The poor broken-hearted captive bowed herself upon her brother’s neck, murmured feebly his name, shrouded her face in his bosom, and died without a sigh or struggle.
The tumult, the roar of the furious multitude, the weapons that glittered round him, were unheard, unseen by Adonijah, who, holding his dead sister in his arms, was pouring over her remains a wailing lamentation in his own language, whose wild pathos, could its meaning have reached their ears, might have softened even the enraged populace then thirsting for his blood.
The cause of the uproar was quickly made known to Vespasian, whose voice interposed between the people and their intended victim. He commanded some soldiers of the Prætorian cohorts to seize the Jew who had interrupted the triumph, and convey him to the Mamertine prison. In a moment Adonijah was overpowered, fettered, and hurried from the scene where the last act of his country’s tragedy was performing, to the depth of that dreadful dungeon.
The procession proceeded forward along the Via Sacra till it reached the Capitol, where, according to the barbarous ancient usage, Simon Gioras, the captive leader of the Jews, was to be put to death. A ferocious joy then sat on every face as the lictors flung the rope round the neck of the guilty wretch and dragged him to the edge of the Tarpæian rock, over which they hurled him trembling and shrinking from the death his crimes deserved. The imprecations the captive Jews heaped upon the mangled victim were mingled with the triumphant yells with which the Romans greeted his fall and stifled his expiring cries. Thus died Simon the Assassin, whose end was as dastardly as his life was cruel.
The day of triumph drew near to its close, but the distant shouts of the mad multitude still at intervals met the throbbing ears of Adonijah as he lay fettered on the flinty floor of the dungeon, listening to every sound with the intense attention of one who expects every instant to receive the sentence of death. Between him and the fathomless gulf of eternity only a brief space apparently intervened. The harrowing excitement that had shaken his reason only a few hours ago subsided into a melancholy consciousness of the reality of those events that had jarred every fibre of his brain. He wished to lift the dim veil that overshadowed his own destiny and that of his outcast people. Where was that mighty arm that had “divided the waves of the Red Sea for His ransomed to pass through,” and then commanded the exulting billows to return to their appointed place, overwhelming the impious Pharaoh and his warlike host? Where was the promised Messiah, where the hope of Israel? Who now should recall the scattered tribes, and bind up the incurable wounds of the daughter of Zion? What hand could heal the broken-hearted captive of Judah, condemned to become a curse to the whole earth?
Then from contemplating his country’s woes his thoughts turned to her—so long numbered in his memory with the dead, so vainly found, only to die within his arms. How sadly seemed her image to rise before his mental vision, not fair and bright as in those happier days when the brother and sister were all the world to each other, when Tamar appeared a creature of happiness and smiles, full of song and sunshine!
Tamar, the dishonoured desolate captive, Tamar become the emblem of her nation’s humiliation and despair—alone met his view. Again he seemed to hear her thrilling cry of recognition; again her dark, troubled eye flashed across his sight; again he felt the last wild throb of her breaking heart beat against his bosom.
The shades of thick coming darkness could not exclude the cruel picture; he closed his burning eye-balls, but still her figure appeared to stand distinct and sad before his shrouded orbs. His spirit sank into the lowest depths of dejection, all the curses of the law seemed poured out upon his head during these lonely hours. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” cried he; “my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Suddenly the remembrance of those denunciations written in the Gospel, which he had trampled upon in his unbelieving indignation, came over his mind with the rapidity of lightning. All had been accomplished, all had been fulfilled. In darkness—fast bound in affliction and iron—a fear that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Christ entered the doubting soul of the Hebrew. He strove to harden his heart against conviction, but still conviction struggled mightily within him—till, exhausted with the mental warfare he sustained, he sank into a deep, death-like sleep, from which he did not awaken till the wandering sunbeams glimmering on his chains recalled him to consciousness and misery.
The morning brought a companion to share in his sorrows—an elderly man of his own tribe, one of the defenders of Jerusalem under Simon Gioras. Every particular of this memorable siege was related by Josadec with terrible minuteness—the divisions among the leaders, the sacrilege, the murder, the cruel famine, and that deed whose matchless horror had made Titus swear “that the sun should never shoot his beams into a city where such a barbarity had been committed.” Adonijah groaned; he writhed in agony, a cold dew bathed his trembling limbs, his hair stood up, but Josadec, like a person rendered insensible to feeling by the dreadful force of habit, continued his revolting relations with an apathy that disgusted his sensitive auditor. The signs and portents of the nation’s fall; the warning voice whose perpetual cry of “Woe, woe!” had never been mute till the Roman missile silenced it for ever; the blazing star hanging over the devoted city in the form of a sword; the mighty sound as of a host rushing forth from the holy of holies with the awful words, “Let us depart;”[[16]] the temple laid in ashes, the foundations of the city ploughed up by Titus’ orders;—all convinced Adonijah that the Lord Himself had utterly forsaken the Jews. His arm had fought against them, and all the curses written in the book of the law were now fulfilled upon them. Again the awful prophecies concerning Jerusalem came into his mind. Jesus of Nazareth had foretold the coming miseries of Jerusalem.[[17]] “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Was Adonijah to acknowledge Him as a prophet, or as the promised Messiah, set at nought and rejected by the Jews? He was confounded. Unresolved and terrified, feeling himself exposed to the wrath of God, yet hanging on the very verge of eternity, the Hebrew knew not what to think; he wished to pray, yet like the prophet could only say, “Thou hast covered thyself with a thick cloud so that our prayer cannot pass through.” His companion too derided him. “God has forsaken us for ever; we are now without a priest, and without a king, and without a sacrifice: all prayer is vain, from this second captivity there can be no return.”
Adonijah’s heart was softening from its hardness, and, pierced with a sense of his sins, he poured forth a flood of tears. Josadec, sullen and immovable as marble, turned contemptuously away, nor did he again address himself to his unfortunate companion.