It was like taking an old friend by the hand to grasp a sword once more.
CHAPTER XVII
A VEILED HEART
For three whole days Mariamne had not set eyes on the Briton, so she felt listless and dispirited. Not that she acknowledged, even to herself, the necessity of Esca’s presence, nor that she was indeed aware how much it had influenced her thoughts and actions ever since she had known him—a period that seemed now of indefinite length. She found herself perpetually recalling the origin and growth of their acquaintance; she dwelt with a strange pleasure on the gross insult offered her by Spado, which scarce seemed an agreeable subject of contemplation; nor, be sure, did she forget its prompt and satisfactory redress. She remembered every step of her subsequent walk home, and every syllable of their conversation in that hasty and agitated progress; nay, every look and gesture of her companion’s and of her own. It pleased her to think of the favourable impression made on her father and his brother by their guest; and the earthen pitcher, from which she gave the latter to drink, assumed a new and unaccountable value in her eyes. Also she strolled to Tiber-side, whenever she had a spare half-hour, and sat her down under the shadow of a broken column, with a strange persistency, and a vague expectation of something, she knew not what. For the first day this dreamy imaginative existence was delightful. Then came a feeling of want; a consciousness that there was a void, which it would be a great happiness to fill. Soon this grew to a thirst—a craving for a repetition of those hours which had glided by so sweetly and so fast. At rare intervals arose the startling thought, “suppose she should never see him again,” and her heart stopped beating, and her cheek paled with the bare possibility; [pg 126]yet was there something not wholly painful in a consciousness of the sorrow such a privation would create.
Though young, Mariamne was no foolish and inexperienced girl. Her life had been calculated to elicit and bring to perfection some of woman’s loftiest qualities. She had early learned the nobility of self-sacrifice, the necessity of self-reliance and self-denial. Like the generality of her nation she possessed considerable pride of race; suppressed, indeed, and kept down by the exigencies in which the Jews had so often found themselves, but none the weaker nor the less cherished on that account. Notwithstanding his many chastisements and reverses,—from his pilgrimage through the wilderness to his different captivities by the great Oriental powers, and final subjection under Rome,—the Jew never forgot that he sprang from a stem more especially planted by the hand of the Almighty; that he could trace his lineage back, unbroken and unstained, to those who held converse with Moses under the shadow of Mount Sinai; nay, to the Patriarch himself, who held his authority direct from Heaven, and who was thought worthy to entertain angels at his tent door on the plains of Mamre. Such a conviction imparted a secret pride to every one of his descendants. Man, woman, and child, were persuaded that to them belonged of right the dominion of the earth.
It may be supposed that one of Eleazar’s disposition was not likely to bring up his family in any humble notions of their privileges and their importance. Mariamne had been early taught to consider her nationality as the first and dearest of her advantages; and, womanlike, she clung to it all the closer that her people had been forced to submit to the Roman yoke. Habits of patience, of reflection and endurance, had been engendered by the everyday life of the Jewish maiden, witnessing her father’s continued impatience of the existing state of things, and his energetic, though secret, efforts to change the destinies of his countrymen; whilst all that such an education might have created of hard, cunning, and unfeminine in his daughter’s mind, the society and counsels of Calchas were eminently qualified to counteract. Losing no opportunity of sowing the good seed; of teaching, both by precept and example, the lessons he had learned from those who had them direct from the Fountain-head; it was impossible to remain long uninfluenced by the constant kindliness and gentle bearing of one who understood Christianity to signify, not only faith, and purity, and devotion even to the death, but also that peace and goodwill [pg 127]amongst men, which its first teachers inculcated as its fundamental principle and essential element. Calchas, indeed, lacked not the fiery energy and the tameless instincts of his race. His nature, perhaps, was originally fierce and warlike as his brother’s, but it had been subdued, softened, exalted by his religion; and, while his heart was pitiful and kindly, nothing remained of the warrior but his loyalty, his courage, and his zeal.
Cherishing a true attachment for that brother, it was doubtless a cause of daily sorrow to observe how totally Eleazar’s principles and conduct were opposed to the meek and holy precepts of the new faith. It seemed to human reasoning impossible to convert the Jew from his grand and simple creed, to modify or to explain it, to add to it, or to take away from it, in the slightest degree to alter his belief in that direct thearchy, to which he was bound by the ties of gratitude, of tradition, of national isolation and characteristic pride of race. A religion which accepts the first great principles of truth, the omnipotence and eternity of the Deity, the immortality of souls, and the rewards and punishments of a life to come, stands already upon a solid basis from which it has little inclination to be removed; and in all ages, the Jew, as in a somewhat less degree the Mahometan, has been most unwilling to add to his own stern tenets the mild and loving doctrines of our revealed religion. Eleazar’s was a character to which the outward and tangible ceremonials of his worship were essentially acceptable. To him the law, in its severest and most literal sense, was the only true guide for political measures as for private conduct; and where its burdens were multiplied or its severities enhanced by tradition, he upheld the latter gladly and inflexibly. To offer the sacrifices ordained by Divine command; to exact and rigidly fulfil the minutest points of observance which the priests enjoined; to keep the Sabbath inviolate by word and deed; also, when opportunity offered, to smite the heathen hip-and-thigh with the edge of the sword; these were the points of faith and practice on which Eleazar took his stand, and from which no consideration of affection, no temptation of ambition, no exigency of the times, would have induced him to waver one hair’s-breadth. The fiercest soldier, the wildest barbarian, the most frivolous and dissolute patrician of the Imperial Court, would have been a more promising convert than such a man as this. Yet did not Calchas despair: well he knew that there is a season of seed-time and a season of harvest, that the soil once choked with weeds, or sown [pg 128]with tares, may thereafter produce a good crop; that waters have been known to flow freely from the bare rock, and that nothing is impossible under heaven. So he loved his brother and prayed for him, and took that brother’s daughter to his heart as though she had been his own child.
It must have required no small patience, no small amount of self-control and humility, to engraft in Mariamne the good fruit, which her father held in such hatred and disdain. These, too, were difficulties with which the early Christians had to contend, and of which we now make small account. We read of their privations, their persecutions, their imprisonments, and their martyrdoms, with a thrill of mingled horror and indignation—we pity and admire, we even glorify them as the heroic leaders of that forlorn hope which was destined to head the armies of the only true conqueror, but we never consider the daily and harassing warfare in which they must have been engaged, the domestic dissensions, the insults of equals, the alienation of friends; above all, the cold looks and estranged affections of those whom they loved best on earth; whom they must give up here, and whom, with the new light that had broken in on them, they could scarce hope to see hereafter. So-called heroic deeds are not always deserving of that superiority which they claim over mortal weakness, when emblazoned on the glowing page of history. Many a man is capable, so to speak, of winding himself up for one great effort, even though it be to perish on the scaffold or the breach; but day after day, and year after year, to wage unceasing war against our nearest and dearest, our own comforts, our own prosperity, nay, our own weaknesses and inclinations, requires the aid of a sustaining power that is neither without nor within, nor anywhere below on earth, but must reach the suppliant directly and continuously from above.