CHAPTER LVII

_Onias, the Enemy of Salathiel_

[Sidenote: Within Sound of Battle]

My new quarters were within the walls of one of those huge country mansions which the pride of our ancestors had built to be the plague of their posterity; for those the enemy chiefly employed for our prisons. Their solid strength defied desultory attack; time made little other impression on them than to picture their walls with innumerable stains; and the man must be a practised prison-breaker who could force his way out of their depths of marble. But if my eyes were useless, my ears had their full indulgence. Every sound of the conflict was heard. The attack was furious, and must have often been close to the walls of my dungeon. The various rallying-cries of the tribes rang through its halls; then a Roman shout, and the heavy charge of the cavalry would roll along until, after an encountering roar and a long clashing of weapons, the tumult passed away, to be rapidly renewed by the obstinate bravery of my unfortunate countrymen.

I felt as a man and a leader must feel during scenes in which he ought to take a part, yet to which he is virtually as dead as the sleeper in the tomb. My life had been activity; my heart was in the cause; I had knowledge, zeal, and strength that might in the chances of battle turn the scale. I even often heard my name among the charging cries of the day. But here I lay within impassable barriers. A thousand times during those miserable hours I measured their height with my eye; then threw myself on the ground, and placing my hands over my ears, labored to exclude thought from my soul.

[Sidenote: The Sons of Chance]

But my fellow prisoners were practical philosophers to a man; untaught in the schools, ’tis true, yet fully trained in that great academy worth all that Philosophy ever dreamed in—experience. In all my wanderings among mankind I never before had so ample an opportunity of studying variety of character. War is the hotbed that urges all our qualities, good and evil, into their broadest luxuriance. The generous become munificent; the mean darken into the villainous; and the rude harden into brutality. The camp is the great inn at which all the dubious qualities set up their rest, and a single campaign perfects the culprit to the height of his profession. There were round me in these immense halls about five hundred profligates, any one of whose histories would have been invaluable to a scorner of human nature.

Among the loose armies of the East those fellows exercised their vocation as regular appendages; often lived in luxury, and sometimes shot up into leaders themselves. But robbery in the Roman armies required master-hands. The temptation was strong, for the legionary was the grand ravager, and like the lion, he left the larger share of the prey to the jackal. Yet justice, inexorable and rapid, was his rule—in all cases but his own; and the jackal, suspected of trespassing within the legitimate distance from the superior savage, ran imminent hazard of being disqualified for all encroachment to come. Three-fourths of my associates had played this perilous game, and its penalties were now awaiting only the first leisure of the troops. Peace, at all times vexatious to their trade, had thus a double disgust for them, and the most patriotic son of Israel could not have taken a more zealous interest in the defeat of the legions.

[Sidenote: A Victim of Ingratitude]

But philosophy still predominated; if hope was at an end, hilarity took its place, and the prison rang with reckless exhibitions of practical glee, riotous songs, and mockeries. In the idleness of the lingering hours the professional talents of those sons of chance were brought into play. The mimic collected his audience, burlesqued the pompous officials of the army, and gathered his pence and plaudits as if he were under the open sky and could call his head his own. The nostrum-vender had his secrets for the cure of every ill, and harangued on the impotence of brand, scourge, and blade, if the patient had but the wisdom to employ his irresistible unguent. The soothsayer sold fate at the lowest price, and fixed the casualties of the next four-and-twenty hours—an easy task with the principal part of his audience. The minstrel chanted the pleasures of a life unencumbered by care or conscience; and the pilferer, with but an hour to live, exercised his trade with an industry proportioned to the shortness of his time.

In the whole gang I met with but one man thoroughly out of spirits. He had obviously been no favorite of fortune, for the human form could scarcely be less indebted to clothing. His swarthy visage was doubly blackened by hunger and exhaustion, and even his voice had a prison sound. Driven away from the joyous groups by the natural repulsion which the careless feel at visages that remind them of trouble, he took refuge in the corner where I lay, tormented by every echo of the battle. Not unwilling to forget the melancholy scenes in which every moment was draining the last blood of my country, I turned to the wretch beside me and asked the cause of his sorrows.

“Ingratitude,” was the reply. “This is a villainous world; a man may spend his life in serving others, and what will he gain in the end? Nothing. There is, for instance, the prince of Damascus wallowing in wealth; yet the greatest rogue under this roof has not a more pitiful stock of honor. Witness his conduct to me. He was out of favor with his uncle, the late prince; was not worth more than the raiment on his limbs, and as likely to finish his days on the gibbet as any of the knot of robbers that helped him to scour the roads about Sidon. In his distress he applied to me. I had driven a handsome share of the free-trade between Egypt and the north, and now and then gave him a handsome price for his booty. The idea of bringing his uncle to terms was out of the question. I named my price; it was allowed to be fair. I made my way into the palace, was exalted to the honors of cupbearer, and on my first night of office gave the old man a cup which cured him of drunkenness forever. And what do you think was my reward?”

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Interest Roused]

“I could name what it ought to have been.”

“You conclude half the old man’s jewels at the least. No; not a stone—not a shekel. I was thrown into chains, and finally kicked out of the city, with a promise, the only one that he will ever keep, that if I venture there again I shall leave it without my head! There’s gratitude! There’s honor for you!

“My next example,” he continued, “was among the Romans. It must be owned that they pay well for secret services. But then, ingratitude infects them from top to toe. I had been three years in their employment, and if I made free with a few of their secrets in favor of others, it was only on the commercial principle of having as many customers as one can supply; still, I helped them to the knowledge of all that was going on.”

He had found a listener, and indulged his recollection; after a variety of events, in which he cheated everybody, he came to one that had some interest for myself.

“At last a showy adventurer changed the scene,” he continued. “Some insult had stirred up his blood, and in revenge he sailed away with the prefect’s galley and set up on his own account. Not a sail, from a shallop to a trireme, could touch the water from the Cyclades to Cyprus without being overhauled by the captain. I was set by the prefect upon his track, and got into his good graces by lending him a little of my information, of which he made such desperate use that the Roman swore my destruction as a traitor. To make up the quarrel I tried a wider game, and was bringing his fleet upon the pirates in their very nest when ill luck came across me. A pair whom to the last hour of my life nothing will persuade me to think anything but demons, sent expressly to do me mischief, spoiled one of the finest inventions that ever came into the head of man.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Becomes a Foil]

“The consequence was that the pirates, instead of being attacked, burned the Roman’s trireme round him, and would have burned himself, if he had not thought a watery end better than a fiery one, leaped overboard, and gone straight to the bottom. The whole blame fell upon me, and my only payment was the cropping of my ears and a declaration, sworn to in the names of Romulus and Remus, that if I ever ventured again within a Roman camp I should not get off so well. Ingratitude again! Never was a man so unfortunate.”

“Quite the contrary. It appears to me that seldom was man so lucky. If one in a hundred would have your tale to tell, not one in a thousand would have lived to tell it.” I had already recognized the Egyptian of the cavern.

“But justice, honor!”

“Say no more about them. Whatever the Romans may be in the matter of justice, your case is an answer to all charges on their mercy.”

He looked at me with a ghastly grimace, and as he threw back the long and squalid locks that covered his countenance, showed what beggary had done to the sleek features of the once superbly clothed and jeweled sea-rover.

“But what,” said I, “threw a man of your virtue among such a gang of caitiffs as are here?”

“Another instance of ingratitude. I had been for twenty years connected with one of the leading men of Jerusalem, and I will say that in my experience of mankind I have known no individual less perplexed with weakness of conscience. He had a difficult game to play between the Romans, whom he served privately, the Jews, whom he served publicly, and himself, whom he served with at least as much zeal as either of his employers. The times were made for the success of a man who has his eyes open and suffers neither the fear of anything on earth nor the hope of anything after it to shut them. He succeeded accordingly; got rid of some rivals by the dagger; sent others to the dungeon; bribed where money would answer his purpose; threatened where threats would be current coin; and by the practise of those natural means of rising in public affairs, became the hope of a faction. But on his glory there was one cloud—the prince of Naphtali!”

[Sidenote: Onias and His Rival]

I listened attentively. I had deeply known the early hostility of Onias, but his devices were too tortuous for me to trace, and until the past night I had lost sight of him for years. I asked what cause of bitterness existed between those personages.

“A hundred, as generally happens where the imagination becomes a party and the accuser is the judge. The prince in his youth and before he attained his rank had the insolence to fall in love with the woman marked by Onias for his own. He had the additional insolence to win her; and the completion of his crimes was marriage. Onias thenceforth swore his ruin. Public convulsions put off the promise, and while he was driven to his last struggle to keep himself among the living, he had the angry indulgence of seeing the young husband shoot up without any trouble into rank, wealth, and renown.”

“But has not time blunted his hostility?” I asked.

“Time, as the proverb goes, blunts nothing but a man’s wit, his teeth, and his good intentions,” said the knave, with a sneer on his grim visage. “The next half of the proverb is that it sharpens wine, women, and wickedness. What Onias may have been doing of late I can only guess; but unless he is changed by miracle, he has been dealing in every villainous contrivance from subornation to sorcery. I had my own affairs to mind. But unless Satan owes him a grudge, he is now not far from his revenge.”

I thought of our meeting at the city gates, and alarmed at the chance of his discovering my family, anxiously asked whether Onias had obtained any late knowledge of his rival.

[Sidenote: A Confessor’s Fear]

“Of that I know but little,” said he; “yet quick as his revenge may be, unless my honest employer manages with more temper than usual, he will rue the hour when he set foot on the track of the prince of Naphtali. If ever man possessed the mastery of the spirits that our wizards pretend to raise, the prince is that man. I myself have hunted him for years, yet he always baffled me. I have laid traps for him that nothing in human cunning could have escaped, yet he broke through them as if they were spider’s webs. I saw him sent to the thirstiest lover of blood that ever sat on a throne. Yet he came back, aye, from the very clutch of Nero. I maddened his friends against him, and he contrived to escape even from the malice of his friends, a matter which you will own is among the most memorable. I had him plunged into a dungeon, where I kept him alive for certain reasons, while Onias was to be kept to his bargain by the prisoner’s reappearance. Yet he escaped, and my last intelligence of him is that he is at this moment living in pomp in Jerusalem, the spot where I have been for the last month in close pursuit of him. Time or some marvelous power must have disguised him. And yet if I were to meet him this night——”

“Look on me, slave!” I exclaimed, and grasping him by the throat unsheathed my dagger. “You have found him, and to your cost. Villain! it is to you then that I owe so much misery. Make your peace with Heaven if you can, for it would be a crime to suffer you to leave this spot alive.”

He was dumb with terror. I held him with an iron grasp. The thought that if he escaped me, it must be only to let loose a murderer against my house, made me feel his death an act of justice.

“Let me go,” he at last muttered; “let me live; I am not fit to die. In the name of that Lord whom you worship, spare me!” He fell at my feet in desperate supplication. “You have not heard all; I have abjured your enemy. Spare me and I will swear to pass my days in the desert, never to come again before the face of man; to lie upon the rock, to live upon the weed, to drink of the pool until I sink into the grave!”

I paused in disgust at the abject eagerness for life in a wretch self-condemned! While I held the dagger before him, his senses continued bound up by fear. He gazed on it with an eye that quivered with every quivering of the steel. With one hand he grasped my uplifted arm as he knelt, and with the other gathered his rags round his throat to cover it from the blow. His voice was lost in horrid gaspings; his mouth was wide open and livid. I sheathed the weapon, and his countenance instantly returned into its old grimace. A ghastly smile grew upon it as he now drew from his bosom a small packet.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Hold upon Onias]

“If you had put me to death,” said the wretch, “you would have lost your best friend. This packet contains a correspondence for which Onias would give all that he is worth in the world; and well he might, for the man who has it in his hands has his life. The world is made up of ingratitude. After all my services—slandering here, plundering there, hunting down his opponents in every direction, till they either put themselves out of the world or he saved them the trouble—he had the baseness to throw me off. At the head of his troops he kicked me from his horse’s side, ordering me to be turned loose, ‘to carry my treachery to the Romans, if they should be fools enough to think me worth the hire.’ I took him at his word. I was watching my opportunity to enter Jerusalem and stab him to the heart when I was taken by some of the plunderers that hover round the camp, and am now probably to suffer for the benefit of Roman morality, as a robber and assassin, as soon as the legions shall have murdered every man and robbed every mansion in Jerusalem.”

The packet contained a correspondence of Onias with the Romans. A sensation of triumph glowed through me—I held the fate of my implacable enemy in my hand. I could now, with a word, strike to the earth the being whose artifices and cruelties had waylaid me through life, and the traitor to my country would perish by the same blow that avenged my own wrongs. My nature was made for passion. In love and hatred, in ambition, in revenge, my original spirit knew no bounds. Time, sorrow, and the conviction of my own outcast state had partially softened those hazardous impulses, and I found the value of adversity. Misfortune comes with healing on its wings to the burning temper of the heart, as the tempest comes to the arid soil; it tears up the surface, but softens it for the seeds of the nobler virtues; even in its feeblest work, it cools the withering and devouring heat for a time. I had yet to find with what fatal rapidity the heart gives way to its old overwhelming temptations.

[Sidenote: The Power of Gold]

“I spare your life,” said I, “but on one condition—that you henceforth make Onias the constant object of your vigilance; that you keep him from all injury to me and mine; and that when I shall seize him at last, you shall be forthcoming to give public proof of his treachery.”

“This sounds well,” said the Egyptian as he cast his eyes round the lofty hall, “but it would sound better if we were not on this side of the gate. All the talking in the world will not sink these walls an inch, nor make that gate turn on its hinges, tho for that, and for every other too, there is one master-key. Happy was the time”—and the fellow’s sullen eye lighted up with the joy of knavery—“when I could walk through every cabinet, chamber, and cell from the Emperor’s palace in Rome down to the Emperor’s dungeon in Cæsarea.”

I produced a few coins which I had been enabled to conceal, and flung them into his hand. The sum rekindled life in him; avarice has its enthusiasts as well as superstition. He forgot danger, prison, and even my dagger at the sight of his idol. He turned the coins to the light in all possible ways; he tried them with his teeth; he tasted, he kissed, he pressed them to his bosom. Never was lover more rapturous than this last of human beings at the touch of money in the midst of wretchedness and ruin. His transports taught me a lesson, and in that prison and from that slave of vice I learned long to tremble at the power of gold over the human mind.

It was past midnight and the noise of the criminals round me had already sunk away. The floor was strewn with sleepers, and the only waking figure was the sentinel as he trod wearily along the passages, when the Egyptian, desiring me to feign sleep that his further operations might not be embarrassed, drew himself along the ground toward him. The soldier, a huge Dacian, covered with beard and iron, and going his rounds with the insensibility of a machine, all but trod upon the Egyptian, who lay crouching and writhing before him. I saw the spear lifted up and heard a growl that made me think my envoy’s career at an end in this world. He still lay on the ground, writhing under the sentinel’s foot, as a serpent might under the paw of a lion.

[Sidenote: The Sentinel Bribed]

I was about to spring up and interpose, but his time was not yet come. The spear hung in air, gradually turned its point upward, and finally resumed its seat of peace on the Dacian’s shoulder. That art of persuasion which speaks to the palm and whose language is of all nations had touched the son of Thrace; I heard the sound of the coin on the marble; a few words arranged the details. The sentinel discovered that his vigilance was required in another direction, broke off his customary round, and walked away. The Egyptian turned to me with a triumphant smile on his hideous visage, the gate rolled on its hinge, and he slipped out like a shadow.

At the instant my mind misgave me. I had put the fate of my family into the hands of a slave, destitute of even the pretense of principle. In my eagerness to save, might I not have been delivering them up to their enemy? He had sold Onias to me; might he not make his peace by selling me to Onias? The gate was still open. A few steps would put me beyond bondage. Yet I had come to claim Esther. If I left the camp, what hope was there of my ever seeing this child of my heart again? Would not every hour of my life be embittered by the chance that she might be suffering the miseries of a dungeon, or borne away into a strange land, or dying and calling on her father for help in vain?

Those contending impulses passed through my mind with the speed and almost with the agony of an arrow. The more I thought of the Egyptian, the more I took his treachery for certain. But the present ruin of all predominated over the possible sufferings of one, and with a heart throbbing almost to suffocation and a step scarcely able to move I dragged myself toward the portal.