_A Minstrel’s Power of Speech_
[Sidenote: The Flight]
While we traversed the grounds, the heaving of the branches under the
wind, which rose in strong gusts from time to time, and the rush of the
rivulets from the hillsides, which retained the swell of the melting
snows, prevented our hearing other sounds; but when we emerged from this
little forest of every plant that yields fruit or fragrance and began to
climb the surrounding ridge, the sights and sounds to which I had been so
long accustomed broke upon us. To the south a long line of light showed
where Jerusalem was struggling against a midnight assault, and the uproar
of battle came wildly on the wind. The Roman camp-fires blazed round
the promontory Scopas, like the innumerable crevices of a huge volcanic
hill breathing flame from root to summit. But a more immediate peril lay
behind us. The first height from which we could see the palace showed us
the well-known fire-signals of the enemy flaming on its battlements. Our
escape had been discovered. The signals were answered from every point of
the horizon. Where a signal was, there was an enemy’s post; we could not
advance a step without the most imminent chance of seizure, and in those
times, death by the shaft or the sword was the instant consequence. The
signals were followed by the trumpet, and every blast from the palace
roof was answered for miles round.
The whole horizon was alive with enemies, and yet, if in every call
captivity and death had not been the language, this circling echo of the
noblest of all instruments of sound, coming in a thousand various tones
from the varied distances, softened by the dewy softness of the night,
and breathing from sources invisible, as if they were inspired only by
the winds, or poured from the clouds, might have seemed sublime.
[Sidenote: Tracked by Bloodhounds]
But a new alarm rose in the direction of the forest, which now lay
beneath us like a sea slightly silvered on its thousand billows by the
sinking moon. The trampling of cavalry was distinctly heard in pursuit,
and torches were seen rushing through the trees. The pursuit had turned
into the very path by which we came, and the baying of a bloodhound
up the ridge was guiding the cavalry to our inevitable capture if we
remained. I was resolved not to be taken while I could fight or fly, and
pointing out to my fellow fugitives the horsemen, as they scoured the
foot of the hills, I plunged down into a ravine, where I could expect
to find only some torrent too deep for us to pass. But it was at least
protracted fate.
I had given Naomi into the hands of her lover, and while they slowly
descended the precipice, returned to its edge to ascertain whether
the enemy were still upon our steps. The rock toward the summit was
splintered into a number of little pinnacles, grasping one of which, I
clung, listening and gazing with indescribable nervousness. The sounds of
pursuit had perished, or were so mingled with the common sounds of nature
as to be unheard, and I was congratulating myself upon our total safety,
and about to return to the spot where I had left my companions, when the
torch-light shot up from the dell, immediately below me. I gave a hurried
glance along the ravine, but Naomi was not there. A detachment of archers
was climbing over the huge rocks that filled up its depth, and flashing
torches through every hollow where a human being could lie.
To rescue my unfortunate charge was my first resolve, and I began to let
myself down the abrupt side of the hollow before the torches disappeared.
They at last seemed to be completely gone, but as I hung within a few
feet of the path, a growl and a dash at my throat nearly overthrew my
steadiness. I knew that a precipice of immense depth lay underneath, and
in the utter darkness I could have no certainty that my next step might
not carry me over it.
[Sidenote: Victims of the Cross]
My sole expedient was to grasp the rock with one hand and defend myself
to the last with the other. The bloodhound had tracked me, and he flew
again at my throat; but I was now prepared; I caught him in the bound
and whirled him down the ravine. His howl, as he fell from crag to
crag, betrayed me at once. A hundred torches rushed upward. I climbed
the pinnacle, sprang from its top into a pine thicket, and winding over
a long extent of broken ground, gradually lost torches and outcries
together.
After a pause, to consider in what quarter final escape was most
probable, a glimmering light through the thicket at a considerable
distance toward the city determined me. My pursuers must be far behind;
the loss of the bloodhound diminished still more their chance of reaching
my track through a remarkably wild and broken district; and come what
would, whether that light was kindled by friends or enemies, I should see
them before they could discover me. I struggled on until I reached the
base of a ridge, on whose farther side the light gleamed. To ascend it
was beyond my powers, but by gliding along the base I found a crevice,
which, enlarged whether by nature or the human hand, led through the
hill. My way in darkness was brief; I had not gone a third of the
distance when the light shone strongly through the cavern. At its mouth I
stood overwhelmed—I had strayed into the memorable valley of the Crosses!
Thousands of men, besmeared with blood, dust, and clay, half naked,
brandishing weapons still dripping with gore; whirling torches; shouting
out roars of triumph; howling in desperate lamentation; kneeling and
weeping over the dead with the most violent affliction; wrapping
themselves in robes and armor; tearing away their raiment, and flinging
sword and spear into the flames; throwing hundreds of corpses into one
promiscuous burning, round which they danced with furious exultation;
carrying away on litters of lances and branches, corpses that they
seemed to hallow as more than mortal; every strange variety of human
passion, wound up to its wildest height, was pictured before me, and all
was thrown into the most living distinctness by the blaze of an immense
central heap of timber.
[Sidenote: The Last of the Conflict]
The horrid cruelties of the execution had been heard of in Jerusalem, and
the spirit of the people was roused to vengeance. With that imperishable
courage which distinguished them above all nations, a scorn of hazard
that in those unhappy days only urged them to their ruin, they determined
to make the enemy pay in slaughter for the memory of their warriors. A
multitude without a leader, but among whom served with the simple spear
many a leader, poured out from the gates to attack an enemy flushed with
victory, and secured in entrenchments, impregnable to the naked strength
of my unfortunate countrymen. They divided into two armies, one of
which assaulted the lines, while the other marched to the valley of the
Crosses. The assault on the lines was repelled after long and desperate
displays of intrepidity. It was the intelligence of this attack that had
broken up the banquet. The Romans sustained heavy losses in the early
part of the night; their outposts in the plain were sacrificed, and the
chief part of their cantonments burned.
But the “army of vengeance,” a name given to it alike by Jew and Roman,
accomplished its purpose with dreadful retribution. The legionaries
posted to defend the valley were trampled down and destroyed at the
first charge. Troop on troop, sent to extricate them, met with the same
fate. One of the few prisoners described the valley, when his cohort
reached its verge, as having the look of a living whirlpool, a vast and
tempestuous rolling and heaving of infuriate life, into which the attempt
to descend was instant destruction.
“Every cohort that entered it,” said the centurion, “was instantly
engulfed and seen no more. Last night our legion, the fifteenth, lay down
in their tents five thousand strong; to-night there are not ten of us on
the face of the earth.”
The conflict was long, and the last of the enemy were under the Jewish
sword when I reached the mouth of the fissure. But in the first intervals
of the struggle, the remains of our tortured people had been taken down
from the accursed tree, tended with solemn sorrow, and given up to their
relatives and friends to be borne back to Jerusalem. The crosses were
thrown into a heap and set on fire; the fallen legionaries underwent the
last indignities that could be inflicted by scorn and rage; and when
even those grew weary, were flung into the blazing pile.
[Sidenote: Salathiel Burns a Cross]
The fate of the noble Eleazar was still unknown, and to obtain the
certainty of his preservation or to render the last honor to his remains,
I forced my way toward the spot on which I had seen him awaiting death.
But my searches were in vain; the witnesses on both sides were now where
there is no utterance. Guard, executioner, and victim were clay; the
battle had raged chiefly round that spot, and the ground, trampled and
deep in blood, gave melancholy evidence of the havoc. There were painful
and peculiar signs of the sacrifice that had extinguished the little
group of the converts, and I poured oil and wine upon their hallowed
ashes. A large fragment of a cross still stood erect in the midst of them.
“Was it upon thee, accursed thing,” I exclaimed, “that the life-blood of
my brother was poured? Was it upon thee that the last breath was breathed
in torture from the lips of virtue, heroism, and purity? Never shalt thou
minister again to the cruelty of the monsters that raised thee there.”
Indignantly I tore up the beam, and dragging it to the pile by my single
strength—to the wonder of the crowd, who eagerly offered their help,
but whom I would not suffer to share in this imaginary yet consoling
retribution—I rolled it into the flames amid shouts and rejoicings.
Daybreak was now at hand, and the sounds of the enemy’s movements
made our retreat necessary. We heaped the last Roman corpse on the
pile, covered it with the broken spears, helmets, and cuirasses of the
soldiery, and then left the care of the conflagration to the wind. From
the valley to Jerusalem our way was crowded with the enemy’s posts;
but the keen eye and agile vigor of the Jew eluded or anticipated the
heavy-armed legionaries, by long experience taught to dread the night in
Judea, and we reached the Grand Gate of Zion as the sun was shooting his
first rays on the pinnacles of the Temple.
[Sidenote: The Wild Host]
In those strange and agitated days, when every hour produced some
extraordinary scene, I remember none more extraordinary than that
morning’s marching into the city. It was a triumph, but how unlike all
that bore the name! It was no idle, popular pageant; no fantastic and
studied exhibition of trophies and treasures; no gaudy homage to personal
ambition; no holiday show to amuse the idleness or feed the vanity of
a capital secure in peace and pampered with the habits of opulence
and supremacy. It was at once a rejoicing, a funeral, a great act of
atonement, a popular preservation, and a proud revenge on the proudest of
enemies.
On the night before, not an eye had closed in Jerusalem. The Romans,
quick to turn every change to advantage, had suffered the advance of our
irregular combatants only until they could throw a force between them
and the gates. The assault was made, and with partial success; but the
population, once roused, was terrible to an enemy fighting against walls
and ramparts, and the assailants were, after long slaughter on both
sides, drawn off at the sight of our columns moving from the hills.
We thus marched in unassailed, a host of fifty thousand men, as wild
and strange-looking a host as ever trod to acclamations from voices
unnumbered. Every casement, roof, battlement, and wall in the long range
of magnificent mansions, leading round by the foot of Zion to Mount
Moriah, was crowded with spectators. Man, woman, and child of every rank
were there straining their eyes and voices, and waving hands, weapons,
and banners in honor of their deliverers from the terror of massacre. Our
motley ranks had equipped themselves with the Roman spoils wherever they
could, and among the ragged vestures, discolored turbans, and rude pikes,
moved masses of glittering mail, helmets, and gilded lances. Beside the
torn flags of the tribes, embroidered standards were tossing with the
initial of the Cæsars, or the golden image of some deity, mutilated by
our scorn of the idolater.
[Sidenote: Ester’s Return]
The Jewish trumpets had scarcely sent up their chorus, when it was
followed by the clanging of the Roman cymbal, the long and brilliant tone
of the clarion, or the deep roar of the brass conch and serpent. Close
upon ranks exulting and shouting victory came ranks bearing the honored
dead on litters and bursting into bitter sorrow; then rolled onward
thousands bounding and showing the weapons that they had torn from the
enemy; then passed groups of the priesthood—for they, too, had long taken
the common share in the defense—singing one of the glorious hymns of the
Temple; then again followed litters, surrounded by the wives and children
of the dead, wrapt in inconsolable grief. Bands of warriors, who had
none to care for, the habitual sons of the field; armed women; chained
captives; men covered with the stately dresses of our higher ranks; biers
heaped with corpses; wagons piled with armor, tents, the wounded and the
dead; every diversity of human circumstance, person, and equipment that
belongs to a state in which the elements of society are let loose—in that
march successively moved before the eye. With the men were mingled the
captured horses of the legionaries; the camels and dromedaries of the
allies; herds of the bull and buffalo, droves of goats and sheep; the
whole one mighty mass of misery, rejoicing nakedness, splendor, pride,
humiliation, furious and savage life, and honored and lamented death; the
noblest patriotism and the most hideous abandonment to the excesses of
our nature.
As soon as I could extricate myself from the concourse, I hastened to
appease the anxieties of my family, who had suffered the general terrors
of the night, with the addition of their own stake in my peril and that
of Constantius. My first inquiry was for Esther. To my great delight, she
had returned, but was still in nervous alarm. On the night of her being
led through filial zeal to meet Septimius, she was seized by a party of
armed men and by them conveyed to a dungeon, where questions had been
put to her tending to charge me at once with magic and correspondence
with the enemy. But this persecution ceased, and she found herself as
unexpectedly set at liberty as she had been seized. At the gate of her
prison the minstrel had met her, and through the midst of the city, then
in its fiercest agitation, had with singular dexterity conducted her
safely home.
[Sidenote: A Minstrel’s Acquirements]
A service of this kind was not to go unrewarded, and he had been suffered
to remain under our roof until my return. But by that time he had
made his ground secure by such zealous service and so many graceful
qualities, that even Miriam, sensitive and sagacious as she was, desired
that he should be retained.
From his knowledge of the various dialects of Asia and his means of
unsuspected intercourse, few events could occur of which he had not
obtained some previous knowledge. His adroitness in availing himself of
his knowledge I had already experienced in my escape from the gates, and
it was to him that was due the flight of the negroes. A stray charger,
a mask, and the common juggler’s contrivance of breathing flames, made
up the demon that defrauded the Ethiopian exchequer. But his dexterity
in the arts of elegance and taste was singular; his pencil was dipped in
nature, and the sketches, which he was perpetually making of the wild and
picturesque population that now filled our streets, were incomparable.
He sculptured, he modeled, he wove; he wrought the gold filigree and
chainwork, for which our artists were famous, with a skill that the most
famous of them have envied. His knowledge of languages seemed the natural
result of his wanderings, but it was extraordinarily various and pure.
The dance and song were part of his profession; but from the little
imperfect harp in use among the minstrels he drew tones that none other
had ever delighted me with—sounds of such alternate spirit and sweetness,
such tender and heart-reaching power, that they were like an immediate
communication of mind with mind.
And the charm of those acquirements was enhanced by the graceful
carelessness with which he made his estimate of their value. To my
questions how he could at his age have mastered so many attainments, his
reply was that with his three teachers “everything might be learned;
common sense alone excepted, the peculiar and rarest gift of Providence!
Those three teachers were Necessity, Habit, and Time. At his starting in
life Necessity had told him that, if he hoped to live, he must labor;
Habit had turned the labor into an indulgence; and Time gave every man an
hour for everything unless he chose to sleep it away.”
[Sidenote: Constantius’ Absence]
But he had higher topics, and the sagacity of his views, in a crisis
that was made to shake the wisdom of the wise, often held me in
astonishment. The fate of Constantius deeply perplexed me. He had
now been absent long, and no tidings of him could be heard among the
returning warriors further than that he had joined them in the march to
the valley of the Crosses, had distinguished himself by the intrepidity
of his attack on the legionary guard at the entrance, and was seen for a
short time with a captured standard in his hand leading on the people.
Unable to endure the silent anguish of those round me, silent only
through fear of giving me pain, I had determined on passing the walls
again to seek my brave and unfortunate son among the fallen. But Miriam’s
quick affection detected me, and with weeping prayers she implored
that “I should not risk a life on which hung her own and those of her
children.”
The sound of the lyre came suddenly upon the air, and to dissipate the
cloud that was gathering on my mind, I wandered to a balcony where, in
the evening light and the pleasant breathing of the breeze, the minstrel
was touching the strings to the song that had first attracted me. I flung
my wearied frame on a couch and listened until memory became too keen,
and I waved my hand to him to change the strain. He obeyed, but his heart
was in the harp no more; his touch faltered, the song died away, and he
approached me with a soothingness of voice and manner that none would
have desired to resist.
“My prince,” said he, “you are unhappy, and if your sorrows can be
lightened by any service of mine, why not command me?”
He waited; but I was too much absorbed in gloomy speculation.
“I can pass the gates,” he timidly continued, “if such be my lord’s will.”
I made a sign of dissent, for the enemy, since their late surprise, had
begun to urge the siege with increased vigilance. Yet my anxiety for the
fate of Constantius, and scarcely less for that of Naomi and her lover,
must have been visible.
[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Prejudices]
He still lingered nigh, watching the indications which inward struggle so
forcibly paints upon the external man.
“Prince of Naphtali,” said he in a steadier tone, “among my teachers
I forgot to mention one, and that one the most effective of
all—Self-determination! not the mere disregard of personal risk, but the
intrepidity of the mind. I loved knowledge, and I pursued it without
fear. Nature is boundless, wise, and wonderful—but prejudice bars up the
gate of knowledge. The man who would learn must despise the timidity that
shrinks from wisdom, as he must hate the tyranny of opinion that condemns
its pursuit. Wisdom is like beauty, to be won only by the bold.”
I looked up at the young pronouncer of the oracle. His countenance,
animated by the topic, wore an expression of power, in which I should
never have recognized the delicate and dejected being that he always
appeared, except in some moment of sportiveness, come and gone with the
quickness of lightning.
“Minstrel, apply this to our people or their bigoted and ignorant
leaders. I have no prejudices.”
“All men have them, my prince, and the only distinction is that in some
they are mean, dark, and malignant; in others they are lofty, generous,
and sensitive; yet they are but the stronger for their nobleness. The
mind itself struggles to throw off the vile and naked fetter. But how
many forget the incumbrance of the chain of gold in its preciousness!”
He hesitated, and then, with a still more elevated air, again began:
“You despise, for instance, the little ingenuities of our profession, and
I own that in general they deserve nothing else. But if there were to
come before you some true lover of nature, a disciple of that sublimer
philosophy which holds the secrets of her operations, a master of those
superb influences which rule the frame of things, and yet more, guide the
fates of men and nations—would not your prejudices—and noble ones they
are—lead you to repel the offer of his mysteries?”
[Sidenote: The Minstrel’s Attire]
Thoughts tending to those mysteries had so often occurred to me, and my
mind was by its original constitution so fond of the abstruse and the
wild, that I listened with interest to the romance of philosophy. The
figure before me was not unsuited to the illusion; slight, habited in the
fanciful dress of his art, a tunic of purple cloth, bound round the waist
with a girdle; the turban, a mere band of scarlet silk, lightly laid upon
his curls. There was in all this nothing that was not to be seen at every
hour in the streets, but round his waist, instead of the usual girdle
of the minstrels, he wore to-night a large golden serpent, embossed and
colored with a startling resemblance to life, and a broad golden circlet
wrought with devices of serpents clasping his brow. The countenance was
vividness itself, not without that occasional wandering and touch of
melancholy that showed where early care has been, yet redeeming the gloom
by a smile that had the sweetness and suddenness of the sunbeam across an
April shower.
The evening music of the Roman camps roused me as their ranks were drawn
out for the customary exercise. I turned from them to glance upon the
battlements, that were now crowded with stragglers of the tribes inhaling
the air of the fields and like myself gazing on the movements of the
enemy. The thought pressed on me how soon and how terribly all this must
end; what were the multitudes to be that now lived and breathed beneath
my glance? The thought was too painful. I turned from earth to look upon
the east, where the evening star was lying on a rosy cloud, like a spirit
sent to bring back tidings from this troubled world.
“There, boy,” said I, “will your wisdom tell me the story of that star?
Are its people as mad as we? Is there ambition on one side and folly
on the other? Are their great men the prey of a populace, and their
populace the fools of their great men? Have they orators to inflame
their passions; lawyers to beggar them in pursuit of justice; traders,
to cheat them; heroes, to give them laurels at the price of blood; and
philosophers, to be the worst plagues among them?”
[Sidenote: The Rulers of the Empire]
“Even that knowledge,” said the minstrel, “may not be beyond the flight
of the human intellect; but prejudices must be first overcome; we must
learn to scorn idle names, defy idle fears, and use the powers of nature
to give us the mastery of nature! There are virtues in plants, in
metals, even in words, that to seek, alarms the feeble, but to possess,
constitutes the mighty. There are influences of the air, of the stars, of
even the most neglected and despised things, that may be gifted to confer
the sovereignty of mankind.”
I listened with the passive indulgence of one listening under a spell;
his voice had the sweetness and the flow of song, and his language was
made impressive by gestures of striking intelligence and beauty. He
pointed to the skies, to the flowers, to the horizon, that glowed like an
ocean of amber; and his fine countenance assumed a changing character of
loftiness, loveliness, or repose as he gazed on the sublime or the serene.
“Boy,” said I faintly, “are not such the studies by which the pagan world
is made evil?”
He smiled. “No! Light is not further from darkness than wisdom from the
superstition of the pagan. Rome is filled with the madness that falls
upon idolatry for its curse—that has fallen since the beginning of the
world—that shall fall until its end. She is the slave of ghostly fear.
This hour, among the proudest, boldest, wisest, within the borders of
paganism, there lives not a man unenslaved by the lowest delusion. The
soothsayer, the interpreter of dreams, the sacrificer, the seller of the
dust of the dead, the miserable pretender to magic—those are the true
rulers of the haughty empire—those are the scepter-bearers to whom the
Emperor is a menial—those are the men of might who laugh at authority,
set counsel at naught, and are sapping the foundations of the state, were
they deep as the center, by sapping the vigor of the national mind.”
[Sidenote: The King of Metals]
While he spoke he was with apparent unconsciousness sketching some
outlines on one of the large marble slabs of the wall. My eyes had
followed the sun until the balcony, darkened by an old vine, was in the
depth of twilight. To my surprise, the marble began to be covered with
fire, but fire of the softest and most silvery hue. The surprise was
increased by seeing this glowworm luster kindle into form. I saw the
portrait of Constantius, and by his side Naomi and her lover. As the
lines grew clearer still, I saw them in chains and in a dungeon! The
extraordinary information which the minstrel had the means of obtaining
made me demand in real alarm whether the picture told the truth, and that
if it did, I should be instantly acquainted with whatever might enable me
to save them.
“And trifles like those fires can excite your astonishment?” he replied;
“what if I were to tell you of wonders such as it has not entered into
the mind of the world to imagine, yet which are before us in every hour
of our lives, are mingled with everything, are grasped in our insensate
hands, are trodden by our careless feet? See these crystals”—he scraped
a portion of the niter exuding from the wall—“in these is hidden a power
to which the strength of man is but air—to which the bulwarks round
us are but as the leaf on the breeze—at whose command armies shall
vanish, mountains shake, empires perish—the whole face of society shall
change; yet by a sublime contradiction, combining the greatest evil with
the greatest good—the most lavish waste of life with the most signal
provision for human security!”
[Illustration: “Judea must fall!”
[_see page 511._
Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]
[Sidenote: The Supremacy of Man]
“Look on this metal,” said he, pointing to some of the leaden ornaments
of the balcony, “and think what is the worth of human judgment. Who
would give the pearl or the diamond, the silver or the gold, for this
discolored dross? Yet here is the king of metals—the king of earth;
for it can create, subdue, and rule all that earth produces of power.
Within this dross are treasures hidden, more than earth could buy—truth,
knowledge, and freedom. It can give the dead a new life and the living
a new immortality. It can sink the haughtiest usurper that ever sinned
against man into the lowest scorn. It can raise the humblest son of
obscurity into preeminence, and even without breaking in upon the
seclusion that he loves, set him forth to every future age crowned with
involuntary glory. It can flash light upon the darkest corners of the
earth—light never to be extinguished. It can civilize the barbarian; it
can pour perpetual increase of happiness, strength, and liberty round
the civilized. It can make feet for itself that walk through the dungeon
walls; wings that the uttermost limits of the world can not weary; eyes
to which the darkest concealments of evil are naked as the day; intellect
that darts through the universe and solves the mightiest secrets of
nature and of mind! But in it, too, is a fearful power of ruin.”
He gazed on me with a glance that seemed to shoot fire.
“Holding the keys of opulence and empire,” he continued, “it can raise
men and nations to the most dazzling height—but it can stain, delude, and
madden them until they become a worse than pestilence to human nature.”
While he spoke, his form assumed a grandeur commensurate with his lofty
topics; the power of his voice awoke with the awaking power of his mind.
My faculties succumbed under his presence, and I could only exclaim:
“More of those wonders; give me more of those noble evidences of the
supremacy of man!”
“Man!” said my strange enlightener; “look upon him as he is, and what
more helpless thing moves under the canopy of heaven? The prey of folly,
the creature of accident, the sport of nature, the surge whirls him
where it will; the wind scorns his bidding; the storm crushes him; the
lightning smites him. But look upon man when knowledge has touched him
with her scepter.”
The circlet on his brow seemed to quiver and sparkle with inward luster;
the golden serpent that clasped his robe seemed to writhe and revolve.
I felt like one under fascination. A strange sense of danger thrilled
through me, yet mixed with a dreamy and luxurious sense of enjoyment. The
air seemed heavy with fragrance, and I sat listening in powerless homage
to a lip molded by beauty and disdain.
“Man, the sport of nature!” said he, pointing to a bead of dew that hung
glittering on a leaf of the vine. “Say man, the sovereign of nature! With
but so feeble an instrument as this dew-drop he might control and scorn
the wind and the wave! Or would you defy the storm in darkness, without
sun or star speed through the unknown ocean, and add a new world to the
old? Within this fragment lies the secret.”
He struck off a brown splinter from the stone of the balcony.
[Sidenote: Exiled—Desperate—Undone]
“Or would you behold regions to which the stars that now blaze above our
heads are but the portal,” he said; “kingdoms of light never penetrated
by mortal vision; generations of worlds? By what splendid influence,
think you, that the miracle is to be wrought? Even by this dust!”
He took up a few grains of the sand at his feet and poured them into my
robe. He saw his time.
“Would you,” exclaimed he, “be master of those magnificent secrets? Then
bind this girdle round you and invoke the name that I shall name.”
I shuddered; the arts of the diviner flashed upon me. But I had listened
too long not to be enfeebled by the temptation. I felt the passion which
lost us paradise—the thirst of forbidden knowledge. Still I resisted. The
young deceiver pressed me with more distinct promises.
“In your fate,” said he, “the fate of your nation is bound up. Has it not
been declared that a great deliverer is to come, by whom the face of the
enemies of Judah is to be withered, and the scepter of the earth given
to the hand of Israel? Pledge yourself to me and be that deliverer! You
shrink! Know then—that even while I speak, every creature of your blood
is in chains; your house is desolate; your fortunes are overthrown; you
are cut off root and branch; you are exiled—desperate—undone!”
I felt a dreadful certainty that his words were true. My heart bled at
the picture of ruin. I wavered. The temptation tingled through my veins.
“What were the sacrifice of myself,” thought I, “wretched and sentenced
as I was, to the preservation of beings made for happiness? Or was I to
hesitate, let the risk be what it might, when virtue, patriotism, and
boundless knowledge were added to that preservation? For the trivial
honors that man could give to man, the highest intellects of the earth
had been influenced, but the honors of the restorer of Judah were an
immortal theme—the old splendors of triumph were pronounced vain and dim,
the old supremacy of thrones weakness, to the domination and grandeur of
the sovereign who should sway the returning tribes of Zion.”
[Sidenote: Judea Must Fall]
The figure approached me, and in a voice that sank with subtle force
through every nerve pronounced the vow that I was to utter. I was
terror-struck; a cloud came over my sight; strange lights moved and
glittered before me. I felt the unspeakable dread that my faculties
should betray me, and that I should unconsciously yield to a temptation
which yet I had no strength to withstand.
While I sat helpless and almost blind, I was aroused by a majestic voice.
I looked up. Eleazar was at my side. I would have flung myself into
his arms; I would have cast myself at his feet, but an indescribable
sensation told me that my noble brother was to be so approached no more.
“Well and wisely hast thou resisted,” were his solemn words, “for in thee
are the last fortunes of thy people. Judea must fall; but fallen with
her as thou shalt be, and desolate, despairing, and wild as shall be thy
sojourn, the last blow of ruin to both would be given hadst thou yielded
to the adversary.”
I glanced at the minstrel. His visage was horror; he stood deformed, like
one dead in the moment of torture. I closed my eyes against the hideous
spectacle. A sound of hurrying steps made me open them, after how long an
interval I know not. I was alone!