With the impulse of flight Deborah glided out from beneath the portal of Apollonius' palace. For a moment she glanced backward, as if her soul would hurl its final malediction upon her enemy. Then she was seized with fright as she realized her danger. The lanterns which hung about the great doorway and throughout the court, with their transparent screens of red and yellow and blue, glared upon her like the eyes of demons. She ran at first without thought of her direction, driven by a wild impulse to escape.
When she reached the open street the light of the moon, shining down serenely between the house-tops, seemed like the white shield of some heavenly defender to save her from the pursuing lanterns. She paused to think. Whither should she flee? Should she flee at all? Caleb? Surely he must be somewhere in the place she had left. With that thought her feet became as lead. She could not desert the child.
She would go back, demand admission to the presence of the tyrant, and risk anything, everything, for her brother's liberation.
Quickly she saw the futility of this project. She might not be readmitted, and if so, Apollonius would now avenge himself by the accomplishment of his original purpose. What should she do? If she went to her home, would not some emissary of the enraged Governor intercept her? Surely this proud and remorseless man would not let her live to tell the story of his shame.
Partly from instinctive caution, partly from the feeling that the darkness of the night better fitted her own uncertainty of purpose, she kept close to the houses on the shadowed side of the narrow street. Though she walked on rapidly, her soul stood still, like a sentinel peering through the gloom that echoes the step of some as yet unseen danger.
By her side at length loomed piles of fallen stone and half-standing walls. These were the ruins of what a few weeks before had been the elegant residence of Ben Isaac, one of the wealthiest merchants of Jerusalem. It had been razed by order of King Antiochus, who had first pillaged its treasures and then carried its master captive to Antioch, and there exacted from him by torture the remnant of his riches.
Deborah turned in amid the ghastly wreck. The wild desolation so fitted her experience that the spot seemed restful. The moon was sinking toward the west, and poured its full lustre against a still-standing wall. The very sharpness of the beams cut a block of contrasted darkness on the side toward the east. Deborah climbed over the rough stones and hid within the shadow.
Beneath her lay, like snowdrifts, the squat domes and flat roofs of the houses in the lower Street of the Cheesemakers, once the homes of honest artisans and tradespeople, now the sleeping-troughs of the vile herd hired to trample out the life of the nation.
Beyond, the vision broken only by the massive shape of the Temple on Moriah, lay the vale of Jehoshaphat, the quiet slopes of Olivet, and the long hills to the north glittering here and there as the moonlight fell upon the hated tents of the enemy. As the rising sea pours its tide into a narrow creek, so there came upon her a sense of her nation's shame and woe. At first her power of definite thought seemed destroyed by the flood. Why could she not cease also to feel? Why could she not die and become as insensate as the stones, these other ruins about her?