With these words the last speaker entered the house, and proceeded to ascend the staircase, followed by his comrades, who pushed and shouldered each other through the door with ribald jest and laughter, that made their listeners’ blood run cold. Mariamne, in her retreat, was thus compelled to retire step by step before them to the top of the stairs, [pg 402]dreading every moment that their eyes, gradually accustomed to the gloom, which was rendered more obscure by the moonlight without, should perceive her figure, and their relentless grasp seize upon her too surely for a prey. It was well for her that the stairs were very dark, and that her black dress offered no contrast in colour to the wall against which she shrank. The door of the upper chamber opened outwards, and she hid herself close behind it, hoping to escape when her pursuers had entered one by one. To her dismay, however, she found that, with more of military caution than might have been expected, they had left a scout below to guard against surprise. Mariamne heard the unwilling sentinel growling and muttering his discontent, as he paced to and fro on the floor beneath.
Through the hinges of the open door, the upper apartment was plainly visible, even by the dim light of a solitary lamp that stood on the board, and threw its rays over the ghastly banquet there set forth. Sick, faint, and trembling with the great horror she beheld, Mariamne could not yet turn her eyes away. A gaunt grim woman was crouching at the table, holding something with both hands to her mouth, and glaring sidelong at her visitors, like a wild beast disturbed over its prey. Her grisly tresses were knotted and tangled on her brow; dirt, misery, and hunger were in every detail of her dress and person. The long lean arms and hands, with their knotted joints and fleshless fingers, like those of a skeleton, the sunken face, the sallow tight-drawn skin, through which the cheek-bones seemed about to start, the prominent jaw, and shrivelled neck, denoted too clearly the tortures she must have undergone in a protracted state of famine, bordering day by day upon starvation.
And what was that ghastly morsel hanging from those parched thin lips?
Mariamne could have shrieked aloud with mingled wrath and pity and dismay. Often had she seen a baby’s tiny fingers pressed and mumbled in a mother’s mouth, with doting downcast looks and gentle soothing murmurs and muttered phrases, fond and foolish, meaningless to others, yet every precious syllable a golden link of love between the woman and her child. But now, the red light of madness glared in the mother’s eye; she was crouching fierce and startled, like the wild wolf in its lair, and her teeth were gnashing in her accursed hunger over the white and dainty limbs of her last-born child. Its little hand was in her [pg 403]mouth when the ruffians entered, whose violence and excesses had brought this abomination of desolation upon her house. She looked up with scarce a trace of humanity left in her blighted face.
“You have food here, mother!” shouted Sosas, rushing in at the head of his comrades. “Savoury food, roasted flesh, dainty morsels. What! hast got no welcome for thy friends? We have come to sup with thee unbidden, mother, for we know of old[21] the house of Hyssop is never ill-provided. Ay, Gyron there, watching down below, misled us sadly. His talk was but of scanty barley-cakes and grudging welcome, while lo! here is a supper fit to set before the high-priest, and the mother gives a good example, though she wastes no breath on words of welcome. Come on, comrades, I tell you; never wait to wash hands, but out with your knives, and fall to!”
While he spoke, the ruffian stretched his brawny arm across the table, and darted his long knife into the smoking dish. Mariamne behind the door, saw him start, and shiver, and turn pale. The others looked on, horror-struck, with staring eyes fixed upon the board. One, the fiercest and strongest of the gang, wiped his brow, and sat down, sick and gasping, on the floor. Then the woman laughed out, and her laughter was terrible to hear.
“I did it!” she cried, in loud, triumphant tones. “He was my own child, my fair, fat boy. If I had a hundred sons I would slay them all. All, I tell you, and set them before you, that you might eat and rejoice, and depart full and merry from the lonely woman’s house. I slew him at sundown, my masters, when the Sabbath was past, and I roasted him with my own hands, for we were alone in the house, I and my boy. What! will ye not partake? Are you so delicate, ye men of war, that ye cannot eat the food which keeps life in a poor, weak woman like me? It is good food, it is wholesome food, I tell ye, and I bid you hearty welcome. Eat your fill, my masters; spare not, I beseech you. But we will keep a portion for the child. The child!” she repeated, like one who speaks in a dream: “he must be hungry ere now; it is past his bedtime, my masters, and I have not given him his supper yet!”
Then she looked on the dish once more, with a vacant, bewildered stare, rocking herself the while, and muttering [pg 404]in strange, unintelligible whispers, glancing from time to time stealthily at her guests, and then upon the horrid fragment she held, which, as though fain to hide it, she turned over and over in her gown. At length she broke out in another wild shriek of laughter, and laid her head down upon the table, hiding her face in her hands.
Pale and horror-struck, with quiet steps, and heads averted from the board, the gang departed one by one. Gyron, who was already wearied of his watch, met them on the stairs, to receive a whispered word or two from Sosas, with a muttered exclamation of dismay, and a frightful curse. The rest, who had seen what their comrade only heard, were speechless still, and Mariamne, listening to their clanking, measured tread as it traversed the lower court and passed out into the street, heard it die away in the distance, unbroken by a single exclamation even of disgust or surprise. The boldest of them dared not have stood another moment face to face with the hideous thing from which he fled.
Mariamne, too, waited not an instant after she had made sure that they were gone. Not even her womanly pity for suffering could overcome her feelings of horror at what she had so lately beheld. She seemed stifled while she remained under the roof where such a scene had been enacted; and while she panted to quit it, was more than ever determined to seek the Roman camp, and call in the assistance of the enemy. It was obvious even to her, girl as she was, that there was now no hope for Jerusalem within the walls. While her father’s faction, and that of John, were neutralising each other’s efforts for the common good—while to the pressure of famine, and the necessary evils of a siege, were added the horrors of rapine and violence, and daily bloodshed, and all the worst features of civil war—it seemed that submission to the fiercest enemy would be a welcome refuge, that the rule of the sternest conqueror would be mild and merciful by comparison.