“Then they are lost! Wretched father, now no father!—man marked by destiny!—the blow has fallen at last! They perished—I saw them perish. Their dying shrieks rang in these ears. I was their destroyer. From first to last I have been their undoing!”
Jubal looked on me with astonishment. My adopted daughter, without any idle attempt at consolation, only bathed my hand with her tears.
“There must be some misconception in all this,” said Jubal. “Before we left that accursed dungeon, they had embarked with a crowd of females from the surrounding country in one of the annual fleets for Egypt. Before we sailed from the pirates’ cavern they were probably safe in Alexandria.”
“No! I saw them perish. I heard their dying cry. I drove them to destruction,” was the only answer that my withering lips could utter. I remembered the horrors of the storm; the desperate efforts of the merchant galley to escape; its fatal disappearance. Faintly, and with many a successive agony, I gave the melancholy reasons for my belief. My auditors listened with fear and trembling.
“There is now no use in sorrow,” said Jubal sternly, “and as little in struggle. I too have lived until the light that brightened my dreary hours is extinguished. I too have known the extremities of passion. If suffering could have atoned for my offenses, I have suffered. A thousand years of existence could not teach me more. Here let us die.”
He unsheathed his poniard.
My young companion, in the anxiety of the moment, forgetting the presence of a stranger, flung back the veil which had hitherto covered her face and figure, and clasping my raised arm, said in a tone so low, yet penetrating, that it seemed the whisper of my own conscience:
Naomi’s Reprimand
“Has death no fears?” She fixed her eyes on me and waited breathlessly for the answer.