Miriam, in utter misery, gazed at her fixedly. “Thou knewest and didst not tell me. Thou didst wait and let me find out for myself that his horse is led and riderless and that they carry a prostrate figure! Someone hath told thee and thou hast concealed it from me. Oh, how couldst thou?”
Adah moaned. “That he could not be healed I felt, I knew, but that it is with him as thou sayest—Miriam, art thou sure?”
But Miriam was gone. With swift steps she passed various members of the elated household. With unseeing eyes she rushed past its master on his way to his wife’s apartments, and though he stopped and spoke graciously she noted not it was he. Her objective was a room in another courtyard where the figure she had seen was being tenderly cared for. Here she knelt beside Milcah and stroked Isaac’s hand, openly weeping over him; took from the servant the cooling drink and administered it herself; listened to an account of the battle with the robbers and forgot to ask for Naaman, and left the room only when she and Milcah were satisfied that it was quite safe to leave him in the hands of other attendants for the time being.
She was soon summoned to the apartments of her mistress, where she prostrated herself before her master, but he gently raised her.
“Look upon me, little maid, and behold what thy faith hath wrought.”
Timidly she raised her eyes as she was bidden and the look lingered. To behold him thus restored! Around the mouth which life had molded into sternness played a little smile, to which the lips of his wife and her handmaiden likewise responded.
“Well did I know that Jehovah would do this,” Miriam exclaimed, delightedly, “if my lord would but go to the Man of God who dwelleth in Samaria in the Land of Israel.”
Adah, with the lassitude all gone, drew Miriam down beside her while the story was told from beginning to end, and the little maid heard with such great happiness that the attitude and the recital seemed the most natural thing in the world and not at all, as it was, an unusual piece of condescension. Nor did either master or mistress appear to remember. The tale finished and questions asked and answered with entire frankness, Naaman suddenly propounded a query.
“And now what wouldst thou, little maid? Behold, a gift is thine.”
Into Miriam’s eyes crept a certain wistfulness and they entreated her mistress. Adah turned her own away. Like the sharp thrust of a dagger she remembered the girl’s wail on the day Naaman had started to Israel and her own words of promise. Yet how could they let her go? Oh, anything but this!