“Thought of her!” and the strong convulsion passing over Helon’s face and frame was indeed sufficient answer. Yet he added calmly, after some minutes’ pause, “For this she, too, would resign me. Her spirit speaks within me, bidding me do what my full soul prompts. What is the happiness of one compared with the lives of hundreds?”
The soul of the dark, stern man shook within him. He battled with emotion for the first time in vain. Falling on Helon’s neck, these words broke forth in sobs: “Forgive me, oh, forgive me, brother! I despised, contemned thee; yet from thee I learn my duty. ‘Whither thou goest, I will go,’ What thou doest, I will do. Brother, make me as thyself.”
But one night intervened, and the wretched Jews of Worms, in the stern stillness of utter despair, awaited their fearful doom. The festive rejoicing which, even in the darkest era of persecution, ever attended the Passover, was changed into deepest mourning. Not one ray of human hope illumined this horrible darkness. The similar fate of hundreds, aye, thousands, even millions, yet rung in their ears. He who alone could save had turned His face in wrath from his afflicted people. They had but one consolation, and mothers clasped closer their unconscious babes, and husbands their trembling wives, in the one glad thought that none would be left to lament the other—they should die together.
Night fell, calmly and softly; oh who that looked up on those radiant heavens, losing all of earth in the thoughts of the hundreds and hundreds of unknown worlds filling the vast courts of trackless space, can imagine without a shudder, the mighty mass of human passion and human suffering which one little corner of the globe contains? Who that feels for one brief minute the pressure of infinity upon his soul, speaking, as it will, in the solemn stillness of spiritual night, can come back to earthly things, without shuddering at the awful amount of countless cruelties worked by insect man, without feeling that we have indeed
“Need of patient faith below
To clear away the mysteries of such woe?”
There was one lone watcher of the silent night, but he thought not of these things. For above an hour a tall muffled figure had been standing without the window of a lowly Jewish dwelling, gazing within, and wrapt up in the strong emotions which the gaze called forth. A lamp was burning on a table, round which a mother and her children sat. Years had passed, long years, since the lone watcher had been among those loved ones, save in dreams; and now, while his whole heart yearned to fling himself upon that mother’s neck, and feel her kiss, and claim her blessing—to clasp hands once more with those loved companions of his childhood, now sprung into sweet blooming youth—he dared not follow feeling’s impulse. Better his own heartsick yearning, the agonized throb of human love and human fear, than the momentary bliss of meeting, to part again for ever.
He had seen the burst of terror, of the wild clinging to life, even such life as theirs, natural to youth, soothed by a mother’s prayer. He had seen them twine hand in hand with hers, and lift their bright heads to heaven in that meek, enduring constancy, the undying attribute of persecuted Israel; and then the mother was alone, and the watcher beheld the calm a brief while give way, and natural anguish take its place.
“My God! thou wilt spare one,” fell on the hushed air, “my firstborn, first-loved, my beautiful Helon! I had thought to look on him again, but I bless thee that thou hast refused my prayer. Bless him, oh, bless him, Father! my own bright boy!”
Was it her own low sob she heard, or its echo, that she so started even from so much grief and looked fearfully round? There seemed a shadow between the window and the faint moonlight, but ere she could trace it to a human form it had gone.