CHAPTER LV

_Salathiel a Prisoner_

During this period the city presented the turbulent aspect that must result from the concourse of vast warlike multitudes, known only by hereditary bickerings. The clansman of Judah looked down upon every human being; and his countrymen among the rest. The Benjamite retorted it, boasted of the inheritance of Jerusalem, and looked down upon the men of the Galilees as rioters and plunderers. These, too, had their objects of scorn, and the remnants of Dan and Ephraim were held in merciless disdain as the descendants of rebels and idolaters. To deepen those ancient feuds were thrown in the mutual injuries of the factions of John and Simon. Their leaders were now but the shadow of what they had been; yet the memory of their mischiefs survived with a keenness aggravated by the public discovery of the insignificance of the instruments.

Genius in the tyrant offers the consolation that if the chain has galled us, it has been bound by a hand made for supremacy. But the last misery of the slave is to have been bound by a creature even more contemptible than himself; to have given to folly the homage due to talent; to have stooped before the base and trembled under the feeble.

[Sidenote: The Vanity of Conquest]

The obvious alarm of the enemy, who had now totally withdrawn from the plain and were occupied with raising rampart on rampart round their several camps; the triumph over the unfortunate troop; and the excitement of a crowd of pretended prophets and frantic visionaries, filled the populace with every vanity of conquest. The constant exclamation in the streets was: “Let us march to storm the camps and drive the idolater into the sea!” But the new luxuries of the city were too congenial not to act as formidable rivals to the popular ambition. No leader appeared, the boastings passed away, and the boiling temperament of the warrior had time to run into the safer channel of words and wine.

[Sidenote: Sabat’s Wandering]

Still one melancholy reminder was there. Through the wildest festivity, through the groups of drinking, dancing, bravadoing, and quarreling, Sabat the Ishmaelite moved day after day, from dawn till evening, pouring out his sentences of condemnation. Nothing could be more singular or more awful than his figure as the denouncer of ruin hurried along, like a being denuded of all objects in life but the one. The multitude in their most extravagant excesses felt undissembled fear before him. I have seen the most ferocious tumult stilled by the sound of his portentous voice; the dagger instantly sheathed; the head buried in the garment; the form often prostrate until he passed by. Where he went the song of license was dumb; the dance ceased; the cup fell from the hand; and many a lip of violence and blasphemy quivered with long-forgotten prayer.

How he sustained life none could tell. He was reduced to a shadow; his eye had the yellow glare of blindness; his once raven hair was of the whiteness of flax. He was an animated corpse. But he strode onward with a force which, if few attempted to resist, none seemed able to withstand; his gestures were rapid and nervous to an extraordinary degree, and his voice was overwhelming. It had the rush and volume of a powerful blast. Even in the clamor of the day, through the innumerable voices of the streets, it was audible from the remotest quarters of the city. I heard it through the tread and shouts of fifty thousand marching men. But in twilight and silence the eternal “Wo!—wo!—wo!” howled along the air with a sound that told of nothing human.

His unfortunate bride still followed him, never uttering a word, never looking but on him. She glided along with him in his swiftest course, as bound by a spell to wander where he wandered, an unconscious slave; her form almost a shadow; without a sound, a gesture, or a glance—her feet alone moved.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Presentiment of Wo]

I often attempted to render this undone pair some assistance. Sabat recognized me, and returned brief thanks, and perhaps I was the only man in Jerusalem to whom he vouchsafed either thanks or memory. But he uniformly refused aid of every kind, and reproaching himself for the moment given to human recollections, burst away and again began his denunciation of “Wo!—wo!—wo!”

The hope of treaty with the besiegers was now nearly desperate; yet I felt so deeply the ruin that must follow protracted war that I had labored with incessant anxiety to bring the people to a sense of their situation. My name was high; my decided refusal of all command gave me an influence which threw more grasping ambition into the shade; and the leading men of Jerusalem were glad to delegate their power to me, with the double object of relieving themselves from an effort to which they were unequal, and from a responsibility under which even their covetousness had begun to tremble.

But Jerusalem was not to be saved;[50] there was an opposing fatality—an irresistible, intangible power arrayed against all efforts. I felt it at my first step. If I had been treading on a volcano and heard it roar under me, I could not have been made more sensible of the hollowness and hopelessness of every effort to save the nation. In the midst of our most according council some luckless impediment was sure to start up. While we seemed on the verge of conciliating and securing the most important interests, to that verge we were suddenly forbidden all approach. Communications actually commenced with the Roman general, and which promised the most certain results, were broken off, none could tell how. There was an antagonist somewhere, but beyond our grasp; a hostility as powerful, as constant, and as little capable of being counteracted as the hostility of the plague.

After my final conversation with Septimius, I had spent the day in one of those perplexing deliberations, and was returning with a weary heart when, in an obscure street leading into the Upper City, I was roused from my reverie by the sound of one of our mountain songs. Music has been among my chief solaces through existence, and the song of Naphtali in that moment of depression keenly moved me. I stopped to listen in front of the minstrel’s tent, in which a circle of soldiers and shepherds from the Galilees were sitting over their cups. His skill deserved a higher audience. He touched his little harp with elegance to a voice that reminded me of the sportiveness and wild melody of a bird in spring. The moonlight shone through the tent, and as the boy sat under its large white folds in the fantastic dress of his art—a loose vermilion robe, belted with sparkling stones, and turban of yellow silk, that drooped upon his shoulder like a golden pinion—he resembled the Persian pictures of the Peri embosomed in the bell of the lily. The rude and dark-featured listeners round him might well have sat for the swart demons submissive to his will.

But thoughts soon returned that were not to be soothed by music, and throwing some pieces of money to the boy, I hastened on. The departure of the young Roman and the influence that it might have on my family, and peculiarly on the mind of a creature doubly endeared to me by a strange and melancholy similitude to the temper of my own excitable mind, deeply occupied me, and it was even with some presentiment of evil that I reached home.

The first sound that I heard was the lamentation of the old domestics. But I could not wait to solve their unintelligible attempts to explain the disaster. I flew to my family. Miriam was absorbed in profound sorrow; Salome was in loud affliction. Dreading everything that could be told me, yet with that sullen hardihood which long misfortune gives, I took my wife’s hands and in a voice struggling for composure desired her to tell me the worst at once.

[Sidenote: “Esther is Gone!”]

“Esther is gone!” was her answer.

She could articulate no more; the effort to speak this shook her whole frame. But Salome broke out into loud reprobation of the baseness of the wretch who had turned our hospitality into a snare, and whose life, twice saved, was employed only to bring misery on his preserver.

The blow fell upon me with the keenness of a sword.

“Was Esther, was my daughter, my innocent, darling Esther, consenting to this flight?”

“I know not,” said Miriam. “I dare not ask myself the question. If she can have forgotten her duty to follow the stranger; if she can have left her parents—no. It must have been through some horrid artifice. But the thought is too bitter. Raise no more such thoughts in my mind.”

She sank in silence. But Salome was not to be restrained. She asserted the total impossibility of Esther’s having thrown off her allegiance to religion and filial duty.

“She must have been,” said this generous and enthusiastic being, “either subjected to those dreadful arts in which the idolaters deal, or carried away by force. Constantius has gone already in search of her; feeble as he is, he determined to discover the robber, and tho his steps were weak and the effort may hazard his life, he would not be restrained, nor would I restrain him where I should have so much rejoiced to hazard my own.”

I rose to depart. Miriam clung to me.

“Must I lose all, Salathiel?”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Goes to the Rescue]

“I am the guilty one, wife! I should have guarded against this. I alone am to blame. I will recover Esther. Without her we all should be miserable. The Roman general is just. I will demand her of Septimius in his presence. Miriam! you shall see your child. Salome! you shall see your sister. And now, come to my heart—come both; my last hope of happiness, the remnant of all that once promised to fill my declining days with peace and prosperity. Weep no more, Miriam, Salome! I must not be unmanned at this time of trial. Go to your chambers and pray for me. Farewell!”

It was nearly midnight and the city sounds were hushed, except where the crowds, which still poured in, struggled for their quarters. The very fear of being thus disturbed kept up the disturbance of the population, and in the leading avenues the tents showed fierce watchers against this violence sitting round their tables, until wine either sent them to sleep or roused them into daggers-drawing. Subordination was now at an end; plunder and blood were to be dreaded by every man who ventured among those champions of freedom and property; and more than once this night I was compelled to show that I wore a weapon.

Yet the disorder which left the city a seat of dissolute riot was not suffered to interfere with its actual defense. That singular mixture of rabble giddiness and sacred care which distinguished my countrymen above all nations was fully displayed in those final hours, and the walls that enclosed a million of rioters and robbers were guarded with the solemn vigilance of a sanctuary.

No argument could prevail with the peasantry at the gates to let me pass. My rank, and even my public name, went for little in the scale against the possibility of my renewing the treaty with an enemy whom they now scorned, and I was doubting whether I must not lose the night by the reluctance of those rough but honest sentinels, when I was cheered by seeing one of the head men of their tribe arrive. He had been a furious partizan; honor and honesty were his declared worship, and his horror of humbler motives was fierceness itself. This was enough for me. I knew what public vehemence means. I took him aside, without ceremony put gold into his grasp, and saw the gate thrown open before me by the immaculate hand of the patriotic Jonathan.

While I had scarcely congratulated myself on having passed this formidable barrier and was still within the defenses, the trampling of horse echoed on the road. The night was clear, and there was no hope of avoiding them. A large body of Idumean horsemen came on, escorting wagons of provision. The foremost riders were half asleep, and I was in strong hope of eluding them all when one of the drivers, in the wantonness of authority, laid his whip on me. I rashly returned the blow, and the man fell off his horse. I was surrounded, charged with murder; was brought before their chieftain, and found that chieftain Onias!

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Old Enemy]

My old enemy recognized me instantly, and with undying revenge firing every feature demanded whither I was going.

“To the Roman camp,” was the direct answer.

“The purpose?”

“To have an interview with the Roman general.”

“You come deputed by the authorities?”

“By not one of them.”

[Sidenote: The Right of the Stronger]

“I long ago knew you to be a daring fellow, but you exceed my opinion. We can not spare heroes from Jerusalem at this time; you must turn back with us.”

“By what right?”

“By the right of the stronger.”

“With what object?”

“That you may be hanged as a deserter. It will save you the trouble of going to Titus, to be hanged as a spy.”

I disdained reply, and in the midst of a circle of barbarians exulting over their capture, as if they had taken the chief enemy of the state, was marched back to the walls.

There I was not the only person disturbed by the adventure. The first glimpse of me caught by Jonathan exhibited everything that could be ludicrous in the shape of consternation. To the inquiries how I was suffered to pass he answered by an appeal to his “honor,” which he again valued, in my presence too, “as the most invaluable possession of the citizen soldier.” He said the words without a blush, and I even listened to them without a smile. He probably trembled a little for his bribe; but he soon discovered by my look that I considered the money as too far gone to be worth pursuing.

Yet Onias, who seemed to know him as well as I, fixed on him a scrutinizing aspect, of all others the most hateful to a delicate conscience, and his only resource was to heap opprobrium upon me.

“How I had contrived to escape the guard,” said Jonathan, “was totally inconceivable, unless it was by”—I gave him an assuring glance—“by imposing on the credulity of some of the ignorant peasants; possibly even by direct corruption. But to put the matter out of future possibility he would proceed to examine the prisoner’s person.”

He proceeded accordingly, and from my sash took my purse, as a public precaution. He was a vigilant guardian of the state, for the purse was never restored.

Onias looked at him during his harangue with a countenance between contempt and ridicule.

“I must go forward now,” said he; “but, captain, see to your prisoner. He must answer before the council to-morrow, and as you have so worthily disabled him from operations with the guard, your own head is answerable for his safe-keeping.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Confined in a Tower]

My enemy, to make all sure, himself saw me lodged within the tower over the gate, comforted his soul by a parting promise that my time was come, and rode off with his Idumeans—to the boundless satisfaction of the scrupulous and much-alarmed Jonathan.

The tower was massive, and there was no probability that anything less than a Roman battering-ram would ever lay open its solid sides. The captain had recovered his virtue at the instant of my losing my purse, and I now could no more dream of sapping his integrity than of sapping the huge blocks of the tower. Whether I was to be prisoner for the night, or for the siege, or to glut the ax by morning, were questions which lay in the bosom of as implacable a villain as long-delayed revenge ever made malignant; but what was to become of my child, of my family, of my share in the great cause, for which alone life was of value?

The chamber to which I was consigned was at the top of the tower and overlooked a vast extent of country. Before me were the Roman camps, seen clearly in the moonlight, and wrapt in silence, except when the solitary trumpet sounded the watch, or the heavy tread of a troop going its rounds was heard. The city sounds were but the murmurs of the sinking tide of the multitude. The spring was in her glory. The air came fresh and sweet from the fields. All was tranquillity; yet what a mass of destructive power was lying motionless under that tranquillity! Fire, sword, and man were before me—elements of evil that a touch could rouse into tempest, not to be allayed but by torrents of blood and the ruin of empires.