“I do not know. I only know that your strange, wild gaze upon its hideous group terrifies me! For years I’ve learned to feel a mingled disgust and fright in the presence of the woman in that presentment. When I came in, your face looked like hers. You did not seem to be my own tender mother, but an angry virago. Oh, why do you shadow all our Sabbath eves, by this mysterious, cruel staring and moaning before this imagery of death? You’ve made me to dread the approaching Holy Day, promise of all delight to our people, as the advent of all pain to us.”
“Marah, this is wickedness in thee. Thou shouldst learn to wrap thy soul about with the joys thou knowest, and leave all this that thou dost not understand, most likely terrible to thee chiefly because thou dost not understand it, to go its way.”
“I’ve tried and tried for months to reason thus; but how little comfort to be saying over and over, ‘it’s all right,’ ‘it’s nothing,’ to a fear that stops the very beatings of the heart. Oh, that I could fly from this land of desolations. Its loneliness and shadows keep coming and coming around me until I dread, lest they enter my very being and become part of me. I’ve leaned hitherto alone on my mother’s greater strength for rest. If I come to fear her, I’ll lose my reason!”
“Marah,” said the mother, with enforced calmness, “thou art feverish to-day; thou hast wrought too much. Now retire and say this pillow Psalm; ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High, abideth under the shadow of the Almighty.’ Thou’lt be peaceful in the morning; as are those ever who abide under the shadow of the King.”
But only the more passionately the daughter clung to her mother, and again she renewed her plaint: “Ah, mother, I haven’t strength to take these promises! Oh, forgive me, I can not help it; I feel as if something awful were impending; something coming between us! A curse is on this land. Is it any way over the De Griffins? Tell me, I beseech you, what is that painted thing? Sometimes I run out of the room when alone, as if those men hanging there were still alive, in death’s agony. I’ve dreamed sometimes that they came down in bodily form charging you and me with murdering them; and when I go out at evening, I imagine that the Ismaelitish woman in the foreground is flitting about my path, while in every thicket I hear the flapping wings of her carrion birds. Oh, mother! let us tear down that sole defilement of our own little, only home, and give it to the pilgrim Rabbi, now in Bozrah, that he may burn it with exorcising rites.”
“Then thou thinkest there’s witchery hereabouts, Marah,” said the mother, severely.
By George Becker.
RIZPAH DEFENDING THE DEAD BODIES OF HER RELATIONS.
“I? I do not know what I think, beyond this, that I’m overcome, terrified, made miserable, and you, under some spell for a time, cease to be my mother.”