“Sleep—the ghostly winds are blowing! No moon abroad—no star is glowing.
The river is deep and the tide is flowing
To the land where you and I are going!
We are going afar,
Beyond moon or star,
To the land where the sinless angels are!
I lost my heart to your heartless sire
(’Twas melted away by his looks of fire),
Forgot my God, and my father’s ire,
All for the sake of a man’s desire;
But now we’ll go
Where the waters flow,
And make our bed where none shall know.”
—“The Mother’s Last Song.”—Barry Cornwall.
 
“How shall we order the child, and how shall we do.”—Judges xiii. 12.
 
Sir Charleroy and his consort took up their abode in one of the many deserted ancient stone houses of the city of Bozrah. The latter, situated in one of the most fertile plains of earth, once having upward of one hundred thousand inhabitants, several times having risen to metropolitan splendor, ages ago sank into neglect, decay and desolation. But with wonderful persistence that city preserves the records, or relics, of[225] what it was in better, greater days. The antiquarian to-day finds in and around Bozrah the dwellings, palaces and temples of many and various peoples, some piled in strata-like courses, one above the other, each layer the tombstone of its predecessor; some as fine as they were forty centuries ago. The annalist there has at hand as an open book the achievements of some of the mightiest men of earth, physically. The latter were contemporary with that line of God’s moral giants, of which Abraham, Moses and David were representative leaders first, and Christ finally. The strata of Bozrah tell of differing policies, politics, religions; all alike in one thing—the attempt to build upon the buttresses of giant force; but they present in the end the one result—failure; all being equally dead at the last, if not equally herculean at the first. Sheer robustness in the armies of Rome, the Turk, Alexander, and Og wrought out their best about the Bashan cities, and in that theater played the eternally losing game of all such. It seems as if God had chosen that part of all the world to illustrate this great lesson of His providence. The Roman, Mohammedan, Greek, and others like them, there had their brutal and sensuous existence. There the Crusader carried also his banners; but the end of the Rephaim was the forerunner and prophecy of all the other giantesque gatherings that followed after them. Each passing race and dynasty left its monuments and tokens of possession; but of all, those of the first, the giants, are the most enduring, most wonderful. These dateless, huge, rugged, fort-like dwellings, standing just as they did four thousand years ago, except that they are mostly unoccupied, are impressive[226] monuments and reminders of the mighty denizens who once abode within them. There are ruins of temples, palaces, houses of commerce and places of amusement, but chiefly of homes; the latter, significantly, instructively, being the best preserved of all. Sir Charleroy observed this circumstance, and casually remarked to Rizpah, as they bestowed their effects in one of the ancient domiciles:
 
“If ever I take to building, I’ll build abiding places for people, only. Such are the most lasting.”
 
But while he came thus near to a royal truth, he did not make it his own. It passed through his mind and he felt its light, as one might that from the wing of a ministering spirit, while his eyes were holden and his back turned. He immediately left the angelic thought, to go wandering through years of misery, before coming back face to face with it again. Sir Charleroy and Rizpah, a western soldier and a woman of Israel, two giants in their way, began a new career at Bozrah. It was providential. Measuring power by the only available test at hand, namely, what it accomplishes, it was manifest long ago to all that the brawn of the Cyclops was not the master force of the word. Hercules cleansed the earth of mythical, not real evils. Sir Charleroy and Rizpah are fittingly brought to the theater of the giants for the purpose of testing the potency of giantesque sentimentality and stubborn, mighty ardor. To this end, two will do as well as a nation, and a decade will be as conclusive as a score of generations. The husband and wife entered Bozrah gladly, and quickly adapted themselves to their new surroundings. They were both very impressible, and there were many things in their new environments that impressed[227] and stimulated them. Nature’s face and locations may be changed by man, but he can not change her heart. She, on the other hand, is invincible in her conquests of both his face and inner being. Climate and environments determine the characters and careers of the majorities. The sleets of the North, in time, will goad the sensuous Turk or Hottentot to high activity, while the Cossack or Esquimaux, under tropical suns soon fall into luxuriousness and laziness. Bozrah began its molding of the knight and his wife. Rizpah and Sir Charleroy were at first attracted to Giant Land by the hugeness of its monuments and ghostly greatness of its record. They received at Bozrah their first impulse to settle and make a home. Probably they were largely influenced by the conviction that, in its way, there was nothing more entrancing or majestic beyond. For the best results to them, the second selection was altogether unfortunate. They had made their home in the midst of battle-fields, and the atmosphere that hung over all things was like that over a defeated army, sullenly submitting. The new comers from the beginning, in their new home, were immersed in ghostly memories, and that atmosphere so like the breath of a bound yet struggling giant. They were affected more than they realized by all these things.
 
“No more tours, no more worlds, for us to conquer!” exclaimed the knight.
 
Rizpah, her cheerfulness of mind largely recovered, replied to this remark of Sir Charleroy with a bantering laugh, at the same time pointing upward. Quickly, and with retort cruel as a giant’s javelin, he cried:
 
[228]
 
“Alas, so soon Rizpah seeks my final departure from her!”
 
The cavalier was no more; it was the brusque and gross within him that spoke. Had he been courtly, even without being Christian, he would have been considerate enough not to have cruelly jested concerning that which lay in his wife’s heart as a possible and sad fact. Often the thought of eternal separation from her husband, even from eternal hope, haunted her now. Her husband knew this.
 
For a moment his answer seemed to stun her; then the affectations of pouting on her mobile face, coming when she pointed upward, changed into lines of anger. A hot flush mounting up to the roots of her hair, hung out the warning signal.
 
The knight, pretending not to observe the change, twined his arms about his wife and mockingly sighed:
 
“Poor girl! I can find no wings on thee. I once thought thou hadst such. They must have dropped off.”
 
There was no reply. He then began to retreat, to placate, and to that intent drew her closer and closer to his heart, until, embracing her, his hands clasped; but, for the first time since the event near Gerash, when the Arabs were vanquished, his caress was without response. He tried a thrust thus:
 
“Well, beloved, since thou dost banish me, bestow a kiss of long farewell.”
 
Quickly, Rizpah flung aside his embracing arms and cried: “Shechemite! I’m no Dinah, won by false professions!”
 
“Shechem was more honorable than all the house of his father,” quoted the knight in reply.
 
[229]
 
“He loved himself, his passions; to these gods he gave up with all devotion, and they immolated him. That was good!”
 
“Why, Rizpah, thou art pettish.”
 
“‘Rizpah!’ Thou art adroit in using bitter similes; a brutalizing power, when brutally used! Now, call me ‘Jarnsaxa.’ Thou toldst me, yesterday, how that mighty male god of the Norse, Thor, while hating her people, to the death, stole Jarnsaxa. Yea, and how many giants fell for women. Perhaps thou didst want me to pity thee. We are in Giant Land now, and thou canst begin to play Colossus!”
 
The knight was startled, and quickly entreated: “My queen, lets drop the masks; no more of this; forget my sarcasm, and I’ll forgive the recriminations. A truce and pardon, in the name of love. What says Esther?”
 
“‘Esther?’ Thou calledst me that when cavalier, turning lover. Thou art neither now!” The sentence ended in a petulant sob.
 
“Oh, stay now. It was playfulness. I—there, now! Canst thou not brook a little playfulness from me?”
 
“Playfulness? Bah! Ye men play so like lions, forgetting to keep the claws cushioned! But, now thou hadst better be going, saint—the only one here. Go, now, right along to heaven. They want thee there. They want thee, not me.” Then she choked back another sob, but instantly thereafter, dashing the rising tear from her eyes, she bitterly exclaimed: “At any rate, thou’lt have company!”
 
“Whom, pray?”
 
“The begetter and chief of all restless vagabonds!”
 
“So; I never heard of him. Has he a name, my dear?”
 
[230]
 
The knight was sarcastic, because he was nettled.
 
Rizpah’s eyes glittered with the fire of offended pride, and she quickly began in measured tone, as if in soliloquy, and alone, to quote Job’s record of satan’s joining the assembly of the sons of God:
 
“There was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and satan came also. And the Lord said whence camest thou? Then satan said from going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it.”
 
“My wife responds to my penitence with bitterness; but even the pagans were wiser. They ever took the gall from the animals offered to Juno, goddess of wedlock.”
 
“Thy wife promised to be thy helpmate and give thee all she had. Now, just forget thy fine paganism, being a Christian long enough to remember that I’m thy helpmate in all things, even in bitterness. I give thee all, even returning thy giving.”
 
“Thou shouldst not make so much of my little misstep.”
 
“Nothing is little with which one must constantly live. Great breaks grow from little fractures. One may stand a blow, but its the constant fretting that roughs the heart-strings to woe unendurable. Thou hast a habit of playfully hurting.”
 
“Well, this has been a day at school; there ought to be a school for husbands! We do not half understand the fine, sensitive creatures that companion us.”
 
“Oh, thou thoughtst thou wert a woman-reader!”
 
“Were I to see an angel with a body like a harp, eyes like the unsearchable ocean, heart of flame, arms like flowering vines, covered with prismatic wings, I’d[231] be no more puzzled and abashed than I am now by my high-strung, fine-tempered Rizpah.”
 
“Puzzled! abashed! I’d help thee pity thy wounded conceit, but that I know that thou art soon to ascend. Art thou going now!”
 
“I’m afraid not, since I’ve so many more sins than graces. When elephants soar with butterfly wings, thou mayst look for my departure. Till then I’ll stay here and practice the patience of Job, beset with his rambling devil.”
 
“How elegantly the cavalier uses simile in coining epithets.”
 
“Heavens! Rizpah, thou dost twist my meanings! Why distort, instead of pardoning my blunders, making both of us miserable!”
 
“Oh, then, thou hast grace enough not to liken me to thy besetting, evil spirit, at least in words?”
 
“No, no, ’tis refined cruelty to put me on the defense as to that. Believe it or not, Rizpah of Gerash and Rizpah of Bozrah are the same. My heart to its core says so!”
 
This second quarrel, that should not have been begun, had the merit of ending, as it should, in reconciliation, tears, embraces and a great many excellent pledges. Yet Sir Charleroy did not greatly profit by the experience. He failed to perceive that these first breaks in the rhythmic flow of conjugal love are great shocks to a deeply affectionate woman. He knew that men easily recover from rebuffs, and so did not stop to consider that young wife-hood was the highest expression on earth of utter clinging to one sole support. He knew his own feelings and took them for the standard. He set himself up as the pattern, quite unconsciously,[232] perhaps; and after the conflict in which he came off conceded victor, he was condescending in his manner. This was unfortunate. Rizpah did not need to be told that her husband was wiser and stronger willed and more self-possessed and more able to endure life’s trial than herself. All this she believed, absolutely, when she surrendered her heart to the man at the first. Woman-like, these were the very circumstances that caused her to love him as she did. A woman never loves completely until her love is supplemented by adoration. She must believe the man, who would make full conquest, is one to whom she can look up; one some way her superior. But while a loving woman will give a devotion almost religious, she will be pained amid her delights of committal by a haunting fear that he whom she adores may rise away from her. In the very plenitude of her fullest love-worship she will deny the reverence, sometimes, in a seeming inconsistency, rebuff and even ridicule her idol. It is with her a sort of hysteria, a confession of secret terror, lest she and he grow apart in mind, and so come to part in body. Hence it is a giant cruelty on the part of a husband, sometimes, to enforce, or thrust forward, his size or his lordship. They may be facts, but God has set over against them as their equal that love which clings, stimulates and supplements, without which the finest man is far less than the half of the united twain. Sir Charleroy blundered along in his error; Rizpah tried to be happy and failed. She did not know how to make the best of her surroundings, and Sir Charleroy did not know, because he did not seek religiously to find out how to help her make the best of them. They had some periods of[233] pleasure, but they continually grew briefer and were more frequently interrupted as time went on. She was ill, he suffered himself to think her at times ill-tempered. As a lover, he admired her outbreaks as very brilliant, and flattered her by remarking that she had the metal of an Arabian steed; as a husband, he thought her very disagreeable when pettish or angry. Indeed, though he never said so to her, he did say to himself that at times she was very like a virago. The only steed that came to his mind then was the ass, to which he likened himself when he considered himself the perfection of submissive patience.
 
A new event radically changed the picture and situation in this troubled home.
 
The prayer of prayers was heard in Bozrah; the cry of a baby; a bundle of needs and helplessness, with no language but a cry. Processions of silent centuries had passed through those halls since they echoed the hoarse voices of the brawny beings who built them. One could not hear the infant cry without remembering the contrasts. A baby; a puny one at that, and of the gentler sex, besides being of a race pigmy compared to the stalwarts who builded those abodes. Sir Charleroy and his consort had set up their household gods, and for a goodly period had occupied as theirs a Rephaim home.
 
The little stranger came, though they did not discern it, with power to bless them both. A poetic visitor, happening on this baby’s hammock there and then, might have gone in raptures, to some truths, after this fashion: “It will be the golden tie, angel of peace and hope, to the home!” The philosopher, seeing the little bundle of helplessness, might have said: “Here[234] is a giant, the home is immortal through its offspring; the babe requiring so much, richly repays its loving care-takers by inducting them into the soul expansions of unselfish service.” But then poets and philosophers often miss the mark, attempting prophesy.
 
The parents followed the usual course of those for the first time in that relation. Their love for each other, very intense, and by its sensitiveness witnessing after all that it was very selfish, got a new direction. They soon drifted into the charming fooleries of their like. Sometimes they petted the child unceasingly, and one was anon jealous of the other if surpassed in this. They each st............