CHAPTER XXVIII

_The Power of a Beggar_

[Sidenote: The Contents of the Saddle-Bag]

I had escaped, but the delay was ruinous. The sun sank when I reached the brow of the mountain, and Masada lay many a weary mile forward. I cast off the tribune’s horse, thus giving his insolent master evidence that I did not understand the main point of my trade, and stood pondering to what point of the mighty ridge that rose blue along the horizon I should turn, when, in the plunge of the horse as he felt himself at liberty, his saddle came to the ground. The possibility of its containing reports of the state of the enemy led me to examine its pockets; they were stuffed with letters worthy of the highest circles of Italian high life; the ill-spelled registers of an existence at a loss how to lose its time; of libertinism sick of indulgence, and of pecuniary embarrassment driven to the most hopeless and whimsical resources.

A glance at a few of those epistles was enough, and I scattered into the air the reputations of half the high-born maids and matrons of Rome; but as I was turning away with an instinctive exclamation of scorn at this compendium of patrician life, my eye was caught by a letter addressed to the governor of Masada. In opening it, I committed no violation of diplomacy, for it held no secret other than an angry remission of his allegiance by some wearied fair one, who announced her intended marriage with the tribune.

[Sidenote: The Distant Sound of Strife]

My revenge was thus to go further than my intent, for I deprived him of the personal triumph of delivering this calamitous despatch to his rival. Yet, on second thought, conceiving that some cipher might lurk under its absurdity, I secured the paper, and giving the rein, left the whole secret correspondence of debt, libel, and love to the delight of mankind. I flew along; my indefatigable barb, as if she felt her master’s anxieties, put forth double speed. But I had yet a fearful distance to traverse. The night came, but I had no time to think of rest or shelter. I pushed on. The wind rose and wrapt me in whirls of sand. I heard the roar of waters. The ground became fractured, and full of the loose fragments that fall from rocky hills. I found that I was at the foot of the ridge and had lost my way. In this embarrassment I trusted to the sagacity of my steed. But thirst led her directly to one of the mountain torrents, and the phosphoric gleam of the waters alone saved us both from a plunge over a precipice, deep enough to extinguish every appetite and ambition in the round of this bustling world.

To find a passage or an escape, I alighted. The torrent bellowed before me. A wall of rock rose on the opposite side. After long climbings and descents, I found that I had descended too deep to return. Oh, how I longed for the trace of man, for the feeblest light that ever twinkled from the cottage window! I felt the plague of helplessness. To attempt the torrent was impossible. To linger where I stood till dawn was misery.

What would be going on meanwhile? Perhaps, at the very time while I was standing in wretched doubt, imprisoned among those pestilent cliffs, the deed was doing. Constantius was, with ineffectual gallantry, assaulting the fortress; my brave kinsmen were sacrificing their lives under the Roman spears, and I was not there!

A fitful sound came mingling with the roar of the cataract; it swelled, and vanished like the rushings of the gale. A trumpet sounded, but so feebly that nothing but the keenness of an ear straining to catch the slightest sound could have distinguished it. I heard remote shouts; they deepened; the echo of trumpets followed.

“The assault has begun!” I thought. “The work of glory and of death was doing. Every instant cost a life. The hailstones that bruised me were not thicker than the arrows that were then smiting down my people. Yet there was I, like a wolf in the pitfall!”

[Sidenote: In the Torrent]

Even where the combat was being fought, baffled my conception. It might be in the clouds or underground, on the opposite side of the black ridge before me, or many a league beyond the reach of my exhausted limbs and drooping steed; all was darkness to the eye and to the mind.

A light flashed down a ravine leading into the heart of the mountains; another and another blazed. Masada stood upon the mountain’s brow.

I instantly plunged into the torrent—was beaten down by the billows—was swept along through narrow channels of rock, until, half-suffocated, I was hurled up against the opposite cliff. Wet and weary, I less climbed than tore my way upward. But the torrent had borne me far below the ravine. Before me was a gigantic rampart of rock. But the time was flying. I dragged myself up to the face of the precipice by the chance brushwood. I swung from point to point by a few projecting branches that broke away almost in my grasp, until, with my hands excoriated, my limbs stiff and bleeding, and my head reeling, I reached the pinnacle.

Was I under the dominion of a spell? Was the power of some fiend raised to mock me? All was darkness as far as the eye could pierce; the heaviest veil of midnight hung upon the earth. There was utter silence. Not the slightest sound reached the ear.

For a while, the thought of some strange illusion was paramount; then came the frightful idea that the illusion was in myself; that in the effort to gain the ascent, I had strained eye and ear until I could neither hear nor see; that I was still within sight and sound of battle, but insensible to the impressions of the external world forever. Immortality under this exclusion! A deathlessness of the deaf and blind! The thought struck me with a force inconceivable by all minds but one sentenced like mine.

[Sidenote: Constantius Tells of the Attack]

In my despair I cried aloud. A flood of joy rushed into my heart when I heard my voice answered, tho it was but by the neigh of my barb below, which probably felt itself as ill-placed as its master. I now used my ear as the guide, and cautiously descending the farther side of the ridge was soon on comparatively level ground, the remnant of a forest. My foot struck against a human body; I spoke; the answer was a groan, and an entreaty that I should bear a small packet, which was put into my hands, “to the prince of Naphtali!” In alarm and astonishment, I raised the sufferer, gave him some water from my flask, and after many an effort, in which I thought that life would depart every moment, he told me that “he was the unfortunate leader of the assault of Masada.” Constantius lay in my arms!

“Where I am,” said he, as he slowly recovered his senses, “how I came here, or anything but that we are undone, I can not conceive. My last recollection was of fixing a ladder to the inner rampart. We had made our way good so far without loss. The garrison was weakened by detachments sent out to plunder. I attacked at midnight. To surprise a Roman fortress was, I well knew, next to impossible; and no man ever found a Roman garrison without bravery. But our bold fellows did wonders. Everything was driven from the first rampart; we made more prisoners than we knew what to do with, and in the midst of all kinds of resistance, we laid our ladders to the second wall. But the garrison were still too strong for us. Our easy conquest of the first line might have been a snare, for the battlements before us exhibited an overwhelming force. We fought on, but the ladders were broken with showers of stones from the engines. The business looked desperate, but I had made up my mind not to go back, after having once got in; and rallying the men, I carried a ladder through a storm of lances and arrows, to the foot of the main tower. I was bravely followed, and we were within grasp of the battlement when I saw a cohort rush out from a sally-port below. This was fatal; the foot of the rampart was cleared at once; the ladders were flung down; and I suppose it is owing to the ill-judged fidelity of some of my followers that I am unfortunate enough to find myself here and alive.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Friend, the Beggar]

During the endless hours of this miserable night, I labored with scarcely a hope to keep life in my heroic son. My coming had saved him. The exposure and his wounds must have destroyed him before morning. We consulted as to our next course. I suggested the possibility of gaining the fortress by a renewal of the attack, while the garrison was unprepared, or perhaps indulging in carousal after success. The necessity of some attempt was strongly in my mind, and I expressed my determination to run the hazard, if I could find where the remnant of our troop had taken refuge. But this was the difficulty. Signals of any kind must rouse the vigilance of the Romans. The fortress was above our heads, and to collect the men during the night was impossible.

While I watched the restless tossings of Constantius, a light stole along the ground at a distance. My first idea was that a Roman patrol was coming to extinguish our last remains of hope. But the light was soon perceived to be in the hand of some one cautious of discovery. To keep its bearer at a distance, I followed the track and grasped him.

“I surrender,” said the captive, perfectly at his ease; “long life to the Emperor!” He lifted the lamp to my face and burst into laughter. “May I have a Roman falchion through me,” said he, “but I think we were born under the same planet. By all the food that has entered my lips this day, I took your highness for a thief, and, pardon the word, for a Roman one. I have been running after you the whole day and night.”

He confined to talk and writhe, with a kind of mad merriment. I could not obtain an answer to my questions, of what led him there, how he could guide us out of the forest, or what news he brought from the procurator. He less walked than danced before me through the thickets, as our scene with Florus recurred to his fantastic mind.

[Sidenote: The Physician]

“Never was trick so capital as your escape,” he exclaimed. “I would have given an eye or an arm, things rather an impediment to a beggar, I allow; but it would have been worth a kingdom to see, as I saw, the faces of the whole camp, procurator, officers, troopers, and all, down to the horse-boys, on your slipping through their fingers in such first-rate style. I have done clever things in my time, but never, no never, shall I equal that way of making five thousand men at once look like five thousand fools. I own I thought that you would do something brilliant, and it was for that purpose that I tried to draw off the eye of that scoundrel Florus, for, sot as he is, there are not ten in Palestine keener in all points where roguery is concerned. I caught hold of his robe, told him a ready lie of the largest size about a discovery of coin in Jerusalem, and while he was nibbling at the bait I heard the uproar. You were off; I could not help laughing in his illustrious face. He kicked me from him, and foaming with rage, ordered every man and horse out after your highness. But I saw at a glance that you had the game in your own hands. You skimmed away like a bird; an eagle could not have got up that long hill in finer condition. Away you went, bounding from steep to steep, like a stone from a sling; you cut the air like a shaft. I have seen many a mare in my time, but as for the equal of yours—why a pair of wings would be of no use to her. She is a paragon, a bird of paradise, an ostrich on four legs, a——”

I checked his volubility and led him to the rough bedside of Constantius. I could not have found a better auxiliary. He knew every application used in the medicine of the time, and, to give him credit on his own showing, all diseases found in him an enemy worth all the doctors of Asia.

“He had traveled for his knowledge; he had fought with death from the Nile to the Ganges, and could swear that the sharks and crocodiles owed him a grudge throughout the world. He had cured rajahs and satraps till he made himself unpopular in every court where men looked for vacancies; had kept rich old men out of their graves until there was a general conspiracy of heirs to drive him out of the country; and had poured life into so many dying husbands that the women made a universal combination against his own.”

This flow of panegyric, however, did not impede his present services. He applied his herbs and bandages with professional dexterity, and kindling a fire, prepared some food, which went further to cheer the patient than even his medicine. He still talked away like one to whom words were a necessary escape for his surcharge of animal spirits.

[Sidenote: The Leech’s Skill]

“He knew everything in physic. He had studied in Egypt, and could compound the true essential extract of mummy with any man that wore a beard, from the Cataracts to the bottom of the Delta. He once walked to the Mountains of the Moon to learn the secret of powdered chrysolite. On the Himalaya he picked up his knowledge of the bezoar, and a year’s march through sands and snows rewarded him at once with a bag of the ginseng, most marvelous of roots, and the sight of the wall of China, most endless of walls.”

How he stooped to veil this accumulation of knowledge in rags, he did not condescend to explain. But his skill, so far, was certainly admirable, and my brave Constantius recovered with a suddenness that surprised me. With his strength his hopes returned.

“Oh,” exclaimed he, waking from a refreshing sleep, “that I were once again at the foot of the rampart with the ladder in my hand!”

“By my father’s beard,” replied the leech, “you are much better where you are; for observe, tho I can go further than any doctor between the four rivers, yet I never professed to cure the dead. Take Masada by scale! Ha! ha! take the clouds by scale! You would have found three walls within the one to which they decoyed you. Herod was the prince of builders, and could have so built as to have kept out everything, except the champion that carries no arms but a scythe.”

“Then you know Masada?” interrupted I eagerly.

“Know it, yes; every loophole, window, door—aye, and dungeon—from one end of it to the other.”

Still, my escape from the camp was so congenial to his ideas of pleasantry that it mingled with all his topics. War and politics went for nothing compared with the adroitness of eluding Roman insolence.

[Sidenote: His Knowledge of Masada]

“By Jove!” said he, “when I played my tricks with that pearl of pearls, that supreme of horseflesh, your barb, I was clumsy; I played the clown; you beat me hollow; it was matchless; it was my purse in prospect of your generosity to its emptiness this night”—he made a profound obeisance; “to see those fellows panting up the hill after you, nearly killed me.”

“But the fortress?”

“Oh! as to the fortress, the notion of attacking it was madness. I had my doubts of your intention, and broke loose from the camp to give you the benefit of my advice. But the tribune; ha, ha! never was coxcomb so rightly served. You won the heart of the whole legion by the single blow that spared him the trouble of sitting his horse. The troopers could not keep their saddles for laughing; and as for the fat old captain, I was only afraid that he would roar himself out of the world. I owed my escape partly to him, and his last words were: ‘Rascal, if you ever fall in with the Arab, whom I suspect to be as pleasant a rogue as yourself, tell him that I wish I had a dozen such in my squadron.’”

“But is there any possibility of knowing the present state of the garrison?”

“Aye, there is the misfortune. Yesterday I could have got in, and got out again, like a wild-cat. But, after this night’s visit, it is not too much to suppose that they may be a little more select in their hospitality. The governor has a slight correspondence of his own to carry on; a trifle in the way of trade; I had the honor to be smuggler extraordinary to his Mightiness, and, as in state secrets everything ought to be kept from the vulgar, my path in and out was by a portcullis, far enough from gates and sentinels, through which portcullis I should have shown you the way, if the attack had waited for me a few hours longer. That chance is of course cut off now. But see, yonder comes the morning.”

“Then we must move, or have the garrison on us.”

“I forbid that maneuver,” interrupted the fellow, with easy audacity.

Constantius and I, in equal surprise, bade him be silent. Yet the quietness with which he took the rebuke propitiated me, and I asked his reason.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Gains an Ally]

“Nothing more than that if you stir you are ruined. The hare is safest near the kennel. The outlaw sleeps sounder in the magistrate’s stable than he ever slept in his den. I once escaped hanging by coolly walking into a jail. There stands Masada!” and he pointed to what looked to me a heap of black clouds gathered on the mountain’s brow.

“Not a soul that you have left alive there will dream of your being within a stone’s throw. The copse is thick enough to hide a man from everything but a creditor, an evil conscience, or a wife; stir out of it, and they are on your heels. I dislike them so heartily that I hope never to have the honor of their attendance. But you are not mad enough to think of trying them again?”

“Mad fellow!” I exclaimed, “you forget in whose presence you are.”

He continued making some new arrangement of the bandages on his patient’s wounds, and without taking the slightest notice of my displeasure, cheered his work with a song.

“Mad or wise,” said I in soliloquy, “I shall lie in the ditch of that fortress, or in its citadel, before next sunrise.”

“You may lie in both,” said the beggar, pursuing his occupation and his song. “Mad! Why not?—all the world is in the same way. The Emperor is mad enough to stay where men have hands and knives. His people are mad enough to let their throats be cut by him. Florus is mad enough to sleep another night in Palestine. You are mad enough to attack his garrison; and I—am mad enough to go along with you.”

“You are a singular being. But will you hazard your neck for nothing?”

[Sidenote: The Importance of a Letter]

“Custom makes everything easy,” observed he, spanning his muscular neck with his hand; “I have been so many years within sight of the cord, and all other expeditious modes of paying the only debt I ever intend to pay, and that only because it is the last, that I care as little about the venture as any broken gambler about his last coin. Well then, my plan is this: I must get into the town; you must gather your troop without noise and be ready for my signal, a light from one of the towers. A false attack must be made on the gates, a true attack must be made by the portcullis, which, if it be not stopped up, I will unlock; and your highness may eat your next supper off the governor’s plate. There’s a plan for you! I should have been a general. But merit—aye, there’s the rub—merit is like the camel’s lading: it stops him at the gate, while the empty slip in. It is like putting wings upon one’s shoulders, when the race is to be run upon the ground. Too much brain in a man is like too much bend in a bow; the bow either breaks, or sends the arrow a mile beyond the mark. Genius, my prince, is——”

I interrupted the general in his progress into the philosopher, and demanded whether the renewed vigilance of the fortress would not require some additional expedient for his entry. He struck his forehead; the thought came, as the flint gives its spark, and he produced a highly ornamented tablet.

“This,” said he, “I ought to employ in your service, for if you had not knocked down the tribune I could never have picked it up. In making my run over the mountain, I struck upon his correspondence. Oh! the curse of curiosity! if I had not stopped to delight myself with the whole scandal of Rome, I should have been here in time. But I lingered, lost an hour in laughing, and when I set out in the dusk lost my way, for the first time in my life. Before setting off, however, I wrote a letter, ridiculing Florus in all points, burlesquing the people about him, scoffing at everybody in the most heroic style; and having subscribed the name of the unlucky tribune, addressed it to one of the most notorious personages in all Italy, and placed it where it is sure to be seen, and as sure to be carried to the most noble of procurators. Now could I not begin a correspondence with the governor, and act the courier myself? Yet, to hit upon the subject——” He paused.

The letter that I had found occurred to me. I showed it to our adroit friend. He was in ecstasies. He kissed it over and over, and played some of those antics which had already made me almost half doubt his sanity. He flung away the tablet.

[Sidenote: The Beggar’s Confidence]

“Go,” said he; “fiction is a fine thing in its way. But give me fact when I want to entrap a great man. He is so little used to truth that the least atom of it is a spell; the fresh bait will carry the largest hook. Aye, this is the letter for us; it has the sincerity of the sex, when they are determined to jilt a man; its abuse will cover me from top to toe with the cloak of a true ambassador.”

“But the unpopularity of your credentials,” said I laughingly.

“Let the potentate by whom they are sent settle that affair with the potentate by whom they are received,” replied he.

“You will be hanged.”

“I shall first get in.”