“Still slowly passed the melancholy day, And still the stranger wist not where to stray:
The world was sad—the Garden was a wild;
And man, the hermit, sighed—till woman smiled.”
—Milton.
 
The Israelites, along Jabbock, were all aglow with preparation for celebrating one of their feasts. Sir Charleroy and his comrade journeying along, in the early morning, were apprised of the advent of the festivities by the passing near them of a company of maidens, marching and chanting. The pilgrims drew apart and sequestered themselves behind a clump of nubt trees that they might observe, themselves unobserved, the graceful procession of singers.
 
“Well, my poet, didst thou conjure up these fairies, or have we come on the musk-born houri?” Sir Charleroy spoke in an absent-minded manner, perhaps, with an affectation of a lack of very much interest. In fact, long privation of the presence of women had somehow rusted from his bearing, in their vicinage, most of the confident courtier. In a word, he was now bashful in their presence. He spoke with a small witticism to subdue,[136] his own embarrassment. His words were unheard, for the Jew was all engaged in contemplating the passing women.
 
In truth, the latter made a striking picture; garbed as they were, in holiday attire; all young, oriental in beauty, and fresh in face, form and action. They were rural maidens and that says all. It had been a long time since either Ichabod or Sir Charleroy had met such types of womanhood; all free from affectation; all natural and graceful in motion; a band of women, as sisters, bent to one purpose and that a lofty one, the proper observance of a joyous, pious, religious ceremonial.
 
Presently Ichabod drew a long breath and rapturously exclaimed: “Praise be to the Patriarchs, my people!”
 
“I’d rather say, Ichabod, praise the Patriarch’s daughters, if these be human!”
 
“Ha, ha! flesh, indeed! Our Hebrew maidens celebrating the Feast of Esther!”
 
“Are they praying God for Adams, so that each Esther and Vashti may have one all to herself? If so, we are part answers to their prayers.”
 
“Hush such jest! These be holy maidens, now honoring our Esther. Thou knowest about her?”
 
“Certainly; she was my heroine before Our Lady dethroned in my heart all others. I was wont to wish I’d been about in Haman’s time. I’d have aroused that old dotard, Ahasuerus, right quickly. By the sackcloth of Mordecai, if I’d been the king, the hanging would have put the Haman family into mourning long before it did.”
 
[137]
 
“Oh, how like angels! It’s years since I saw a woman other than as deflowered by harem life. Heavens, what a spoiler man is at his worst!”
 
“Dost forget Nourahmal? But no matter; I admire, and wonder that some roving band of Arabs, with less piety, or more force than we, does not swoop down upon these innocents for seraglio prizes. Perhaps these have the liveried angels about, that are said ever to guard saintly purity.”
 
“Doubtless; and besides them, with all the practical providence which belongs to the Jew, thou mayst be sure that the groves, not far away, are full of fathers, brothers, lovers.”
 
“I wish I were a brother to some of them.”
 
“Then thou’dst be a Jew.”
 
“I’d forget that in being a lover to the others.”
 
“Thou wouldst not change thy faith for a woman?”
 
“Now, I’d swear I would not. If like most men, and in love, I’d swear I would; and then, having gotten my new priestess, in a little while, backslide and drag her with me, or make her heart weep. My comfort in the last estate being my consistency, if not my constancy. What a mad rout it is when religion and love, born twins, cross purposes?”
 
“That’s a very true, yet bitter speech. I’ll tell the Hebrew maidens to beware.”
 
“Better tell me to beware, now. It’s the beginning that makes the trouble. No beginning, then no after folly.”
 
The procession glided past and the pilgrims followed at a distance.
 
“We are within an arm of dear old Jabbock,” remarked[138] Ichabod, as they came to a river-bank, later.
 
“Ah, ha! my chartless pilot, does the current whisper its name to thee, in Hebrew? I’d not wonder if it did, since every thing is clannish in this country.—I hope there is no more swimming for us to do.”
 
“Its tumbling waters are full of voices to me, blending with echoes of things of the past; but one who spoke a thousand times more tenderly than ever spoke murmuring waters, told me its name, knight.”
 
“Nourahmal? No! rather some one of those pious beauties we passed not long ago. Oh, roguish Ichabod, I remember thou wert away a long time in the morning after our breakfast of peas and grapes. But, dear Ichabod,” continued Sir Charleroy, feigning rebuke, “didst thou so soon forget thy little convert of Jericho? I wonder if thou lifted up thy voice and wept when thou kissed the maid that told thee the river’s name? Come, confess, and I’ll call thee Isaac.”
 
“Raillery of prime quality, knight; but raillery and ridicule, though keenly pointed, are generally bad arrows for long range.”
 
“Well, no matter. I’m glad thou knowest the place, if thou dost know it. Who told thee the name of this water?”
 
“One with a voice to me sweeter, kinder than that of any betrothed lover’s ever can be.”
 
“Very, very eloquent thou art. Indeed, if we were in Italy, I’d guess ’twas a syren had communed with thee; in France, a Crusader troubadour; in Rhineland, the water sprite, Lurline; but, being in this wondrous country of revelations, apparitions, prophets, angels[139] and the like, I can only as a catechumen, ask thy dulcet informer’s name?”
 
“How oddly thou dost talk when thou talkest as a double man; half sneering infidel; half Christian preacher.”
 
“A truce, Ichabod. That may be a home-thrust well aimed, but it’s enough that one of us be bitter. It’s sometimes natural to me, but not to thee.”
 
“A bee-sting will redden the high priest’s brow.”
 
“Well, I’ll not sting thee. Who gave the name of the river?”
 
“Master, one to me alone of all the world an angel, my mother. I was born near here, and the memories of a youth made happy by one all patient, all loving, rises above and survives all changes.”
 
“My noble friend, forgive my repartee. I’m glad, truly, that we are so lucky as to have this knowledge.”
 
“Lucky? Then all is not fate; there is some chance, if no Providence?”
 
“Pardon more; the bee-sting is still on thy brow. Ichabod, I can not help my feelings, which sometimes make me think that only God can tread the hidden, narrow line between stern fate and happy accident. They say the Sybil wrote her prophetic decrees upon leaves and flung them recklessly to the inconstant winds. Just so we’re in decreed courses, swirled by chance gusts.”
 
“Yet we two are getting on well together.”
 
“So do chance and fate; the pity is to the waif that falls between them.”
 
“I wonder how here, in Holy Land, thou canst think of any control but Providence.”
 
[140]
 
“Wonder? So do I. I’m a bundle of wonderings.”
 
“Listen to Jabbock.”
 
“I do, more attentively than Jabbock to me. What of it?”
 
“Grander rivers are forgotten; why is it so remembered?”
 
“We’re forgotten, meaner men remembered.”
 
“This river sings through the centuries of history the song of a fugitive of pale heart, who in sheer desperation, long, long ago, seized a fleeting hope and became a prince, having power to prevail with God.”
 
“Ah, Jacob, who worked fourteen years to win a woman. It was, I’m sure, the woman that nerved him to attempt greatness. Such a woman! Had she been like our moderns she would have jilted him, or eloped with him, before the end of one of the fourteen years.”
 
“I’ll not tilt with thy sarcasms. It were much better to remember that he, a pigmy, the night in his soul, as that about him, black as Erebus, grappled with the mighty, unknown, unseen apparition to find he was holding Deity. The mysteries of crossing fates and chances are as open nut-bur compared to that of all weakness prevailing with Omnipotence, my good master, I think.”
 
“But ever after that joust, Jacob was a cripple!”
 
“Oh, but remember, as he halted on his thigh the sun rose over Penuel, ‘the place of seeing God,’ by interpretation. He was stronger for his laming!”
 
“A very ‘Timor-lame,’ this prince of great chances and mean ways.”
 
“Time and trial repaired Jacob’s spotted soul.”
 
“There was much room for the mending, I do vow.”
 
[141]
 
“His weightings bespeak some charity. Think; a weak mother, one designing wife, and plenty of wealth!”
 
“Well, ’tis true, these were enough to have undone St. Anthony, if the devil had only thought to have tried them all at once upon him!”
 
“Sir Charleroy swings back to his old bitterness toward women; did he never love one?”
 
“No, not as a lover. I was never tried except by designing coquetries that nauseated finally.”
 
“Perhaps, like most solitary men, thou so revered thyself by habit that there was no room for other person in thy heart.”
 
“I never met one I deemed perfect and available.”
 
“Better to have loved some one far from perfect than none. If thy heart-fount had been once touched it would have set thy imaginations to weaving halos about the one touching. Thou wouldst have enthroned her by a love that would have transformed both. She would have become in time what she was in love’s young dream; while thou wouldst have grown by the experience to be twice the man thou hadst been—or art.”
 
“The sun in thy head is settling down into thy heart, Jew.”
 
“Is that so, Charleroy?”
 
“Yes, but not to harm; heart sunsets ripen heart fruits; that’s the reason the autumn suns run low; the low suns ripen. But after all, I’m not so very miserable in heart. I’ve loved some women; mother and my Mary——”
 
“Filial love, religious love! somewhat akin and blessing him that feels their mellow, exalting influences;[142] but, oh, Sir Charleroy, they do not fill completely the heart’s temple. There are places there for the expression of ruddy, glorious lover’s love. 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.
 
“There are other passions which ebb with time, or, being well fed, wax gross; not so with this one. Inspired by the potencies of life, which lie at the very core of being, it wells up in rills, rivers and torrents of pleasurable sensations. Out from the heart it goes to the remotest members, only to double on its courses and dash again through the beating heart, heating its flame by its doubling and hasting, making the beatings wilder by its hastings, and then hasting more because of the wilder beatings. Of all emotions love is the most tireless. It increases by giving, grows stronger by action and proclaims the secret of its heavenly birth, its immortality, by the way in which it deepens and ripens with every movement of its life. Aye, more, it proclaims itself the power of the resurrection by the way it transforms the lives it possesses. A man may be a lout, ever so crude in fiber, but this musical flame passing through his being, burns up his dross, making him all brave, courteous, tender, poetic,[143] religious! Yea, religious! If it do not utterly redeem a sinner possessed by it, it will take him nearer to salvation than any other power known on earth, except the Spirit of Grace. It is as the opening of the eyes of the blind man, for it opens the doors of a new sense to the realizing of a world as new as delightful. As the thrummings on the harp-strings someway leave a lasting sonorousness and tenderness in the supporting woods about the lyre, so leaves this passion, through the beatings of every wave of i............