Full of such thoughts, he ran down to the water’s edge, and sought the broken column where she was accustomed to descend and fill her pitcher from the stream. In vain his eager eye watched for the dark‐clad figure and the dear pale face. Once in the deepening twilight his heart leapt as he thought he saw her crouching low beneath the bank, and sank again to find he had been deceived by a fallen slab of stone. Then he turned for one more searching look ere he departed, and his glance rested on a pitcher, broken into a dozen fragments, at his feet. He did not know that it was Mariamne’s. How should he, when a thousand pitchers carried by a thousand women to the Tiber every evening were precisely alike? Yet his blood ran cold through his veins and his fears hurried him back, almost insensibly, to Eleazar’s door, which he burst open without going through the ceremony of knocking.
Her father and his brother were in the house. The former leapt to his feet and snatched a javelin from the wall ere he recognised his visitor. The latter, less prone to do battle at a moment’s notice, laid his hand on Eleazar’s arm, and calmly said—
“It is the friend who is always welcome, and whom we have expected day by day in vain.”
Everything looked so much as usual that for a moment Esca felt almost reassured. It was possible Mariamne might be even now busied with household affairs, safe in the inner chamber. A lover’s bashfulness brought the blood to his cheeks, as he reflected if it were so it would be difficult to account for his unceremonious entrance; but the recollection of her danger soon stifled all such trivial considerations, and he confronted her father impetuously, and asked him, almost in a threatening tone—
Eleazar looked first simply astonished, then somewhat offended. He answered, however, with more command of temper than was his wont.
“My daughter has but now left the house with her pitcher. She will be home again almost immediately; but what is this to thee?”
“What is it to me?” repeated Esca in a voice of thunder, catching hold of his questioner’s arm at the same time with an iron grasp for which the fierce old Jew liked him none the worse—“What is it to thee, to him, to all of us? I tell thee, old man, whilst we are drivelling here, they are bearing her off into captivity ten thousand times worse than death! I heard the plot—I heard it with my own ears, lying chained like a dog on the hard stones. The wicked tribune was to make her his own this very night, and though he has met his reward, the villains that do his bidding have got her in their power ere this. The pure—the loved—the beautiful—Mariamne—Mariamne!”