“I feel so safe and so happy with you,” said she caressingly. “We seem to have changed places. You are the one who is now anxious and—no, not frightened—but ill at ease. Esca! what is it?” she asked with a start, as, [pg 261]looking fondly up in his face, she caught its expression of actual terror and dismay.
His blue eyes were fixed like stone. With parted lips and rigid features, his whole being seemed concentrated into the one effort of seeing, and backed by the dark shadows of the cypress, his face, usually so frank and fearless, was paler even than her own. Following with her eyes the direction of his glance, she, too, was something more than startled at what she saw. Two black figures, clad in long and trailing garments, moved slowly into sight, and crossed the sheet of moonlight which flooded the wide avenue, with solemn step and slow. These again were followed by two in white, looking none the less ghostly that their outlines were so indistinctly defined, the head and feet being alone visible, and the rest of the figure wrapped, as it were, in mist. Then came two more in black, and thus in alternate pairs the unearthly procession glided by; only, ere the half of it had passed, a something, not unlike the human form, draped in a white robe, seemed to float horizontally, at a cubit’s height, above the line. A low and wailing chant, too, rose and fell fitfully on the listeners’ ears. It was the “Kyrie Eleison,” the humble plaintive dirge in which the Christian mourned, not without hope, for his dead.
Fear was no familiar sentiment in Esca’s breast. It could not remain there long. He drew himself up, and the colour rushed back redly to his brow.
“They are spirits!” said he; “spirits of the wood, on whose domains we have trespassed. Good or evil, we will resist them to the last. They will sacrifice us to their vengeance if we show the least signs of fear.”
She was proud of his courage even then—the courage that could defy, though it had not been able to shake off, the superstitions of his northern birthplace. It was sweet, too, to think that from her lips he must learn what was truth, both of this world and of the next.
“They are no spirits!” she answered. “They are Christians burying their dead. Esca, we shall be safe with them, and they will show us how to leave this place unobserved.”
“Christians?” he replied doubtfully; “and we, too, are Christians, are we not? I would they were armed, though,” he added reflectively. “With twenty good swordsmen, I would engage to take you unmolested from one end of Rome to the other; but these, I fear, are only priests. Priests! and the legions are loose even now all over the city!”
He was but a young disciple, thought his loving teacher, and many a defeat must be experienced, many a rebuff sustained, ere dependence on his own courage is rooted out of a brave man’s heart, to be replaced by that nobler fortitude which relies solely on the will of Heaven. Yet a brave man is no bad material out of which to form a good one.
They left their hiding-place, and hastened down the alley after the departing Christians. In a secluded place, where the remaining trees grew thickest and most luxuriant—where the noontide ray had least power to penetrate, the procession had halted. The grave was already being dug. As spadeful after spadeful of loose earth fell with a dull grating sound on the sward, or trickled back into the cavity, the dirge wailed on, now lowered and repressed like the stifled sob of one who weeps in secret, now rising into notes of chastened triumph, that were almost akin to joy. And here, where Mæcenas, and his poets and his parasites, had met, with garland and goblet, to while away the summer’s day in frivolous disputations, arguing on the endless topics of here and hereafter, life and death, body and soul; groping blindly and in vain throughout the labyrinth for a clue—sneering at Pythagoras, refuting Plato, and maligning Socrates—the body of the dead Christian was laid humbly and trustfully in the earth, and already the departed spirit had learned the efficacy of those truths it had imbibed through scorn and suffering in its lifetime—truths that the heathen sages would have given goblets and garlands, and riches and empire, and all the world besides, but to know and believe in that supreme moment, when all around the dying fades and fails as though it had never been, and there is but one reality from which is no escape.
The Jewess and her champion waited a few paces off while the spade threw its last handfuls to the surface. Then the Christians gathered solemnly and silently round the open grave, and the corpse was lowered gently into its resting-place, and the faces that watched it sink, and stop, and waver, and sink again out of sight, even like the life of the departed, beamed with a holy triumph, for they knew that with this wayfarer, at least, the journey was over and the home attained. Two mourners, somewhat conspicuous from the rest, stood at either end of the grave. The one was a woman, still in the meridian of her beauty; the other a strong warlike man, scarcely of middle age. The woman’s face was turned to heaven, rapt, as it seemed in an ecstasy of prayer. She was not thinking of the poor remains, the [pg 263]empty shell, consigned beneath her feet to its kindred dust; but with the eye of faith she watched the spirit in its upward flight, and for her the heavens were opened, and her child was even now disappearing through the golden gate. But on the man’s contracted features might be read the pain of him who is too weak to bear, and yet too strong to weep. His eye followed with sad wistful glances clod after clod, as they fell in to cover up the loved and lost. When the earth was flattened down above her head, and not till then, he seemed to look inquiringly at the vacant space amongst the bystanders, and to know that she was gone. He clenched his strong hands tight, and raised his eyes at last. “It is hard to bear,” he muttered; “it is very hard to say, ‘Thy will be done.’ ” Then he thought of the empty place at home, and hid his face and wept.