Chapter XXVIII: A Treasure Lost and a Soul Found

A joyful meeting awaited Ethne on her return. Marius himself came to greet her, with their little Paul in his arms.

Fabricius and Damaris were sitting together in the corridor.

After the first rapture of re-union was over, Ethne’s eyes, always quick to perceive any suffering creature, caught sight of the crouching figure of an aged man, propped up against one of the pillars of the house, and of a woman bending over him.

In another moment she recognized that the poor, feeble, bent form was that of Eleazar, with his wife beside him. She went to them at once. Miriam looked up into her face with anguish in her eyes; but in Eleazar’s face there was no sign of recognition. On his wrists were the scars and cuts of tightly-strained cords. He looked at Ethne with a piteous appeal, but no comprehension.

“All gone!” he kept muttering to himself; “all! all! All the treasure! all the treasure I had heaped up for my Rachel! All the treasure the Almighty had preserved so long for my people, and caused the Gentiles to preserve. The golden table, the golden seven-branched candlestick of the Temple, all are gone! We are forsaken! We are trampled into the dust for ever! There is none to care and none to save!”

Fabricius and Marius had but just arrived with the helpless old man. After a time they led him gently away into a chamber apart with his wife, laid him on a couch, set fruit and bread before them, and left them alone.

Ethne did not yet venture to tell them of Rachel. She saw that the old man could not bear any fresh shock, even a shock of joy; and besides, she felt she must first see Miriam alone and give her the tidings.

When she came back into the corridor, she and Damaris listened to the story of the terrible fortnight of the separation. For fourteen days the luxurious city had been given up to the plunder of the most practised and cruel plunderers in the world; Rome had been abandoned to her bitterest enemies.

The palaces, many of them like cities in themselves, each with its amphitheatre, its stadium, its baths, its garrison of slaves, had been rifled of every treasure they contained. Gold, gems, rich silks, costly furniture and raiment, embroideries, tapestries, carpets from every land under the sun; priceless sculptures and paintings, bronzes, marbles, jewelled cups and urns, choice graven work in brass and copper, everything was gone. The temples of the old gods were emptied at last. The statues were taken from all the ancient shrines, and the Temple of Peace was robbed of the sacred plunder found in the Temple of Jerusalem, and sculptured in bas-relief on the Arch of Titus. The pagan statues and the Jewish sacred treasures were placed in two of the Vandal ships, which had different fates. The sacred things of the Jewish temple reached Carthage in safety, but the ship which was laden with the old Roman gods and goddesses foundered and sank, and thus for centuries the beautiful old statues have been lying under the blue waves of the Mediterranean.

But far worse than this, the Vandal fleet had borne away into slavery hundreds of the noblest in Rome—men and matrons, youths and maidens.

“How did you escape?” Ethne and Damaris asked.

“We scarcely know,” Marius said, “unless it was because you were praying, and we were needed here.”

“But they said Leo had saved Rome for the second time,” Ethne said. “How can it be said that Rome is saved?”

“Rome is still _there_,” Marius replied mournfully, remembering vanished Aquileia, “despoiled indeed, but not destroyed; still a home of the living, still a city, not a heap of ashes and a charnel-house of the dead. And this she owes to Leo. As to us, our lives at least are saved; and if life is still worth anything to him, we have saved the poor old Jew and his noble wife. For he _is_ poor, without pretence, at last, and she _is_ noble.”

“How did you save him? and what from?” Ethne asked.

“His precious hoard was all but his death,” Marius replied; “those ferrets of Vandals wrung out of him where it was hidden. I found him hung up by the wrists in his own upper chamber, the ropes cutting through to his poor old bones; they were threatening other tortures, and his wife was kneeling vainly imploring them to have pity on his grey hairs. At that moment, hearing cries of distress, I happened to come in, and I reminded the brigands of the promise made by their king Genseric to Leo, not to torture their captives or to slaughter the unresisting. ‘But this old fellow is not unresisting,’ they said; ‘he refuses to show us the hoards we know he has here, close at hand.’ ‘What hoards can a hunted, persecuted old exile like me have?’ moaned the Jew. The Vandals laughed, and strained the cords tighter. The old man writhed, but would not give any information as to the coveted hoard. If it had been a sacred trust he was defending he would have been a hero; if a religious faith, a martyr.

“Then Miriam, unable to bear any longer seeing him thus tortured, whispered to me, and pointed to a corner of the room, where the hoard had been built in. The old man’s eyes flashed fire, and he denied what she said; but the plunderers knocked at the wall, found that it rang hollow, broke into it, and greeted the shower of gold and silver that rattled down on the floor with peals of mocking laughter. Again I reminded them of the promise of mercy to Leo. The chief agreed.

“‘All fair, the secret is out,’ he said. ‘We have the treasure, and that is torture enough for the old miser.’ And at his command they cut the cords and let the victim down.

“He fell in a helpless heap on the floor, all hope and courage crushed out of him, and wept and sobbed like a child. If it had been wife and child for whom he had suffered any one must have wept with him.”

“It _was_ wife and child and country to him,” Ethne murmured; “it was the double glamour which bewildered him—the hideous curse of Mammon and the fond dream of affection. But what of Miriam?”

“She knelt down beside him,” Marius said, “the noble Jewish woman. She threw her arms around him and sustained him; she took his poor wounded hands and held them to her heart; she sobbed out every tender name she could; I understood them by the tones, though the words were in their own Hebrew. There was tender reverence in her every gesture, even more than affection; and turning to me, she said, in a tone almost of triumph, ‘It is not himself, it is his deadliest enemy they have slain. And now he will be himself again.’ And she added, ‘Thy wife will understand!’”

“I do understand,” Ethne said, with a victorious radiance like a halo on her face; “and I have found him his true gold! I have found his child! The idol is broken, but the dream of love shall prove true.”

The next morning she crept quietly into the chamber where they had left Eleazar and Miriam. The old man had fallen at last into a heavy sleep. Miriam was sitting on the floor beside him, holding one of his hands. Ethne sat down beside her, and for some minutes said nothing.

“The evil spirit has gone out of him,” Miriam said. “You see, he sleeps as sweetly as a child.”

“And the lost child is coming to him,” Ethne answered. “Coming to you both, mother and father! Your Rachel is found.”

Miriam started as if she had seen a spirit, fixing her dark eyes with passionate intensity on the sweet grey eyes of Ethne. Her whole frame quivered.

“Lady! child!” she said. “To thee, I know, it would be impossible to lie, even in the fond hope of binding up a broken heart. You would always know that nothing but truth could heal the wounded spirit, or bind up the broken heart. Nothing but the love which is true—nothing but God.”

“Nothing but God, Who is Truth and Love,” Ethne said, with her infectious smile; “Who has heard thy prayers and seen thy tears all through these weary years; Who gave thee compassion which made thee good as an angel to me. He has led me to thy child.”

And then she told Miriam the story of Rachel.

As early as possible on the morrow Ethne and Marius went to the farm on the mountains, and there they found Rachel amongst her children; the dark-eyed boys, and one fair, golden-haired baby girl. Father, mother, and children at once came down the hills to the villa of Fabricius. There, by many tokens, the mother recognized her child, whilst by an instinctive sympathy their hearts drew together.

When Eleazar awoke, the little group around him, Rachel and her sons, and the golden-haired babe on Miriam the grandmother’s knee, were beside him.

“Who are these?” he said, starting up, with eyes wide open and bewildered, yet with a dawning consciousness in them, like one waking out of a dream.

“It is only thy Rachel, our Rachel, and her children,” Miriam said, in tender, quiet tones, caressing the little one on her knee. “Thou hast always known they would come, and now, see, they are here!”

“Is it Paradise?” he said. “Are we in the garden of God?”

“Nay, beloved,” Miriam replied, very quietly, “except as every true marriage brings us back to Eden.”

Then he began gradually to return to full, quiet consciousness, and rising on the couch, he said—

“My Rachel! And all the dowry, all the treasure I had saved for thee is gone.” Then burying his face in his hands, the old man wept, quiet, natural tears.

But his daughter knelt beside him, and gently drawing down his hands, laid her babe in his arms.

“Father,” she said, “see, the God of our fathers has given us the gift and inheritance that cometh of the Lord.”

And her husband, standing behind her, laid his hand on her head and said—

“See, here is thy hid treasure. Truly thou hast given the best jewel in the world to me.”

“What to us were gold and silver?” Rachel pleaded. “God has given us the babes, and also the old riches of our race, the riches of Abraham our father. We are rich in flocks and herds. Wilt thou not come and see?”

And the old man laid his trembling hands on her head, and said—

“The Lord hath taken away, and the Lord hath given; blessed be the name of the Lord.”