"Then expect me," the Maccabee said.
The shepherd boy smiled contentedly and blessed the Maccabee and let
him go. As long as the man could see, his young host watched him, and
at the summit of the hill the Maccabee turned to wave his final
farewell. When the path dipped down the other side of the hill, the
man felt that more than the sunshine had been cut off by its great
shadow.
He did not go forward with a light heart. The whole of his purpose had
suddenly resolved itself into duty. There had been a certain nervous
expectancy that was almost fear in the thought of meeting the grown
woman he had married in her babyhood. He had lived in Ephesus with an
unengaged heart in all the crowd of opportunities for love, good and
bad. He had magnetism, strength, aloofness and a certain beauty--four
qualifications which had made him over and over again immensely
attractive to all classes of Ephesian women. But whatever his response
to them, he had not loved. Love and marriage were things so apart from
his activities as to be uninteresting. When finally he was called in
full manhood to assume without preliminary both of these things, he
was uncomfortable and apprehensive. But after he had met the girl in
the hills, his sensations of reluctance became emphatic, became an
actual dread, so that he thrust away all thought of the domestic side
of the life that confronted him, and bitterly resigned all hope in the
tender things that were the portion of all men. The villainy of Julian
of Ephesus engaged him chiefly, and his punishment. After that, then
the establishment of his kingdom, politics, conquest and power--but
not love!
Late that afternoon, he stepped out of a wady west of Jerusalem and
halted.
Ahead of him ran a road depressed between worn, hard, bare banks of
earth, past a deserted pool, marged with stone, up shining surfaces of
outcropping rock, through avenues of clustered tombs, pillars, pagan
monuments which were tracks of the Herods, dead and abandoned,
splendid pleasure gardens, suburban palaces lifeless and still, toward
the looming Tower of Hippicus, brooding over a fast-closed gate.
The Maccabee nodded. It was as he had expected. The city was besieged.
It was afternoon, a week-day at the busiest portal of Jerusalem; but
save for the fixed and pygmy sentry upon the tower, there was no
living thing to be seen, no single sound to be heard.
Beyond the mounting hills of the City of David stood up, shouldering
like mantles of snow their burden of sun-whitened houses. Above it
all, supreme over the blackened masonry of Roman Antonia, stood a
glittering vision in marble and gold--the Temple. At a distance it
could not be seen that any of those inwalled splendors lacked;
Jerusalem appeared intact, but the multitudes at the gate were absent
and the voice of the city was stilled.