The soldiers came on along the top of the wall till they feared to approach nearer to the fire, lest they should fall through the burning rafters.
"Yield!" they cried. "Yield, fool, before you perish! Titus gives you your life."
"That he may drag me, an elder of Israel, in chains through the streets of Rome," answered the old Jew scornfully. "Nay, I will not yield, and I pray God that the same end which you have brought upon this city and its children, may fall upon your city and its children at the hands of men even more cruel than yourselves."
Then stooping down he lifted a spear which lay upon the wall and hurled it at them so fiercely, that it transfixed the buckler of one of the soldiers and the arm behind the buckler.
"Would that it had been your heart, heathen, and the heart of all your race!" he screamed, and lifting his hands as though in invocation, suddenly plunged headlong into the flames beneath.
Thus, fierce and brave to the last, died Benoni the Jew.
Again Miriam fainted, again to be awakened. The door that led from the gate chambers to its roof burst open and through it sped a figure bare-headed and dishevelled, his torn raiment black with blood and smoke. Staring at him, Miriam knew the man who Simeon--yes, Simeon, her cruel judge, who had doomed her to this dreadful end. After him, gripping his robe indeed, came a Roman officer, a stout man of middle age, with a weather-beaten kindly face, which in some dim way seemed to be familiar to her, and after him again, six soldiers.
"Hold him!" he panted. "We must have one of them to show if only that the people may know what a live Jew is like," and the officer tugged so fiercely at the robe that in his struggles to be free, for he also hoped to die by casting himself from the gateway tower, Simeon fell down.
Next instant the soldiers were on him and held him fast. Then it was for the first time that the captain caught sight of Miriam crouched at the foot of her pillar.
"Why," he said, "I had forgotten. That is the girl whom we saw yesterday from the Court of Women and whom we have orders to save. Is the poor thing dead?"
Miriam lifted her wan face and looked at him.
"By Bacchus!" he said, "I have seen that face before; it is not one that a man would forget. Ah! I have it now." Then he stooped and eagerly read the writing that was tied upon her breast: "Miriam, Nazarene and traitress, is doomed here to die as God shall appoint before the face of her friends, the Romans."