CHAPTER XXXV

_The Lapse of Years_

[Sidenote: In a Dungeon]

In that dungeon I lay for two years![37] How I lived, or how I bore existence, I can now have no conception. I was not mad, nor altogether insensible to things about me, nor even without occasional inclination for the common objects of our being. I used to look for the glimmer of daylight that was suffered to enter my cell. The reflection of the moon in a pool, of which, by climbing to the loophole, I could gain a glimpse, was waited for with some feeble feeling of pleasure, but my animal appetites were more fully alive than ever. An hour’s delay of the miserable provision that was thrown through my bars made me wretched. I devoured it like a wild beast, and then longed through the dreary hours for its coming again!

I made no attempt to escape. I dragged myself once to the entrance of the dungeon, found it secured by an iron door, and never tried it again. If every bar had been broken, I scarcely know whether I should have attempted to pass it. Even in my more reasoning hours, I felt no desire to move. Destiny was upon me. My doom was marked in characters which nothing but blindness could fail to read; and to struggle with fate, what was it but to prepare for new misfortune?

[Sidenote: The Prince of Naphtali is Free]

The memory of my wife and children sometimes broke through the icy apathy with which I labored to encrust my mind. Tears flowed; nature stung my heart; I groaned, and made the vault ring with the cries of the exile from earth and heaven. But this passed away, and I was again the self-divorced man, without a tie to bind him to transitory things. I heard the thunder and the winds; the lightnings sometimes startled me from my savage sleep. But what were they to me! I was dreadfully secure from the fiercest rage of nature. There were nights when I conceived that I could distinguish the roarings of the ocean, and, shuddering, seemed to hear the cries of drowning men. But those, too, passed away. I swept remembrance from my mind, and felt a sort of vague enjoyment in the effort to defy the last power of evil. Cold, heat, hunger, waking, sleep, were the calendar of my year, the only points in which I was sensible of existence; I felt like some of those torpid animals which, buried in stones from the creation, live on until the creation shall be no more.

But this sullenness was only for the waking hour; night had its old, implacable dominion over me; full of vivid misery, crowded with the bitter-sweet of memory, I wandered free among those forms in which my spirit had found matchless loveliness. Then the cruel caprice of fancy would sting me; in the very concord of enchanting sounds there would come a funereal voice; in the circle of the happy, I was appalled by some hideous visage uttering words of mystery. A spectral form would hang upon my steps and tell me that I was undone.

From one of those miserable slumbers I was roused by a voice pronouncing my name. I at first confounded it with the wanderings of sleep. But a chilling touch upon my forehead completely aroused me. It was night, yet my eyes, accustomed to darkness, gradually discovered the first intruder who ever stood within my living grave; nothing human could look more like the dead. A breathing skeleton stood before me. The skin clung to his bones; misery was in every feature; the voice was scarcely above a whisper.

“Rise,” said this wretched being, “prince of Naphtali, you are free; follow me.”

Strange thoughts were in the words. Was this indeed the universal summoner—the being whom the prosperous dread, but the wretched love? Had the King of Terrors stood before me I could not have gazed on him with more wonder.

“Rise,” said the voice impatiently; “we have but an hour till daybreak, and you must escape now or never.”

[Sidenote: Freedom Foiled]

The sound of freedom scattered my apathy. The world opened upon my heart; country, friends, children were in the world, and I started up with the feeling of one to whom life is given on the scaffold.

My guide hurried forward through the winding way to the door. He stopped; I heard him utter a groan, strike fiercely against the bars, and fall. I found him lying at the threshold without speech or motion; carried him back, and, by the help of the cruse of water left to moisten my solitary meal, restored him to his senses.

“The wind,” said he, “must have closed the door, and we are destined to die together. So be it; with neither of us can the struggle be long. Farewell!”

He flung himself upon his face. A noise of some heavy instrument roused us both. He listened, and said: “There is hope still. The slave who let me in is forcing the door.” We rushed to assist him, and tugged and tore at the massive stones in which the hinges were fixed, but found our utmost strength as ineffectual as an infant’s. The slave now cried out that he must give up the attempt, that day was breaking and the guard was at hand. We implored him to try once more. By a violent effort he drove his crowbar through one of the panels; the gleam of light gave us courage, and with our united strength we heaved at the joints, which were evidently loosening. In the midst of our work the slave fled, and I heard a plunge into the pool beneath.

“He has perished,” said my companion. “The door is on the face of a precipice. He has fallen, in the attempt to escape, and we are now finally undone.”

The guard, disturbed by the noise, arrived, and in the depths of our cell we heard the day spent in making the impassable barrier firmer than ever.

For some hours my companion lay in that state of exhaustion which I could not distinguish from uneasy slumber, and which I attributed to the fatigue of our common labors. But his groans became so deep that I ventured to rouse him, and even to cheer him with the chances of escape.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Recognizes Jubal]

“I have not slept,” said he; “I shall never sleep again, until the grave gives me that slumber in which the wretched can alone find rest. Escape! No—for months, for years, I have had but one object. I have traversed mountain and sea for it; I have given to it day and night, all that I possessed in the world; I could give no more but my life, and that too I was to give. I stood within sight of that object. But it is snatched from me, and now the sooner I perish the better.” He writhed with mental pain.

“But what cause can you have for being here? You have not fought our tyrants. Who are you?”

“One whom you can never know—a being born to honor and happiness, but who perverted them by pride and revenge, and whose last miserable hope is, that he may die unknown, and without the curses that fall on the traitor and the murderer. Prince of Naphtali, farewell!”

I knew the speaker in those words of wo. I cried out: “Jubal, my friend, my kinsman, my hero! Is it you, then, who have risked your life to save me?”

I threw myself beside him. He crept from me. I caught his meager hand; I adjured him to live and hope.

He started away wildly. “Touch me not; I am unfit to live. I—I have been your ruin, and yet He who knows the heart, knows that I alone am not to blame. I was a dupe to furious passions, the victim of evil counselors, the prey of disease of mind. On my crimes may Heaven have mercy! They are beyond the forgiveness of man.”

By the feeble light, which showed scarcely more than the wretchedness of my dungeon, I made some little preparations for the refreshment of this feverish and famished being. His story agitated him, and strongly awakened as my curiosity was, I forbore all question. But it lay a burden on his mind, and I suffered him to make his confession.

[Sidenote: Jubal’s Explanation]

“I loved Salome,” said he; “but I was so secure of acceptance, according to the custom of our tribe, that I never conceived the possibility of an obstacle to our marriage. My love and my pride were equally hurt. The new distinctions of her husband made my envy bitterness. To change the scene, I went to Jerusalem. I there found malice active. Your learning and talents had made you obnoxious long before; your new fame and rank turned envy into hatred. Onias, whose dagger you turned from the bosom of the noble Eleazar, remembered his disgrace. He headed the conspiracy against you, and nothing but the heroic vigor with which you stirred up the nation could have saved you long since from the last extremities of faction. My unhappy state of mind threw me into his hands. I was inflamed against you by perpetual calumnies. It was even proposed that I should accuse you before the Sanhedrin of dealing with the powers of darkness. Proofs were offered which my bewildered reason could scarcely resist. I was assailed with subtle argument; stimulated by sights and scenes of strange import, horrid and mysterious displays, which implicate the leaders of Jerusalem deeply in the crime of the idolaters. Spirits, or the semblances of spirits, were raised before my eyes; voices were heard in the depths and in the air, denouncing you, even you, as the enemy of Judea and of man; I was commanded, in the midst of thunders, real or feigned, to destroy you.”

Here his voice sank, his frame quivered; and wrapping his head in his cloak, he remained long silent. To relieve him from his confession, I asked for intelligence of my family and of the country.

“Of your family I can tell you nothing,” said he mournfully; “I shrank from the very mention of their name. During these two years I had but one pursuit—the discovery of your prison. I refused to hear, to think, of other things. I felt that I was dying, and I dreaded to appear before the great tribunal with the groans from your dungeon rising up to stifle my prayers.”

“But is our country still torn by the Roman wolves?”

“The whole land is in tumult.[38] Blood and horror are under every roof from Lebanon to Idumea. The Roman sword is out, and it falls with cruel havoc; but the Jewish dagger pays it home, and the legions quail before the naked valor of the peasantry. Yet what is valor or patriotism to us now? We are in our grave!”

[Sidenote: Another Chance of Escape]

The thought of my family exposed to the miseries of a ferocious war only kindled my eagerness to escape from this den of oblivion. It was evening, and the melancholy moon threw the old feeble gleam on the water which had so long been to me the only mirror of her countenance. I suddenly observed the light darkened by a figure stealing along the edge of the pool. It approached, and the words were whispered: “It is impossible to break open the door from without while the guard is on the watch; but try whether it can not be opened from within.” A crowbar was pushed into the loophole; its bearer, the slave, who had escaped by swimming, jumped down and was gone.

I left Jubal where he lay, lingered at the door till all external sounds ceased, and then made my desperate attempt. I was wasted by confinement, but the mind is force. I labored with furious effort at the mass of bolt and bar, and at length felt it begin to give way. I saw a star, the first for two long years, twinkling through the fracture. Another hour’s labor unfixed the huge hinge, and I felt the night air, cool and fragrant, on my cheek. I now grasped the last bar, and was in the act of forcing it from the wall when the thought of Jubal struck me. There was a struggle of a moment in my mind. To linger now might be to give the guard time to intercept me. I was hungering for liberty. It was to me at that moment what water in the desert is to the dying caravan—the sole assuaging of a frantic thirst, of a fiery and consuming fever of the soul. If the grains of dust under my feet were diamonds, I would have given them to feel myself treading the dewy grass that lay waving on the hillside before me.

A tall shadow passed along. It was that of a mountain shepherd, spear in hand, guarding his flock from the wolves. He stopped at a short distance from the dungeon, and, gazing on the moon, broke out with a rude but sweet voice into song. The melody was wild, a lamentation over the fallen glories of Judea, “whose sun was set, and whose remaining light, sad and holy as the beauty of the moon, must soon decay.” The word freedom mingled in the song, and every note of that solemn strain vibrated to my heart. The shepherd passed along.

[Sidenote: The Ridicule of the Guard]

I tore down the bar and gazed upon the glorious face of heaven. My feet were upon the free ground! I returned hastily to the cell and told Jubal the glad tidings, but he heard me not. To abandon him there was to give him up to inevitable death, either by the swords of the guard or by the less merciful infliction of famine. I carried him on my shoulders to the entrance. A roar of ridicule broke on me at the threshold. The guard stood drawn up in front of the dilapidated door; and the sight of the prisoner entrapped in the very crisis of escape was the true food for ruffian mirth. Staggering under my burden, I yet burst forward, but was received in a circle of leveled spears. Resistance was now desperate; yet even when sunk upon the ground under my burden, I attempted to resist or gather their points in my bosom and perish. But my feeble efforts only raised new scoffing. I was unworthy of Roman steel, and the guard, after amusing themselves with my impotent rage, dragged me within the passage, placed Jubal, who neither spoke nor moved, beside me, blocked up the door, and wished me “better success the next time.”

I spent the remainder of that night in fierce agitation. The apathy, the protecting scorn of external things, that I had nurtured, as other men would nurture happiness, was gone. The glimpse of the sky haunted me; a hundred times in the night I thought that I was treading on the grass; that I felt its refreshing moisture; that the air was breathing balm on my cheek; that the shepherd’s song was still echoing in my ears, and that I saw him pointing to a new way of escape from my inextricable dungeon.

[Sidenote: The Labyrinth]

In one of those half-dreams I flung the crowbar from my hand. A sound followed, like the fall of stones into water. The sound continued. Still stranger echoes followed, which my bewildered fancy turned into all similitudes of earth and ocean—the march of troops, the distant roar of thunder, the dashing of billows, the clamor of battle, boisterous mirth, and the groaning and heaving of masts and rigging in storm. The dungeon was as dark as death, and I felt my way toward the sound. To my surprise, the accidental blow of the bar had loosened a part of the wall and made an orifice large enough to admit the human body. The pale light of morning showed a cavern beyond, narrow and rugged. It branched into a variety of passages, some of them fit for nothing but the fox’s burrow. I returned to the lair of my unhappy companion, and prevailed on him to follow only by the declaration that if he refused I must perish by his side. My scanty provisions were gathered up. I led the way, and, determined never to return to the place of my misery, we set forward to tempt in utter darkness the last chances of famine—pilgrims of the tomb.

We wandered through a fearful labyrinth for a period which utterly exhausted us. Of night and day we had no knowledge. I was sinking, when a low groan struck my ear. I listened pantingly; it came again. It was evidently from some object close beside me. I put forth my hand and pushed in the door of a large cavern; a flash of light illumined the passage. Another step would have plunged us into a pool a thousand feet below.