She had been thinking of him only that minute, too. It was strange,
but at this time, each year, his memory, his image came to her, so that
she could say in winter, "On the second moon of spring there will be
flowers, and an air like wine, and the Mediterranean fishers will
overhaul their gear, and I shall think of Samson," and she was the only
person in Philistia who could remember him clearly.
Some old magistrate perhaps, or captain of civic guard might, their
memory jogged, recall the Hebrew rebel, and say: "Wasn't there a Samson
once, a great red-bearded man, who was supposed to have killed a lion
with his bare hands? Or perhaps I am thinking of some of the black
African giants, wrestlers or circus men. I don't know. But I seem to
recall the name."
And about him, among his own people, had arisen a great myth, as will
arise among desert peoples and they telling stories by the fire. The
old guerilla captain had become a national hero to them, and they had
magnified his raids out of all proportion to reality.
And when they thought in the desert tents of the destiny of their
people, and longed for the day when the then rich southwestern country
would be theirs by either conquest or penetration, they said, "If
Samson had lived... If Samson had n't gone wrong..."
And Delilah they cursed bitterly, even after twenty years, and they saw
her not as Samson's wife, but as some strange perfumed woman who had
enticed him and sold him to his enemies. Even the little children were
taught to curse her. And all she had done was to adore him, and love
him, and to care for and pity him when he had grown old and blind and
astray in the head.
Oh well, what did it matter what they said!
Three men there had been in her life: her childhood's sweetheart in her
native valley of Sorek, the slim lad who was to have married her and
settled down in the valley to lead the idyllic life of country lovers.
But he had gone to Egypt, and been infested with ambition, and they had
grown apart and never married. And now in Egypt he was a suave
administrator, very close to the Pharoah, a great man.
And there had been Samson.
And there was her present husband, small, hawk-eyed, taciturn, the
greatest of the Oriental sea-captains, who knew the Mediterranean as
other men knew the lake of Galilee, who had passed through the straits
known to the Greeks as the pillars of Hercules, and been north to
Ibernia, the land of forests and savage, hairy Celts, and bearded druid
priests with sinister eyes, and to other lands where the Phoenicians
had great tin mines. A quiet, efficient man, he!
To her husband she gave admiration and a fond devotion. To the boy of
her youth she had given her heart in a burst of virginal music. But to
the rough Hebrew rebel, a stranger to her race, in religion, in every
mode of life, she had given an immensity of love....