to oppose, I feel a desire within to have thee win in this argument. I’m one compound of contradictions. I was a sworn bachelor, then a sworn husband, now I’m neither. I’m a widower, with a living wife; a parent of three children with only one. I bewail my homelessness, yet run from an offered home. I confess to being useless, yet see a mission most important at my own door. Swearing loyalty to Mary, I disregard all she exemplified—of late revealed to me; professing to be a Christian, I live a life that would shame a decent Jew. I have a daughter, said by all to be much like me in temper, feature, and mind, yet we are here utterly opposed in thought and purpose. I’ve heard the profoundest teachers in grandest temples unmoved to this duty, to-day presented; and, now, without the pale of any church, in the wilds of Jericho, a mere girl, my daughter, instructs me well! This all proves that I’m the caricature of Miriamne’s father. If I be Sir Charleroy, then I’m beside myself!”

“A good half confession! Now for the atonement!”

“What, a bundle of contradictions making atonement? undoing the past! more contradictions?”

“Righteousness displaces all the contradictions of life!”

“I could make no atonement except by contradicting a score of years, and going to Bozrah! Now hear me finally; by the glory of God, alive, I’ll never go to Rizpah’s house!”

Miriamne felt that further persuasion would be futile. She made a last request, then.

“Will my father take me to the outskirts of that city? I’ll enter alone to comfort the woman who, notwithstanding her faults, I believe to be the noblest of mothers. She may not have a husband; she has a daughter.”

As the father and daughter rested at noon, not far from the Giant City, some days after the foregoing events, they beheld a single horseman from toward Bozrah speeding along the great southern highway.

“I think he’s a Jew and in peaceful pursuit. I’ll hail him,” said the knight, “in the language of Galilee.”

The rider, hearing the call, halted. Glancing about him he discovered the source of the call, and promptly reined his steed toward where the pilgrims were sitting. Instantly he began in short, quick sentences:

“Wonder; the face of a Frank, the garb of a Turk, the voice of a Jew! An old man, a young woman! A Moslem in company with his slave? No, she sits by his side! A harem favorite? No! She is not veiled! Ye do not look cunning enough for magicians, too cunning to be pilgrims; not pious enough, old man, to be a priest, and too pious-looking to be a robber.”

“True, Laconic,” said the knight, “I’m at no loss as to thee.”

“So it seems! But pray, Christian, Jewish, Druses, Turks, who are ye?”

“We’re pilgrims, good runner.”

“Ha, ha; these pilgrims are a mad-lot, with piebald customs!”

“What news, runner?”

“What news! A plague in Bozrah! De Griffin’s twins are nigh to death—De Griffin? May be thou knowest him? Thou dost look like him: but he’s dead. Now his twins have no nurses nor mourners, but Rizpah, and I’m racing to Gerash to see if I can find a soul to swell her wailings.”

The rider turned his horse and with a word, “_Selamet_,”—“peace,” was gone.

Miriamne had heard enough, and now, with redoubled vehemence, reöpened her arguments and appeals to her father to go to her home.

“I’ll not go into Rizpah’s house. I tell thee thou art inviting me into hell!”

Miriamne, in turn, replied: “There is good anywhere for those that earnestly seek it. Mohammed, they say, got his first inspiration in Bozrah, and he a Moslem, a crescent devotee!”

“Yes; he wed a rich wife there, too, and she was a saint. I may envy him in these things.”

The young woman hastily entered the city and stopped for a little time at the mission house of Father Adolphus, briefly, hurriedly, to announce her return, inquire the latest report concerning the illness of her brothers, and to beseech the old priest to go out after her father; if possible, to bring him into the city and to the desolate fireside.

“Well, well; there, now, I’d call thee bee or humming-bird, truly, darting from point to point, subject to subject, if I didn’t know I was talking to an angel.”

The sincere compliment was unheard by Miriamne, for she was gone ere it was sounded. The old man shaded his eyes, looked after her a few moments, then girding himself, hobbled down the street to seek at the city’s outskirt the waiting knight.

And Miriamne, with heart beating high, sped on homeward. But as she approached it she slackened her pace, with questionings as to how she had best enter, so as to secure loving welcome and in no wise perturb by sudden surprise. She saw her mother through the doorway, bowed and swinging back and forth. The girl’s heart divined all; “My brothers are dead!” The mother seemed oblivious to all about her, and Miriamne hesitated on the threshold. Just then the runner galloped up to the open door, reined his steed, and exclaimed: “Out of sight, out of mind! Death, like poverty, sifts our friends! Ye can hire mourners cheaper at Bozrah than at Gerash, and there are none to be had without coins! Gerash is distant. I had no coins, and was a fool to start, wise to return!” It was Laconic, and he was gone before any reply was given. Rizpah didn’t even lift up her head to notice his coming or going.

Miriamne was glad of the circumstance, for the runner gave her words with which to enter: “A daughter never forsakes.” She spoke thus, very softly.

Rizpah, perhaps not recognizing the voice, moaned on, swaying as she moaned:

“Mother, mother?”

Rizpah slowly lifted her eyes to the speaker; then, either by a masterful self-control or because sorrow dazed, she slowly and without emotion, addressed the maiden:

“Thou here? So, then, my three are safe together, before my eyes, in death. Thou wert buried years ago.”

Without another word the daughter and sister quietly moved to the forms lying beside the mother, and knelt down, bowing, her one arm flung over the corses. Presently she reached out her hand and it met a warm clasp from her mother. The maiden knew full well that it meant welcome. It was death’s victory; expressive, unspoken eloquence. There were four hearts; two still in death; two alive and breaking, but the dead hearts somehow drew the living ones together and then they beat as one, each all comforting to the other. Two dead hearts bridged the gulf between two living ones. There followed the embrace and kiss of peace, and then Rizpah questioned:

“Wilt stay with me a little while, my only—?” thereupon she sobbed and was relieved.

“Stay? Yes, always! But when, the burial?”

“At once! It’s the plague and the law requires promptness. O Death, thou didst do thy bitterest for Rizpah!”

Rizpah soon rose up and began to busy herself about the bodies.

“Mother, tell me how to aid you.”

“Yea, as I need. Thou and I wilt carry them to the cave of entombment.”

“But will there be no funeral rites?”

“I’ll perform such; keeping vigil as Rizpah of old. My children were crucified, as were hers. All mankind turned from us in our stress, and so they died in want.”

“But, mother, the watching would kill you!”

“Thou dost comfort me, now. Oh, I’d be overjoyed, if I only knew for certainty that death would court me at my vigil.”

Softly Miriamne spoke:

“Sir Charleroy is at Bozrah.”

“Now thou makest Bozrah seem afar. Oh, the garments of people may brush together passing, but still to all things else the passers be eternities apart,” replied quickly, and yet with cool self-possession, Rizpah.

“Death, that cools the pulses, also subdues the asperities. I could not hate an enemy if I met him amid his dead,” persuasively responded the maiden.

“Imperious, fanatical, stubborn Charleroy! changeable in all but his determination to make conquest of the faith of others. Then, I can not ask his pardon for my serving God. Liberty came to Egypt because the mothers of captive Israel were faithful. So says our Talmud.”

“Sir Charleroy respects at least, fidelity.”

“Then ’tis well to have me die. He never did me justice to my face; let him embalm me in honey after I’m dead, as Herod did the wife he murdered. It’s a way of some husbands. But we must be moving, daughter; I’ve prepared two biers. The plague is a stern messenger, nor leaves room for any dallying.”

And Bozrah witnessed a strange, sad spectacle. Two roughly constructed burial couches; on each a body, and two women, the one aged, the other youthful, both bowed with grief, slowly bearing the biers away, down to the tomb-hill. The elder directed; and so they went; first a little way forward with one body, then returning to advance the other. There were no mourners following; the passers-by offered no help; the women of the city drew their doors shut, and the children playing in the streets, when they beheld this funeral procession, fled away with subdued exclamations.

The ancient Rizpah, watching her dead on their crosses, was standing that time in her valley of “dry bones;” her imitator, Rizpah de Griffin, was now walking through that same valley. Both made pitiable by desolation. Neither was able to hide her dead from her sight by looking for the hope of the blessed resurrection. Their loving had been fierce enough, but the soul-reviving Spirit of the prophet’s vision was not yet seen to be in the valley for them. The two Rizpahs were “mothers of sorrow,” but followed no cross that had on it besides “death,” “victory.” They went with tears, but not held by a love that triumphs in “leading captivity captive.” These ancient Jewish mothers may be put in striking contrast with the Davidic Queen Mary, who wept from the Judgment Hall, past the cross, past the tomb, up to the chamber of Pentecost, from which she viewed the transports of the Ascension of her Son, her Saviour, her King.