Such words confirmed a conviction already vaguely felt by Deborah. She recalled her tremendous emotion that night amid the ruins of the house of Ben Isaac. She knew nothing of those psychological laws by which she might have accounted for her experience without attributing it to Divine suggestion. She had often observed how the atmosphere, hot above the fire, becomes hazy and tremulous, so that objects seen through it are distorted; but she did not know that her overheated mind might render it just as uncertain a medium for thoughts.
A few days after her conversation with Mattathias, the venerable man, shaken by age, and by the strain of duties that would have broken the energy of the youngest and strongest, laid himself down to die.
Earth has witnessed few scenes so humanly sublime as that in the rock-formed chamber, where the priest and warrior committed his work to his children, and his soul to God.
His sons knelt around the couch. To them he gave special counsel, correcting the weakness or encouraging the peculiar strength which his prophetic soul saw in each. For Jonathan he invoked caution; for Simon, courage; for all, faith in the Presence of the Lord, "who," said he, "will surely appear for our deliverance. But by whose arm will He smite? I know not. And yet——"
He looked long upon Judas. He put his thin hands upon his son's head. Then his own uplifted face became strangely luminous—doubtless as once was that of Moses. His lips parted as if they were burdened with some glorious prophecy; but they uttered no further word. There issued from them only—his soul.
They laid the body of Mattathias back upon the couch. A light seemed for a while to glow about his head, and then to be absorbed into the marble whiteness of his features.
Never was funeral cortege of warrior or monarch more impressive than that which wound among the hills far away to Modin, watched by hostile eyes, and guarded by the sharp swords of a band of patriots who determined that their dead chieftain should not be deprived of burial in the sepulchre of his fathers. The mournful train was accompanied for a short distance from the Fort of the Rocks by the entire multitude of women and children, wailing with low outcries, rending their garments, and flinging handfuls of dust into the air until the armed procession was out of sight.
The soul of Deborah had been too mightily stirred by these occurrences to allow her to speak much with her people. A deep ravine hard by became sacred to her as a place of meditation. There was something in the very formation of this place that helped her thought. An enormous rock projected many feet from a precipitous palisade, and overhung the narrow width of the ravine. It seemed about to fall and crush her as she sat beneath it. Yet she knew that it could not fall, for the mass of visible stone was more than counterbalanced by a larger proportion of the rock imbedded out of sight, in the hillside.
"So," she said, "I am always under impending danger. A black shadow is always on my soul. But I can trust the unknown goodness of the Lord, which outweighs and prevents the threatening evil!"