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Further than that, the whole country became a charnal-house; columns and stakes in every street, the doorposts of private houses, the fences in the fields were laden with human carcases, strangled, burned, beheaded. Within a few months after the arrival of Alva the spirit of the nation seemed hopelessly broken.
It was not till the midnight cry, that exceeding great and bitter cry had resounded through the land of Egypt showing that the destroying angel had entered the houses of the Egyptians, leaving death and desolation there; it was not till the judgment had actually come that the Israelites realised the delivering power of the blood which they had sprinkled on their doorposts.
Thus the conceptions of vicarious suffering, and of a death which is a deliverance, and of blood which, sprinkled on the doorposts, guards the house from the destroying angel, are all gathered into these words. Nor do these exhaust the sources of this figure, as it comes from the venerable and sacred past.
Mimi, towards whom the draught from the open door wafted the smoke, rose up choking, and ran to the inner door, which she threw open to its fullest extent, disclosing on the outside a curtain of thin silk, fixed to the doorposts. The draught from the open door swayed the thin silk towards her, and in her fright, she tore down the curtain, which enveloped her from head to foot.
Below the tapestry a carved walnut wainscoting went round the room, and the door was panelled and flanked by fluted doorposts of the same dark wood, on which rested corbels fashioned into curling acanthus leaves, to hold up the cornice, which itself made a high shelf over the door.
His rather round face was brown and lined. His hands, which grasped the doorposts uncompromisingly to bar the way, were lean and veined and old. But all that I found in my recollections afterward to be utterly unimportant. His eyes were his predominant, his formidable, his compelling characteristic. They were round, the pupils very small, the irises large and of a light flecked blue.
Arriving at a drug store which bore the name of a medical man upon one of its doorposts, Marcy entered and asked where he could find somebody to tell him whether or not his broken arm had been properly set and cared for. "Step right this way, and I will tell you in less than five minutes," said the man who stood behind the counter. "How did you break it?" "I was knocked down," replied Marcy.
This superstition is still popular, and its practice is to be seen to-day on thousands of doors in Morocco, in rudely painted hands on the doorposts. The anniversary of that date, January 2nd, is a high time for the young ladies, who flock here to toll the bell in the hopes of being provided with a husband during the new-begun year.
We think of the children of Israel in Egypt, when God told them to put the blood of the lamb on their doorposts one night, so their eldest son would be spared when the death angel passed over. Ex. 12:12,13. The blood on the door was the powerful warning to keep evil from the Israelites on that night when the Egyptians were visited and death was in every home.
Instead of facing it, they went into their houses to protect themselves against it. So there was much idle time, when only prayer and praise for a God of wrath filled the hours. Not a family was free from disease, not a house but that upon the doorposts were marks of blood. The word "psychology" had never been heard by Mrs. Hutchinson, but the thing itself she knew.
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