Deborah: A tale of the times of Judas Maccabaeus. James M. LudlowЧитать онлайн книгу.
of such filial devotion that they will give their lives for their sires. Will this one not give Apollonius her friendship for her father's life?"
Deborah stood like a statue. The flush faded from her face as if her soul had fled. She forgot for the moment the scene and the man before her. She was with her father. She saw his face so white, with blood on his beard. She imagined him led out to death; thrust over the city walls; prodded with spear; tortured on the rack; having the tongue torn from his mouth—for such things had recently been done in Jerusalem.
The cry came from her lips:
"Give me my father's life!"
"Aye, and thine with it, sweet maiden," cried Apollonius, imagining that his prey was yielding to his importunities.
But he was quickly undeceived. Deborah's whole form seemed to expand. In the wine-dimmed eyes of her captor she was transformed from a helpless girl into the most queenly of women, whose dignity awed him; then into some avenging deity; a divine apparition of purity which had come to scourge him for his lifetime of lust and cruelty.
"My life?" she cried. "Can a Greek understand this—that Elkiah would slay his daughter with his own hand if he knew that Apollonius had touched her?"
The soldier who had never quailed before men was cowed by this woman. What was left of manhood in him asserted itself in maudlin apology. He sought to appease the righteous fury he had excited.
But it was too late. The woman was no longer a suppliant. As a soldier is turned by excitement of the battle into a fiend, so Deborah was turned into a soldier, and now became her own defender. She withdrew to the farther side of the apartment. As she did so she caught sight of the sword of the General lying upon a table. She noted its hilt gemmed with jewels, and its blade etched with heroic devices. She seized it, and sprang like a tigress upon the unarmed man. As he crouched back to avoid the stroke, Deborah stopped.
"Stay, I will not slay you like a caged beast. Let the great Apollonius outrage a defenseless woman—a Jewish woman would despise herself if she harmed a defenseless Greek. The daughter of feeble Elkiah will give the brave Apollonius a chance for his life. Unbar the door, or let it be said that a woman slew thee. I will not ask a pledge of a Greek to spare my father. I would not trust the word he has already broken. Jehovah of Israel will avenge my father's house! Unbar the door!"
Apollonius flung a quick glance around to discover a mode of escape. Had he been fully possessed of his wits he would doubtless have found some means of disarming his assailant. Yet the action of the woman was so alert and resolute that most men would have been held at bay. She poised the weapon for its lunge. Had the Jewess learned the art of fence? Or did the quickening of her faculties by the intensity of her purpose supply the deficiency of training? Her attitude was perfect for the giving of the fatal blow. In the General's eyes at the moment, if she were not Ares, the god of war, she was Athena armed—no less puissant.
The baffled chieftain had no alternative but submission. Yet it was not mere submission to the accident of her advantage. There was a sort of voluntary homage in the way in which, half sobered by the situation, he yielded to the inevitable.
"The daughter of Elkiah has won her liberty," said he, with a wave of his hand that nearly sent him sprawling. He staggered to where a bronze plate hung, and struck it. As its signal was answered from without, he cried:
"Ho, Servites, let the woman pass!"
Without losing for an instant her attitude of caution, Deborah passed to the doorway. Putting the weapon beneath her robe, she said:
"This will I keep as the pledge of Apollonius' honor until he shall win it back from braver hands than his own. Our God will raise us up a defender. The Avenger of Israel shall come."
Pausing a moment between the curtains which Servites held back for her passage, and fixing upon her captor a look of utter contempt, she drew the sword again from her garment, and flung it ringing upon the marble floor, with the exclamation:
"But no! Let it not be said that a Hebrew girl despoiled the General of the Greeks. Apollonius may keep his sword until the Lord Jehovah gives us a man strong enough to take it from him."
She passed out.
VIII
DEBORAH DISCOVERS HERSELF
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?
At length she realized a strange transformation taking place within her; she felt that she had grown suddenly to be no longer a child, but a woman. Nor was she merely a woman of Jerusalem, but a strong avenging spirit. She drank the bitterness of her own heart, and was intoxicated, frenzied, with it. She, who had never felt anything but love, had now learned to hate, and it seemed good to her. Then she became frightened at this revelation