“Now thou makest Bozrah seem afar. Oh, the garments of people may brush together passing, but still to all things else the passers be eternities apart,” replied quickly, and yet with cool self-possession, Rizpah.
“Death, that cools the pulses, also subdues the asperities. I could not hate an enemy if I met him amid his dead,” persuasively responded the maiden.
“Imperious, fanatical, stubborn Charleroy! changeable in all but his determination to make conquest of the faith of others. Then, I can not ask his pardon for my serving God. Liberty came to Egypt because the mothers of captive Israel were faithful. So says our Talmud.”
“Sir Charleroy respects at least, fidelity.”
“Then ’tis well to have me die. He never did me justice to my face; let him embalm me in honey after I’m dead, as Herod did the wife he murdered. It’s a way of some husbands. But we must be moving, daughter; I’ve prepared two biers. The plague is a stern messenger, nor leaves room for any dallying.”
And Bozrah witnessed a strange, sad spectacle. Two roughly constructed burial couches; on each a body, and two women, the one aged, the other youthful, both bowed with grief, slowly bearing the biers away, down to the tomb-hill. The elder directed; and so they went; first a little way forward with one body, then returning to advance the other. There were no mourners following; the passers-by offered no help; the women of the city drew their doors shut, and the children playing in the streets, when they beheld this funeral procession, fled away with subdued exclamations.
The ancient Rizpah, watching her dead on their crosses, was standing that time in her valley of “dry bones;” her imitator, Rizpah de Griffin, was now walking through that same valley. Both made pitiable by desolation. Neither was able to hide her dead from her sight by looking for the hope of the blessed resurrection. Their loving had been fierce enough, but the soul-reviving Spirit of the prophet’s vision was not yet seen to be in the valley for them. The two Rizpahs were “mothers of sorrow,” but followed no cross that had on it besides “death,” “victory.” They went with tears, but not held by a love that triumphs in “leading captivity captive.” These ancient Jewish mothers may be put in striking contrast with the Davidic Queen Mary, who wept from the Judgment Hall, past the cross, past the tomb, up to the chamber of Pentecost, from which she viewed the transports of the Ascension of her Son, her Saviour, her King.