“One worthy of her and you. A generous, bold, warm-hearted kinsman, in the spring of life, sufficiently opulent, for he will probably be my heir, prepared to honor you, and, I believe, long and deeply attached to her.”
“Jubal! There is not a man in our tribe to whom I would more gladly give her. Let my friend Jubal come. Congratulate me, Constantius; you shall now at last see festivity in our land in scorn of the Roman. You have seen us in flight and captivity; you shall now witness some of the happiness that was in Judah before we knew the flapping of an Italian banner, and which shall be, if fortune smile, when Rome is like Babylon.”
Jubal’s Cause
Constantius suddenly rose from his volume, and thrusting it within the folds of his tunic, was leaving the apartment.
“No,” said I, “you must remain; Miriam and Salome shall be sent for, and in your presence the contract signed.”
For the first time I perceived the excessive pallidness of his countenance, and asked whether I had not trespassed too much on his patience with my studies.
His only reply was: “Is there no liberty of choice in the marriages of Israel? Will you decide without consulting her, whom this contract is to render happy or miserable while she lives?” He rushed from the room.
Miriam came—but alone. Her daughter had wandered out into one of our many gardens. She received Eleazar with sisterly fondness, but her features wore the air of constraint. She heard the mission, but “she had no opinion to give in the absence of Salome. She knew too well the happiness of having chosen for herself to wish to force the consent of her child. Let Salome be consulted.”
The flourish of music and the trampling of horses broke up our reluctant conference. Jubal had already come with a crowd of his friends. We hastened to receive him at the porch, and he bounded into the court on his richly caparisoned barb, at the head of a troop in festal habiliments.
The men of Israel loved pomp of dress and handsome steeds. The group before me might have made a body-guard for a Persian king. Jubal had long looked on my daughter with the admiration due to her singular beauty; it was the custom to wed within our tribe; he was the favorite and the heir of her uncle; she had never absolutely banished him from her presence, and in the buoyancy of natural spirits, the boldness of a temperament born for a soldier, and perhaps in the allowable consciousness of a showy form, he had admitted none of the perplexities of a trembling lover. Salome was at length announced, and the proposed husband was left to plead his own cause.