CHAPTER V

GLAD TIDINGS

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The eye of Calchas did indeed brighten, and his colour went and came when food was placed before him in the Roman general’s tent. It was with a strong effort that he controlled and stifled the cravings of hunger, never so painful as when the body has been brought down by slow degrees to exist on the smallest possible quantity of nourishment. It was long since a full meal had been spread even on Eleazar’s table; and the sufferings from famine of the poorer classes in Jerusalem had reached a pitch unheard‐of in the history of nations. Licinius could not but admire the self‐control with which his guest partook of his hospitality. The old man was resolved not to betray, in his own person, the straits of the besieged. It was a staunch and soldierlike sentiment to which the Roman was keenly alive, and Licinius turned his back upon his charge, affecting to give long directions to some of his centurions from the tent‐door, in order to afford Calchas the opportunity of satisfying his hunger unobserved.

After a while, the general seated himself inside, courteously desiring his guest to do the same. A decurion, with his spearmen, stood at the entrance, under the standard where the eagles of the Tenth Legion hovered over his shining crest. The sun was blazing fiercely down on the white lines of canvas that stretched in long perspective on every side, and flashing back at stated intervals from shield, and helm, and breastplate, piled in exact array at each tent‐door. It was too early in the year for the crackling locust; and every trace of life, as of vegetation, had disappeared from the parched surface of the soil, burnished and slippery with the intense heat. It was an hour of lassitude and repose even in the beleaguering camp, and scarce a sound broke the drowsy stillness of noon, save the stamp and snort of a tethered steed, or the scream of an ill‐ tempered mule. Scorched without, and stifled within, even the well‐ disciplined legionary loathed his canvas shelter; longing, yearning vainly in his day‐dreams for the breeze of cool Præneste, and the shades of darkling Tibur, and the north wind blowing through the holm‐oaks off the crest of the snowy Apennines.

In the general’s pavilion the awning had been raised a cubit from the ground, to admit what little air there was, so faint as scarce to stir the fringe upon his tunic. Against the pole that propped the soldier’s home, rested a mule’s pack‐saddle, and a spare breastplate. On the wooden frame which served him for a bed, lay the general’s tablets, and a sketch of the Tower of Antonia. A simple earthenware dish contained the food offered to his guest, and, like the coarse clay vessel into which a wineskin had been poured, was nearly empty. Licinius sat with his helmet off, but otherwise completely armed. Calchas, robed in his long dark mantle, fixed his mild eye steadily on his host.

The man of war and the man of peace seemed to have some engrossing thought, some all‐important interest in common. For a while they conversed on light and trivial topics, the discipline of the camp, the fertility of Syria, the distance from Rome, and the different regions in which her armies fought and conquered. Then Licinius broke through his reserve, and spoke out freely to his guest.

“You have a hero,” said the Roman, “in your ranks, of whom I would fain learn something, loving him as I do like a son. Our men call him the Yellow Hostage; and there is not a warrior among all the brave champions of Jerusalem whom they regard with such admiration and dread. I myself saw him but yesterday save your whole army from destruction beneath the walls.”

“It is Esca!” exclaimed Calchas. “Esca, once a chief in Britain, and afterwards your slave in Rome.”

“The same,” answered Licinius; “and, though a slave, the noblest and the bravest of men. A chief, you say, in Britain. What know you of him? He never told me who he was, or whence he came.”

“I know him,” replied Calchas, “as one who lives with us like a kinsman, who takes his share of hardship, and far more than his share of danger, as though he were a very chief in Israel—who is to me, indeed, and those dearest to me, far more precious than a son. We escaped together from Rome—my brother, my brother’s child, and this young Briton. Many a night on the smooth Ægean has he told me of his infancy, his youth, his manhood, the defence his people made against your soldiers, the cruel stratagems by which they were foiled and overcome, how nobly he himself had braved the legions; and yet how the first lessons he learned in childhood were to feel kindly for the invader, how the first accents his mother taught him were in the Roman tongue.”

“It is strange,” observed Licinius, musing deeply, and answering, as it seemed, his own thought. “Strange lesson for one of that nation to learn. Strange, too, that fate seems to have posted him continually in arms against the conqueror.”

“They were his mother’s lessons,” resumed Calchas; “and that mother he has not forgotten even to‐day. He loves to speak of her as though she could see him still. And who shall say she cannot? He loves to tell of her stately form, her fond eyes, and her gentle brow, with its lines of thought and care. He says she had some deep sorrow in her youth, which her child suspected, but of which she never spoke. It taught her to be kind and patient with all; it made her none the less loving for her boy. Ay, ’tis the same tale in every nation and under every sky. The garment has not yet been woven in which the black hank of sin and sorrow does not cross and recross throughout the whole web. She had her burden to bear, and so has Esca, and so hast thou, great Roman commander, one of the conquerors of the earth; and so have I, but I know where to lay mine down, and rest in peace.”

“They are a noble race, these women of Britain,” said Licinius, following out the thread of his own thoughts with a heavy heart, on which one of them had impressed her image so deeply, that while it beat, a memory would reign there, as it had reigned already for years, undisturbed by a living rival. “And so the boy loves to talk of his childhood, and his lost mother—lost,” he added bitterly, “surely lost, because so loved!”

“Even so,” replied Calchas; “and deep as was the child’s grief, it carried a sharper sting from the manner of her death. Too young to bear arms, he had seen his father hurry away at the head of his tribe to meet the Roman legions. His father, a fierce, imperious warrior, of whom he knew but little, and whom he would have dreaded rather than loved, had the boy dreaded anything on earth. His mother lay on a bed of sickness; and even the child felt a nameless fear on her account, that forbade him to leave her side. With pain and difficulty they moved her on her litter to a fastness in their deep, tangled forests, where the Britons made a last stand. Then certain long‐bearded priests took him by force from his mother’s side, and hid him away in a cavern, because he was a chief’s son. He can recall now the pale face and the loving eyes, turned on him in a last look, as he was borne off struggling and fighting like a young wolf‐ cub. From his cavern he heard plainly the shouts of battle and the very clash of steel; but he heeded them not, for a vague and sickening dread had come over him that he should see his mother no more. It was even so. They hurried the child from his refuge by night. They never halted till the sun had risen and set again. Then they spoke to him with kind, soothing words; but when he turned from them, and called for his mother, they told him she was dead. They had not even paid her the last tribute of respect. While they closed her eyes, the legions had already forced their rude defences; her few attendants fled for their lives, and the high‐born Guenebra was left in the lonely hut wherein she died, to the mercy of the conquerors.”

When Calchas ceased speaking, he saw that his listener had turned ghastly pale, and that the sweat was standing on his brow. His strong frame, too, shook till his armour rattled. He rose and crossed to the tent‐door as if for air, then turned to his guest, and spoke in a low but steady voice—

“I knew it,” said he—“I knew it must be so; this Esca is the son of one whom I met in my youth, and why should I be ashamed to confess it? whose influence has pervaded my whole life. I am old and grey now. Look at me; what have such as I to do with the foolish hopes and fears that quicken the young fresh heart, and flush the unwrinkled cheek? But now, to‐day, I tell thee, warworn and saddened as I am, it seems to me that the cup of life has been but offered, and dashed cruelly away ere it had so much as cooled my thirsty lips. Why should I have known happiness, only to be mocked by its want? What! thou hast a human heart? Thou art a brave man, too, though thy robes denote a vocation of peace, else thou hadst not been here to‐day in the heart of an enemy’s camp. Need I tell thee, that when I entered that rude hut in the Briton’s stronghold, and saw all I loved on earth stretched cold and inanimate on her litter at my feet, had I not been a soldier of Rome my own good sword had been my consolation, and I had fallen by her there, to be laid in the same grave; and now I shall never see her more!” He passed his hand across his face, and added, in a broken whisper, “Never more! never more!”

“You cannot think so. You cannot believe in such utter desolation,” exclaimed Calchas, roused like some old war‐horse by the trumpet sound, as he saw the task assigned him, and recognised yet another traveller on the great road, whom he could guide home.

“Do you think that you or she, or any one of us, were made to suffer, and to cause others suffering—to strive and fail, and long and sorrow, for a little while, only to drop into the grave at last, like an over‐ripe fig from its branch, and be forgotten? Do you think that life is to end for you, or for me, when the one falls in his armour, at the head of the Tenth Legion, pierced by a Jewish javelin, or the other is crucified before the walls for a spy, by Titus, or stoned in the gate for a traitor, by his own countrymen? And this is the fate which may await us both before to‐ morrow’s sun is set. Believe it not, noble Roman! That frame of yours is no more Licinius than is the battered breastplate yonder on the ground, which you have cast aside because it is no longer proof against sword and spear; the man himself leaves his worn‐out robe behind, and goes rejoicing on his journey—the journey that is to lead him to his home elsewhere.”

“And where?” asked the Roman, interested by the earnestness of his guest, and the evident conviction with which he spoke. “Is it the home to which, as our own poets have said, good Æneas, and Tullus, and Ancus have gone before? the home of which some philosophers have dreamed, and at which others laugh—a phantom‐land, a fleeting pageant, impalpable plains beyond a shadowy river? These are but dreams, the idle visions of men of thought. What have we, who are the men of action, to do with aught but reality?”

“And what is reality?” replied Calchas. “Is it without or within? Look from your own tent‐door, noble Roman, and behold the glorious array that meets your eye—the even camp, the crested legionaries, the eagles, the trophies, and the piles of arms. Beyond, the towers and pinnacles of Jerusalem, and the white dome of the Temple with its dazzling roof of gold. Far away, the purple hills of Moab looking over the plains of the Dead Sea. It is a world of beautiful reality. There cometh a flash from a thunder‐cloud or an arrow off the wall, and your life is spared, but your eyesight is gone: which is the reality now, the light or the darkness? the wide expanse of glittering sunshine, or the smarting pain and the black night within? So is it with life and death. Titus in his golden armour, Vespasian on the throne of the Cæsars, that stalwart soldier leaning yonder on his spear, or the wasted captive dying for hunger in the town—are they beings of the same kind? and why are their shares so unequal in the common lot? Because it matters so little what may be the different illusions that deceive us now, when all may attain equally to the same reality at last.”

Licinius pondered for a few minutes ere he replied. Like many another thinking heathen, he had often speculated on the great question which forces itself at times on every reflective being, “Why are these things so?” He, too, had been struck ere now with the obvious discrepancy between man’s aspirations and his efforts—the unaccountable caprices of fortune, the apparent injustice of fate. He had begun life in the bold confidence of an energetic character, believing all things possible to the resolute strength and courage of manhood. When he failed, he blamed himself with something of contempt; when he succeeded, he gathered fresh confidence in his own powers and in the truth of his theories. But in the pride of youth and happiness, sorrow took him by the hand, and taught him the bitter lesson that it is good to learn early rather than late; because, until the plough has passed over it, there can be no real fertility, no healthy produce on the untilled soil. The deeper they are scored, the heavier is the harvest from these furrows of the heart. Licinius, in the prime of life, and on the pinnacle of success, became a thoughtful, because a lonely and disappointed, man. He saw the complications around him; he acknowledged his inability to comprehend them. While others thought him so strong and self‐reliant, he knew his own weakness and his own need; the broken spirit was humble and docile as a child’s.

“There must be a _reason_ for everything,” he exclaimed at last; “there must be a clue in the labyrinth, if a man’s hand could only find it. What is truth? say our philosophers. Oh, that I did but know!”

Then, in the warlike tent, in the heart of the conquering army, the Jew imparted to the Roman that precious wisdom to which all other learning is but an entrance and a path. Under the very shadow of the eagles that were gathered to devastate his city, the man to whom all vicissitudes were alike, to whom all was good, because he knew “what was truth,” showed to his brother, whose sword was even then sharpened for the destruction of his people, that talisman which gave him the mastery over all created things: which made him superior to hunger and thirst, pain and sorrow, insult, dishonour, and death. It is something, even in this world, to wear a suit of impenetrable armour, such as is provided for the weakest and the lowest who enter the service that requires so little and that grants so much. Licinius listened eagerly, greedily, as a blind man would listen to one who taught him how to recover his sight. Gladdening was the certainty of a future to one who had hitherto lived so mournfully in the past. Fresh and beautiful was the rising edifice of hope to one whose eye was dull with looking on the grey ruins of regret. There was comfort for him, there was encouragement, there was example. When Calchas told, in simple, earnest words, all that he himself had heard and seen of glorious self‐ sacrifice, of infinite compassion, and of priceless ransom, the soldier’s knee was bent, and his eyes were wet with tears.

By the orders of his commander, Licinius conducted his guest back to the Great Gate of Jerusalem with all the customary honours paid to an ambassador from a hostile power. He bore the answer of Titus, granting to the besieged the respite they desired. Placidus had been so far right that the prince’s better judgment condemned the ill‐timed reprieve; but in this, as in many other instances, Titus suffered his clemency to prevail over his experience in Jewish duplicity and his anxiety to terminate the war.