Aurelian; or, Rome in the Third Century by William Ware (best color ebook reader .txt) 📖

of the very family of the Emperor, will surely overtake others. Piso, I would fain serve thee, if I may. Though I hate the Roman, and the Christian, and thee, as a Jew, yet so am I, that I cannot hate them as a man, or not unto death; and thee do I love. Now it is my counsel, that thou do in season escape. Now thou canst do it; wait but a few days, and, perhaps, thou canst no longer. What I say is, fly! and, it were best, to the farthest east; first, to Palmyra, and then, if need be, to Persia. This, Piso, is what I am come for.'

'Isaac, this all agrees with the same goodness—'

'I am a poor, miserable wretch, whom God may forgive, because his compassions never fail, but who has no claim on his mercy, and will be content to sit hereafter where he shall but just catch, now and then, a glimpse of the righteous.'

'I must speak my thoughts, not yours, Isaac. This all agrees with what we have known of you; and, with all our hearts, you have our thanks. But we are bound to this place by ties stronger than any that bind us to life, and must not depart.'

'Say not so! Lady, speak! Why should ye remain to add to the number that must fall? Rank will not stand in the way of Aurelian.'

'That we know well, Isaac,' said Julia. 'We should not look for any shield such as that to protect us, nor for any other. Life is not the chief thing, Isaac. What[Pg 222] is life, without liberty? Would you live, a slave? and is not he the meanest slave, who bends his will to another? who renounces the thoughts he dearly cherishes for another's humor? Who will beggar the soul, to save, or serve, the body?'

'Alas, princess, I fear there is more courage in thee, woman as thou art, than in this old frame! I love my faith, too, princess, and I labor for it in my way; but, may the God of Abraham spare me the last trial! And wouldst thou give up thy body to the tormentors and the executioner, to keep the singleness of thy mind, so that merely a few little thoughts, which no man can see, may run in and out of it, as they list?'

'Even so, Isaac.'

'It is wonderful,' exclaimed the Jew, 'what a strength there is in man! how, for an opinion, which can be neither bought, nor sold, nor weighed, nor handled, nor seen—a thing, that, by the side of lands, and gold, and houses, seems less than the dust of the balance—men and women, yea, and little children, will suffer and die; when a word, too, which is but a little breath blown out of the mouth, would save them!'

'But, it is no longer wonderful,' said Julia, 'when we look at our whole selves, and not only at one part. We are all double, one part, of earth, another, of heaven; one part, gross body, the other, etherial spirit; one part, life of the body, the other, life of the soul. Which of these parts is the better, it is not hard to determine. Should I gain much by defiling the heavenly, for the sake of the earthly? by injuring the mind, for the preservation of the body; by keeping longer the life I live now, but darkening over the prospect of the life that[Pg 223] is hereafter? If I possess a single truth, which I firmly believe to be a truth, I cannot say that it is a lie, for the sake of some present benefit or deliverance, without fixing a stain thereby, not on the body, which by and by perishes, but on the soul, which is immortal; and which would then forever bear about with it the unsightly spot.'

'It is so; it is as you say, lady; and rarely has the Jew been known to deny his name and his faith. Since you have spoken, I find thoughts called up which have long slept. Despise me not, for my proposal, yet I would there were a way of escape! Flight now, would not be denial, or apostacy.'

'It would not,' said Julia. 'And we may not judge with harshness those whose human courage fails them under the apprehension of the sufferings which often await the persecuted. But, with my convictions, and Piso's, the guilt and baseness of flight or concealment would be little less than that of denial or apostacy. We have chosen this religion for its divine truth, and its immortal prospects; we believe it a good which God has sent to us; we believe it the most valuable possession we hold; we believe it essential to the world's improvement and happiness. Believing it thus, we must stand by it; and, if it come to this—as I trust in Heaven it will not, notwithstanding the darkness of the portents—that our regard for it will be questioned except we die for it—then we will die.'

Isaac rose, and began to fasten on his pack. As he did so, he said,

'Excellent lady, I grieve that thou shouldst be brought from thy far home, and those warm and sunny skies, to meet the rude shocks of this wintry land. It[Pg 224] was enough to see what thou didst there, and to know what befell thy ancient friends. The ways of Providence, to our eyes, are darker than the Egyptian night, brought upon that land by the hand of Moses. It is darkness solid and impenetrable. The mole sees farther toward the earth's centre, than does my dim eye into the judgments of God. And what wonder? when he is God looking down upon earth and man's ways as I upon an ant-hill, and seeing all at once. To such an eye, lady, that may be best which to mine is worst.'

'I believe it is often so, Isaac,' replied Julia. 'Just as in nauseous drugs or rankest poisons there is hidden away medicinal virtue, so is there balm for the soul, by which its worst diseases are healed and its highest health promoted, in sufferings, which, as they first fall upon us, we lament as unmitigated evil. I know of no state of mind so proper to beings like us, as that indicated by a saying of Christ, which I shall repeat to you, though you honor not its source, and which seems to me to comprehend all religion and philosophy, "Not my will, but thine, O God, be done!" We never take our true position, and so never can be contented and happy, till we renounce our own will, and believe all the whole providence of God to be wisest and best, simply because it is his. Should I dare, were the power this moment given me, to strike out for myself my path in life, arrange its events, fix my lot? Not the most trivial incident can be named that I should not tremble to order otherwise than as it happens.'

'There is wisdom, princess, in the maxim of thy prophet, and its spirit is found in many of the sayings of truer prophets who went before him, whose words[Pg 225] are familiar to thy royal mother, though, I fear, they are not to thee; a misfortune, wholly to be traced to that misadventure of thine, Piso, in being thrown into the company of the Christian Probus on board the Mediterranean trader. Had I been alone with thee on that voyage, who can say that thou wouldst not now have been what, but this morning, I took thee for, as I looked upon those marble figures?'

'But, Isaac, forget not your own principles,' said Julia. 'May you, who cannot, as you have said, see the end from the beginning, and whose sight is but a mole's, dare to complain of the providence which threw Piso into the society of the Christian Probus? I am sure you would not, on reflection, re-arrange those events, were it now permitted you. And seeing, Isaac, how much better things are ordered by the Deity than we could do it, and how we should choose voluntarily to surrender all into his hands, whose wisdom is so much more perfect, and whose power is so much more vast, than ours, ought we not, as a necessary consequence of this, to acquiesce in events without complaint, when they have once occurred? If Providence had made both Piso and Probus Christians, then ought you not to complain, but acquiesce; and, more than that, revere the Providence that has done it, and love those none the less whom it has directed into the path in which it would have them go. True piety, is the mother of charity.'

'Princess,' rejoined Isaac, 'you are right. The true love of God cannot exist, without making us true lovers of man; and Piso I do love, and think none the worse of him for his Christian name. But, touching Probus, and others, I experience some difficulty. Yet may I[Pg 226] perhaps, escape thus—I may love them as men, yet hate them as Christians; just as I would bind up the wounds of a thief or an assassin, whom I found by the wayside, and yet the next hour bear witness against him, and without compunction behold him swinging upon the gibbet! It is hard, lady, for the Jew to love a Christian and a Roman.—But how have I been led away from what I wished chiefly to say before departing! When I spake just now of the darkness of Providence, I was thinking, Piso, of my journey across the desert for thy Persian brother, Calpurnius. That, as I then said to thee, was dark to me. I could not comprehend how it should come to pass that I, a Jew, of no less zeal than Simon Ben Gorah himself, should tempt such dangers in the service of thee, a Roman, and half a Christian.'

'And is the enigma solved at length?' asked Julia.

'I could have interpreted it by saying that the merit of doing a benevolent action was its solution.'

'That was little or nothing, princess. But I confess to thee, that the two gold talents of Jerusalem were much. Still, neither they, nor what profit I made in the streets of Ecbatana, and even out of that new Solomon the hospitable Levi, clearly explained the riddle. I have been in darkness till of late. And how, think you, the darkness has been dispersed?'

'We cannot tell.'

'I believe not. Piso! princess! I am the happiest man in Rome.'

'Not happier, Isaac, than Civilis the perfumer.'

'Name him not, Piso. Of all the men—he is no man—of all the living things in Rome I hold him[Pg 227] meanest. Him, Piso, I hate. Why, I will not tell thee, but thou mayest guess. Nay, not now. I would have thee first know why I am the happiest man in Rome. Remember you the woman and the child, whom, in the midst of that burning desert, we found sitting, more dead than alive, at the roots of a cedar—the wife, as we afterwards found, of Hassan the camel-driver—and how that child, the living resemblance of my dead Joseph, wound itself round my heart, and how I implored the mother to trust it to me as mine, and I would make it richer than the richest of Ecbatana?'

'We remember it all well.'

'Well, rejoice with me! Hassan is dead!'

'Rejoice in her husband's death? Nay, that we cannot do. Milo will rejoice with thee.'

'Rejoice with me, then, that Hassan, being dead by the providence of God, Hagar and Ishmael are now mine!'—and the Jew threw down his pack again in the excess of his joy, and strode wildly about the portico.

'This is something indeed,' said Julia. 'Now, we can rejoice sincerely with you. But how happened all this? When, and how, have you obtained the news?'

'Hassan,' replied Isaac, 'as Providence willed it, died in Palmyra. His disconsolate widow, hearing of his death, in her poverty and affliction bethought herself of me, and applied, for intelligence of me, to Levi; from whom a letter came, saying that Hagar had made now on her part the proposal that had once been made on mine—that Ishmael should be mine, provided, he was not to be separated from his mother and a sister older than he by four years. I, indeed, proposed not for the woman, but for the child only—nor for the sister. But[Pg 228] they will all be welcome. They must, by this, be in Palmyra on their way to Rome. Yes, they will be all welcome! for now once more shall the pleasant bonds of a home hold me, and the sounds of children's voices—sweeter to my ear than