A. Stewart Walsh

“ One knight, for a while entranced by the grim, gloomy spectacle, shuddered; then looked up as if to say: “When will the moon rise? the darkness is oppressive!” Another tried to cheer his comrades by crying: “England’s songsters know us and come to sing us into hopefulness!”
“Men, to rest; you’ll need it.” It was Sir Charleroy who spoke. Responsibility made him motherly.
“Let us revel awhile in memories of better days,” replied the Templar.
“But listen; do you not hear afar off something like the moaning of the winds before a storm?”
“What of it? A storm could add little to our misery.” ”

“ As a girl, abhorring waywardness; as a woman, therefore, free from wantonness. Mark me, ye maidens, the wayward becomes the wanton. Coquetry brushes the down from the cheek of the peach, and she that frivolously plays with passion in the morning will be likely to seek the groves of Astarte at noon. Our ideal woman reached maidenhood’s roses all portionless, as world-help is counted, but with the inestimable affluence of prudence, constancy and purity. Thus she set the finest youths of all Jewry to striving for her heart and hand. What Juno was to Rome, Mary was to Israel. ”

“ Oh, there were young men at His sepulcher; yet those angels could count their years by centuries! Let the hour-glass make record and the sickle reap; the passion flower recalls a vernal life, where the oldest saints are the youngest, where all existence is growth, refreshment, glory, exultation! There, love is law and law is love, and to love is to live and to live is to love. We get a breath of this life here as we enter the vicinage of the immortal pair, Jesus and Mary; and we get a distant view of the whole from the mountains of the gospel. ”

“ Sometimes I run out of the room when alone, as if those men hanging there were still alive, in death’s agony. I’ve dreamed sometimes that they came down in bodily form charging you and me with murdering them; and when I go out at evening, I imagine that the Ismaelitish woman in the foreground is flitting about my path, while in every thicket I hear the flapping wings of her carrion birds. Oh, mother! let us tear down that sole defilement of our own little, only home, and give it to the pilgrim Rabbi, now in Bozrah, that he may burn it with exorcising rites. ”

“ Miriamne screamed and clung to her mother, her thoughts on the vultures of the picture.
“’Twas only a bat, daughter!”
“Oh, this ghostly place!” the young woman cried.
“Ghosts and bats are very harmless; would men were like them!” bitterly spoke Rizpah.
“A bat putting out our light; it’s like an omen!”
“Yes, wrongs do put out the light of human joy, but only for a little while; look out to the firmament, my clinging other self, as I do, for comfort by times. See, the stars are immovable; all bright and in seemingly everlasting calm. ”

“ But the valiant English knight lured me into his Christian love and my race’s hate. I had once the luxurious faith of a pious girl; all feeling, all flowers; too young to reason, but young enough to love the good and beautiful unto salvation. The knight poisoned the blossoms before they ripened by the acids of ridicule! There is a loss beyond repair and a bitter memory, that of a broken promise; under our love-star thou didst swear thou wouldst never lightly treat my believing. Venus has set, Mercury is rising; but wisdom brings a burning glare. ”

“ For are not Israel’s women not only plenteous and bright and lofty like the stars, and her men numberless, rugged and restless as the surf-washed sands on every shore? Does not this race, in all history, continually attest the persistence and pre-eminence of all good to those who walk under the Divine covenants?
Miriamne not only is seen to possess a gracefulness like unto that of the palm, nature’s pattern of beauty in the East, but she has such robustness of form as might be expected in one born of such a Hebrew mother and such a Saxon father. ”

“ The hyacinth lures me to Ichabod’s tomb.”
“The rose, emblem of Mary, flower of wedded love, is sweeter than the hyacinth. Go home to Bozrah, father, I beseech you, so you may prove yourself still a Knight of Saint Mary.”
“Home? I’ve none! Bozrah is grim ruins within, without. There, as only fit and in fit dwellings, abide the cormorant and hyena. All hopes that ever centred in that place for me were but dancing satyrs at the last; all loves but eagles with hot-iron beaks, which devoured the hearts that fed them, then fled away! I hate Bozrah!” ”

“ So storm-beaten, in a flight from the ancient Rizpah and her counterpart, Rizpah of Bozrah, the maiden naturally turned toward the place where there seemed rest, escape; the haven known to all the troubled and sick of the Giant city. With a great throb of joy she at length drew nigh the Church of Adolphus. All was silent about it; but its up-pointing spire, emblem of eternal, aspiring hope, rest on a rock, stability—in grand contrast with the grim ruins God’s revenges had scattered in dire confusion all around, assured her. ”

“ I judge this Hebrew heroine mother by her influence upon me, and that has been for good. The hypocrite or romancer may call the passer-by to prayer and have no more soul in it than the Moslem trumpet. Only those who have some God-like saintliness of character, can win effectually, unceasingly. There is mighty power in the unspoken sermons of such a life. I cherish Rizpah, whose touch of moral power, coming where and when I was weak to callowness, girded me with purpose for wavering and thews of steel for rosy softness. ”

“ Miriamne; let the illusion work; sleep the Leathen sleep; yield to love’s dream; then comes the full noon to awaken to marriage joy. Thou wilt find, not above thee but at thy side, then, the teacher, guide; shepherd as well; but also the husband.”
Miriamne had reached a point of hesitancy, which is, in all lives, just a step from surrender, and the lover, made alert by his ardor, perceived the advantage. Though a prey to hopes and fears, an incarnation of paradoxes, in which bashfulness contested with audacity for control of the will, he gathered all his powers into a grand charge. ”

“ Is there no balm in Gilead, Sir Charleroy? If thou and she have been great sinners, He’s a great Savior, and more, a patient one. Hast thou thought how He lingered near His followers in an overplus of love, lured from the triumphs of heaven, to personally deal, all comfortingly, all encouragingly, peculiarly with individuals? For thirty-three years in the flesh he wandered about, doing good, healing all those oppressed of the devil; but the finest hours of all His life lay in those forty days between the resurrection and the ascension. ”

“ Then I dreamed that my mother was in the star all luminous, holy, happy, looking down in constant guardianship of her outcast boy! Oh, can a child ever be outcast utterly to mother? Can it be that she, who so loved me and so loved God, can hate me now, loving her and loving God as I do? God knows my heart! Will he not tell her all? Her constant mandate to me was, ‘keep a loyal heart, an undefiled conscience.’ I’ve tried to do both, but then her soul loathed apostacy. Does she loathe me for leaving Israel’s fold? My heart all torn, cries to-day, ‘Mother, mother!’ I’m sure she can not hate me. ”

“ But the soul quickened from the charnel-house of sin and inducted, not only into a new inner life but into a new fellowship, hungers for more and more. Hence, it is a common thing for the young convert to wish to die, and be away from life’s turmoils and defilements at once and with the glorified, immediately, forever. It is as if the disciple would pass at once from the sepulcher directly up the Mount of Ascension. In this spirit Mary Magdalene pressed forward to embrace to her human heart the newly risen Saviour that morning when he tenderly restrained her. ”

“ The woman whom thou exaltest as the queen of hearts is, after all, not thy pattern. Judas and Mary are in lasting contrast; he all treason, she fidelity’s choicest fruit. It is well to see to it to which one is the nearer. Oh, Gethsemane, garden of touching contrasts! There love was most grossly interpreted by the shrines of Baaltis; there most grandly interpreted by love’s sublimest offering that night the Saviour agonized. There twice the enemy of man did his almost worst; once by the rites of the groves, once in the wracking temptations of the Man of Sorrows. ”

“ The three make up an all-comprehending trinity, and fill the man as Deity the universe. I see religious love in adoration of God’s Fatherhood, mother love in the tender leading of the Spirit, lover’s love in the priceless self-surrender of our Saviour. That made the angels sing, and in the being of each of our race there is room, aye need, of the melody which only the experiencing of this passion in full can produce. In love-mating is a wondrous thrill which can be but faintly voiced even by those who have experienced it. ”

“ When it travels along right lines, it quickens the one enriched by it to the noblest deeds. He whose name is Love came to earth through the Incarnation to show the splendor of human affection, working at its best in the kingdom of its finest displays—the home circle. The fate of Eden made men believe a lie, but Bethlehem refuted that lie for all time. Rizpah turned bitterly from the fiery, disappointing love she had experienced to stamp all loving, except parent love, a mockery. She had nursed her false creed, and suppressed her rebel heart by adoration of the wintry ideal of Gibeah. ”

“ Their converse was interrupted by a prolonged trumpet blast, echoing from hill to hill. Sir Charleroy sprang to his feet and clasping his sword hilt, cried eagerly, “We’re ambuscaded!”
“No, by the glory of God, ’twas the temple call! How grand it sounds away in this wilderness!”
“No, no, Jew, I’ve heard that call; this one had six responses.”
“’Twas echo’s magic! Didst thou not notice how the sound spread as it traveled in a sort of sheet of melody? Then it rose and fell from low hill to high. One blast; seven responses. Nature proclaiming against fate and chance; the covenant number.” ”

“ Cornelius and Miriamne, the young reformers, having embarked fully upon the full, glowing, exalting, triumphant tide of their love were themselves reformed and transformed. A while ago each was willing to die for the world, now each was willing to die, if need be, for the other and not for humanity’s sake, unless some way the heart’s idol was to be part of the reward of that sacrifice. This new tide carried them quickly to that place of paradoxical oscillations, the place where the lover is one moment utterly self-denying, the next utterly grasping ”

“ Yea, knight, thou hast been a rivulet to Ichabod in a day when he wandered as among arid mountains and dead seas.”
“Blest child of Abraham, thy faith is great, though [96] I be but a pitiable guide; yet I’ll adopt thy similes. Be thou and I, to each other, Jordan, rivulet and flower by turn; the fresh current gives life to plant and blossom, while plant and blossom both shade and beautify the streams. With both it shall be well, if we well learn to seek deep for the hidden springs of the life that can never die. Already thou hast blessed me very greatly, gathering truths I failed to find. ”

“ In what a realm is every mother the queen. The eagles of heaven can not fly across that dominion. Horses, panting and with lathered flanks, are not swift enough to run to the outpost of that realm, and death itself will only be the annexation of heavenly principalities. When you want your grandest idea of a queen you do not think of Catherine of Russia, or of Anne of England, or Maria Theresa of Germany: but when you want to get your grandest idea of a queen you think of the plain woman who sat opposite your father at the table or walked with him, arm in arm, down life’s pathway ”

“ May we not believe that this love for Mary, in the God heart, is widened into peculiar tenderness toward all who give the earth its lords and paradise its elect through the crucifixions of maternity?”
“Oh, Miriamne, I’ve learned in the past to stand, as it were, with bared head, all reverential in the presence of true motherhood; when I see it strengthened by faith, enriched by suffering; the most entrancing example of self-abnegation on earth! ”

“ Cornelius had reminded her the day before, as they were sailing along the coast of Cyprus, that, at Paphos, on that island, there was once a temple to Venus, the fabled goddess of love. That divinity, surrounded by multitudes paying her homage, came before the dreamer’s mind in all those ravishing splendors of person that are so attractive to human desires. Around the goddess, and very close to her, were hosts of young men and maidens, their actions as boisterous and ecstatic as those intoxicated. ”

“ Which the more like Jezebel—Sir Charleroy or Rizpah?”
“But Rizpah was ardent to lay our love, and our children on her altar. Like the women who brought their jewels to Aaron to be transmuted into the golden calf! I could only protest, and I did.”
“Did not the men of Egypt and Israel first proclaim the worship of Apis? Were not the women merely following their lords? There are many women who defile their jewels because, with contempts that turn their hearts to ashes, their lords do not, as they should, wear both the wives and the jewels on strong and loyal hearts.” ”