In those strange and agitated days, when every hour produced some extraordinary scene, I remember none more extraordinary than that morning’s marching into the city. It was a triumph, but how unlike all that bore the name! It was no idle, popular pageant; no fantastic and studied exhibition of trophies and treasures; no gaudy homage to personal ambition; no holiday show to amuse the idleness or feed the vanity of a capital secure in peace and pampered with the habits of opulence and supremacy. It was at once a rejoicing, a funeral, a great act of atonement, a popular preservation, and a proud revenge on the proudest of enemies.
On the night before, not an eye had closed in Jerusalem. The Romans, quick to turn every change to advantage, had suffered the advance of our irregular combatants only until they could throw a force between them and the gates. The assault was made, and with partial success; but the population, once roused, was terrible to an enemy fighting against walls and ramparts, and the assailants were, after long slaughter on both sides, drawn off at the sight of our columns moving from the hills.
We thus marched in unassailed, a host of fifty thousand men, as wild and strange-looking a host as ever trod to acclamations from voices unnumbered. Every casement, roof, battlement, and wall in the long range of magnificent mansions, leading round by the foot of Zion to Mount Moriah, was crowded with spectators. Man, woman, and child of every rank were there straining their eyes and voices, and waving hands, weapons, and banners in honor of their deliverers from the terror of massacre. Our motley ranks had equipped themselves with the Roman spoils wherever they could, and among the ragged vestures, discolored turbans, and rude pikes, moved masses of glittering mail, helmets, and gilded lances. Beside the torn flags of the tribes, embroidered standards were tossing with the initial of the Cæsars, or the golden image of some deity, mutilated by our scorn of the idolater.
Ester’s Return
The Jewish trumpets had scarcely sent up their chorus, when it was followed by the clanging of the Roman cymbal, the long and brilliant tone of the clarion, or the deep roar of the brass conch and serpent. Close upon ranks exulting and shouting victory came ranks bearing the honored dead on litters and bursting into bitter sorrow; then rolled onward thousands bounding and showing the weapons that they had torn from the enemy; then passed groups of the priesthood—for they, too, had long taken the common share in the defense—singing one of the glorious hymns of the Temple; then again followed litters, surrounded by the wives and children of the dead, wrapt in inconsolable grief. Bands of warriors, who had none to care for, the habitual sons of the field; armed women; chained captives; men covered with the stately dresses of our higher ranks; biers heaped with corpses; wagons piled with armor, tents, the wounded and the dead; every diversity of human circumstance, person, and equipment that belongs to a state in which the elements of society are let loose—in that march successively moved before the eye. With the men were mingled the captured horses of the legionaries; the camels and dromedaries of the allies; herds of the bull and buffalo, droves of goats and sheep; the whole one mighty mass of misery, rejoicing nakedness, splendor, pride, humiliation, furious and savage life, and honored and lamented death; the noblest patriotism and the most hideous abandonment to the excesses of our nature.
As soon as I could extricate myself from the concourse, I hastened to appease the anxieties of my family, who had suffered the general terrors of the night, with the addition of their own stake in my peril and that of Constantius. My first inquiry was for Esther. To my great delight, she had returned, but was still in nervous alarm. On the night of her being led through filial zeal to meet Septimius, she was seized by a party of armed men and by them conveyed to a dungeon, where questions had been put to her tending to charge me at once with magic and correspondence with the enemy. But this persecution ceased, and she found herself as unexpectedly set at liberty as she had been seized. At the gate of her prison the minstrel had met her, and through the midst of the city, then in its fiercest agitation, had with singular dexterity conducted her safely home.
A Minstrel’s Acquirements
A service of this kind was not to go unrewarded, and he had been suffered to remain under our roof until my return. But by that time he had made his ground secure by such zealous service and so many graceful qualities, that even Miriam, sensitive and sagacious as she was, desired that he should be retained.
From his knowledge of the various dialects of Asia and his means of unsuspected intercourse, few events could occur of which he had not obtained some previous knowledge. His adroitness in availing himself of his knowledge I had already experienced in my escape from the gates, and it was to him that was due the flight of the negroes. A stray charger, a mask, and the common juggler’s contrivance of breathing flames, made up the demon that defrauded the Ethiopian exchequer. But his dexterity in the arts of elegance and taste was singular; his pencil was dipped in nature, and the sketches, which he was perpetually making of the wild and picturesque population that now filled our streets, were incomparable. He sculptured, he modeled, he wove; he wrought the gold filigree and chainwork, for which our artists were famous, with a skill that the most famous of them have envied. His knowledge of languages seemed the natural result of his wanderings, but it was extraordinarily various and pure. The dance and song were part of his profession; but from the little imperfect harp in use among the minstrels he drew tones that none other had ever delighted me with—sounds of such alternate spirit and sweetness, such tender and heart-reaching power, that they were like an immediate communication of mind with mind.
And the charm of those acquirements was enhanced by the graceful carelessness with which he made his estimate of their value. To my questions how he could at his age have mastered so many attainments, his reply was that with his three teachers “everything might be learned; common sense alone excepted, the peculiar and rarest gift of Providence! Those three teachers were Necessity, Habit, and Time. At his starting in life Necessity had told him that, if he hoped to live, he must labor; Habit had turned the labor into an indulgence; and Time gave every man an hour for everything unless he chose to sleep it away.”