The garrison marched out. I restrained the violence of their conquerors, irritated by the memory of years of insult. Not a hair of a Roman head was touched. They were led down to the valley of Kedron, where they were disarmed, and thence sent without delay under a safeguard to their countrymen in Idumea. In one night the Holy City was cleared of every foot of the idolater.
CHAPTER X
The Fall of Onias
After the Conflict
While the people were in a state of the wildest triumph, the joy of their leaders was tempered by many formidable reflections. The power of the enemy was still unshaken; the surprise of a single garrison, tho a distinguished evidence of what might be done by native valor, was trivial on the scale of a war that must be conducted against the mistress of the civilized world. The policy of Rome was known; she never gave up a conquest while it could be retained by the most lavish and persevering expenditure of her strength. Her treasury would be stripped of every talent, and Italy left without a soldier, before she would surrender the most fruitless spot, an acre of sand or a point of rock in Judea.
I went forth, but not among the leaders nor among the people; I turned away equally from the council and the triumph. A deeper feeling urged me to wander round those courts where my spirit had so often turned in my exile. The battle had reached even there, and the pollution of blood was on the consecrated ground. The Roman soldiers, in their advance, had driven the people to take refuge in the cloisters of the Temple, and the dead lying thickly among the columns showed how fierce even that brief and partial struggle had been. With a torch in my hand, I trod through those heaps of what once was man to have one parting look at the scene where I had passed so many blameless hours. I stood before the porch of my own cloister, almost listening for the sound of the familiar voices within. The long interval of time was compressed into an instant.
The Return Home of Salathiel
I awoke from this reverie with something like scorn at the idleness of human fancy, and struck open the door. There was no answer; but the bolts, loosened by time, gave way, and I was again the master of my mansion. It had been uninhabited since my flight; why, I could not conceive. But as I passed from room to room I found them all as if they had been left but the hour before. The embroidery, which Miriam wrought with a skill distinguished even among the daughters of the Temple, was still fixed in its frame before the silken couch; there lay the harp that relieved her hours of graceful toil; the tissued sandals were waiting for the delicate feet; the veil, the vermilion mantle that designated her rank, the tabor, the armlets and necklaces of precious stones, still hung upon the tripods, untouched by the spoiler. There was but one evidence of time among them—but that bore its bitter moral. It was the dust that hung heavy upon the curtains of precious needlework and chilled the richness of the Tyrian purple—decay, that teacher without a tongue, the lonely emblem of what the bustle of mankind must come to at last; the dull memorial of the proud, the beautiful, the brave! All was the silence of the tomb! With the torch in my hand, throwing its red reflection on the walls and remembrances round me, I sat, like the mummy of an Egyptian king in the sepulcher—in the midst of the things that I had loved, yet forever divorced from them by an irresistible law!
I impatiently broke forth into the open air. The stars were waning; a gray streak of dawn was whitening the summit of the Mount of Olives. As I passed by Herod’s palace and lifted my eyes in wonder at the unusual sight of a group of Jews keeping watch, where but the day before the Roman governor lorded it and none but the Roman soldier durst stand, I saw Jubal hurrying out and making signs to me through the crowd, from the esplanade above. I was instantly recognized, and all made way for my ascent up those gorgeous and almost countless steps of porphyry that formed one of the wonders of Jerusalem.