Sir Charleroy and his consort took up their abode in one of the many deserted ancient stone houses of the city of Bozrah. The latter, situated in one of the most fertile plains of earth, once having upward of one hundred thousand inhabitants, several times having risen to metropolitan splendor, ages ago sank into neglect, decay and desolation. But with wonderful persistence that city preserves the records, or relics, of what it was in better, greater days. The antiquarian to-day finds in and around Bozrah the dwellings, palaces and temples of many and various peoples, some piled in strata-like courses, one above the other, each layer the tombstone of its predecessor; some as fine as they were forty centuries ago. The annalist there has at hand as an open book the achievements of some of the mightiest men of earth, physically. The latter were contemporary with that line of God’s moral giants, of which Abraham, Moses and David were representative leaders first, and Christ finally. The strata of Bozrah tell of differing policies, politics, religions; all alike in one thing—the attempt to build upon the buttresses of giant force; but they present in the end the one result—failure; all being equally dead at the last, if not equally herculean at the first. Sheer robustness in the armies of Rome, the Turk, Alexander, and Og wrought out their best about the Bashan cities, and in that theater played the eternally losing game of all such. It seems as if God had chosen that part of all the world to illustrate this great lesson of His providence. The Roman, Mohammedan, Greek, and others like them, there had their brutal and sensuous existence. There the Crusader carried also his banners; but the end of the Rephaim was the forerunner and prophecy of all the other giantesque gatherings that followed after them. Each passing race and dynasty left its monuments and tokens of possession; but of all, those of the first, the giants, are the most enduring, most wonderful. These dateless, huge, rugged, fort-like dwellings, standing just as they did four thousand years ago, except that they are mostly unoccupied, are impressive monuments and reminders of the mighty denizens who once abode within them. There are ruins of temples, palaces, houses of commerce and places of amusement, but chiefly of homes; the latter, significantly, instructively, being the best preserved of all. Sir Charleroy observed this circumstance, and casually remarked to Rizpah, as they bestowed their effects in one of the ancient domiciles:
“If ever I take to building, I’ll build abiding places for people, only. Such are the most lasting.”
But while he came thus near to a royal truth, he did not make it his own. It passed through his mind and he felt its light, as one might that from the wing of a ministering spirit, while his eyes were holden and his back turned. He immediately left the angelic thought, to go wandering through years of misery, before coming back face to face with it again. Sir Charleroy and Rizpah, a western soldier and a woman of Israel, two giants in their way, began a new career at Bozrah. It was providential. Measuring power by the only available test at hand, namely, what it accomplishes, it was manifest long ago to all that the brawn of the Cyclops was not the master force of the word. Hercules cleansed the earth of mythical, not real evils. Sir Charleroy and Rizpah are fittingly brought to the theater of the giants for the purpose of testing the potency of giantesque sentimentality and stubborn, mighty ardor. To this end, two will do as well as a nation, and a decade will be as conclusive as a score of generations. The husband and wife entered Bozrah gladly, and quickly adapted themselves to their new surroundings. They were both very impressible, and there were many things in their new environments that impressed and stimulated them. Nature’s face and locations may be changed by man, but he can not change her heart. She, on the other hand, is invincible in her conquests of both his face and inner being. Climate and environments determine the characters and careers of the majorities. The sleets of the North, in time, will goad the sensuous Turk or Hottentot to high activity, while the Cossack or Esquimaux, under tropical suns soon fall into luxuriousness and laziness. Bozrah began its molding of the knight and his wife. Rizpah and Sir Charleroy were at first attracted to Giant Land by the hugeness of its monuments and ghostly greatness of its record. They received at Bozrah their first impulse to settle and make a home. Probably they were largely influenced by the conviction that, in its way, there was nothing more entrancing or majestic beyond. For the best results to them, the second selection was altogether unfortunate. They had made their home in the midst of battle-fields, and the atmosphere that hung over all things was like that over a defeated army, sullenly submitting. The new comers from the beginning, in their new home, were immersed in ghostly memories, and that atmosphere so like the breath of a bound yet struggling giant. They were affected more than they realized by all these things.
“No more tours, no more worlds, for us to conquer!” exclaimed the knight.
Rizpah, her cheerfulness of mind largely recovered, replied to this remark of Sir Charleroy with a bantering laugh, at the same time pointing upward. Quickly, and with retort cruel as a giant’s javelin, he cried:
“Alas, so soon Rizpah seeks my final departure from her!”
The cavalier was no more; it was the brusque and gross within him that spoke. Had he been courtly, even without being Christian, he would have been considerate enough not to have cruelly jested concerning that which lay in his wife’s heart as a possible and sad fact. Often the thought of eternal separation from her husband, even from eternal hope, haunted her now. Her husband knew this.
For a moment his answer seemed to stun her; then the affectations of pouting on her mobile face, coming when she pointed upward, changed into lines of anger. A hot flush mounting up to the roots of her hair, hung out the warning signal.
The knight, pretending not to observe the change, twined his arms about his wife and mockingly sighed: