A terrific crash drowned the words. The siege of the last wall had begun.
The Palace rocked and vibrated with blows of the battering rams. Huge stone blocks from the engines of war smashed down into the Eternal City between Palace and Temple; and a fearful cry of throngs crushed as they ran, rent the air. A great light flooded the darkening room of the Herod Tower.
All dashed to the turret window. A flame leaped with the roar of livid sea to very mid-heaven of the vaulted blue. The Temple was on fire. The Romans were inside the last wall. Fiery swords, bucklers, battle axes, javelins, arrows, flaming balls of naptha went tossing in mid-air as the Zealots on the roof plunged in the flames, or flung themselves to death in the burning moats from the walls. Jerusalem rained fire from the defenders on the parapet. The roar of the seething torrents drove all the city into the street and over the prostrate bodies rode the horsemen slashing with spear and sword, sparing neither women nor children, inflamed by the defiant insults to the proffered peace and insane with the demon lust for blood and plunder, held back these weary months. The Palace rocked again. Bernice leaned far out from the turret window. Just as the afterglow of the mystic sunset colored the heights of the Holy City, a mirage of chariots and troops struck the flaming clouds in shadow—the destruction of a shadow kingdom of sword and power. Armies, principalities and powers—seemed to be fighting in rolling billows of flame. The Princess hid her face in her hands on the window casement.
Jerusalem had fallen.
It was as if all the evils of all past ages in all past cycles of time crashed down in one vibrant shock that shook the world; as if the iron bands of law and order and empire forged in the furnaces of that Ancient of Days—had burst asunder; as though a great Tidal Wave from Eternity had submerged another Atlantis and thrown up in the wreckage on the Shores of Timeless Eternity another race, another age, another order. The terrible cry, that ascended to Heaven, was the cry of a Dying World.
The Kingdom of the Herod line for which she had risked her life and sacrificed her love was crumbling to dust and ashes under her eyes.
The Old had passed away for the New; and Fate had rejected her pawn.
Came the iron-shod trample of soldiers running up the stone stairs of the Herod Tower, and King Agrippa broke into the room followed by Titus, the emperor’s son, and Trajan, the youthful lieutenant, all faces blackened with the smoke of battle.
“You are safe here, my Sister,” cried the last ruler of the Herod line. “The fire cannot touch these Towers. All the city but these Herod Towers will be laid flat as plain by morning.”
“And where,” demanded Titus, “is the Princess page, who risked her life running through the Aqueduct this morning to do Rome service?” And Titus was not such a figure as her dreams of power had painted. He was a plain, short, thickset soldier, with keener eye for spear than woman’s guiles.