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Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

by Elizabeth Miller · English · Gutenberg #37862 · 660,677 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

Author: Elizabeth Miller

Illustrator: J. André Castaigne


        
Release date: October 26, 2011 [eBook #37862]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37862

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAUL OF TARSUS: A TALE OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: "The seed of his teaching has spread abroad" _Page 4_]






SAUL OF TARSUS

_A TALE OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS_


_By_

ELIZABETH MILLER

_Author of_ The Yoke




WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

ANDRE CASTAIGNE




INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS




COPYRIGHT 1906

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY




CONTENTS


Chapter

       I  Saul of Tarsus
      II  A Prudent Exception
     III  The First Martyr
      IV  The Bankrupt
       V  Agrippa in Repertoire
      VI  Marsyas Assumes a Charge
     VII  The Bondman of Hate
    VIII  An Alexandrian Characteristic
      IX  "--As an Army With Banners"
       X  Flaccus Works a Complexity
      XI  The House of Defense
     XII  "Scattering the Flock"
    XIII  A Trust Fulfilled
     XIV  For a Woman's Sake
      XV  The False Balance
     XVI  A Matter Handled Wisely
    XVII  A Word in Season
   XVIII  The Ransom
     XIX  The Deliverance
      XX  The Feast of Flora
     XXI  The Fining Fire
    XXII  "In the Cloak of Two Colors"
   XXIII  A Letter and a Loss
    XXIV  The Digged Pit
     XXV  The Speaking of Eutychus
    XXVI  The Arm Made Bare
   XXVII  The Proconsul's Deliberations
  XXVIII  The Strange Woman
    XXIX  In Extremis
     XXX  The Eremite in Scarlet, and the Bankrupt in Purple
    XXXI  The Dregs of the Cup of Trembling
   XXXII  Sanctuary
  XXXIII  The Dregs of the Cup of Fury
   XXXIV  Captives of the Mighty
    XXXV  The Approach of the Day of Visitation
   XXXVI  On the Damascus Road
  XXXVII  In the House of Ananias
 XXXVIII  The Requital




In Memory of

My Soldier Brother

Ralph Miller

Lieutenant Sixth Cavalry

U.S.A.




SAUL OF TARSUS




CHAPTER I

SAUL OF TARSUS

On a certain day in March of the year 36 A.D., a Levite, one of the
Shoterim or Temple lictors, came down from Moriah, into the vale of
Gihon, and entered the portal of the great college, builded in
Jerusalem for the instruction of rabbis and doctors of Law in Judea.

With foot as rapid and as noiseless as that of a fox among the tombs,
the Levite crossed the threshold into the great gloom of the interior.
This way and that he turned his head, watchful, furtive, catching every
obscure corner in the range of his glance.

He saw that three men sat within, two together, one a little apart from
the others.  From this to that one, the alert gaze slipped until it
lighted upon a small, bowed shape in white garments.  Then the Levite
smiled, his lips moved and shaped a word of satisfaction, but no sound
issued.  Silently he flitted into an aisle which would lead him upon
the two, and suddenly appeared before them.

The small bent figure made a nervous start, but the Levite bowed and
rubbed his hands.

"Greeting, Rabbi Saul; God's peace attend thee.  Be greeted, Rabbi
Eleazar; peace to thee!"

Rabbi Eleazar raised a great head and looked with an unfavorable eye at
the Levite; in it was to be read strong dislike of the Levite's
stealthy manner.

"Greeting, Joel," he replied in a voice quite in keeping with his
splendid bulk, "peace to thee.  Yet take it not amiss if I suggest that
since there is no warning in thy footfall or thy garments, thou
shouldst be belled!"

The other had dropped back in his seat, and the Levite bowed again to
him.

"I pray thy pardon, Rabbi Saul, but I came as I was sent--in haste."

"It is nothing, Joel," Saul answered.  "Give us news of the High
Priest's health."

"He continues in health, God be thanked, but his spirit was sorely
tried--" He stopped abruptly to look, as if in question, at the man
sitting apart in the shadows.

"Who is that?" he asked suspiciously.

"A pupil," was Eleazar's impatient reply.  The Levite looked again,
but, the twilight thwarting him, he hitched a slant shoulder and,
passing to one of the windows, drew aside its heavy hanging.
Instantly, a great golden beam shot into the cold chamber and
illuminated it gloriously.  Saul threw his hand over his eyes to shut
out the blinding radiance.  But the pupil, helped at his reading by the
admitted light, straightened himself, glanced up a moment, and turned
to his scroll without a word.

"A stranger," Joel whispered, coming back to the rabbis.

"What burden of mystery dost thou conceal, Joel?" Eleazar exclaimed.
"Yonder man is an Essene; look about; the stones will take tongue and
betray thee, sooner than he."

"Let me be sure, let me be sure!" Joel insisted stubbornly.

As if obedient to Eleazar, he cast an eye about the chamber.

The light which came in at the west was straight from the spring sun,
moted and warm with benevolence.  That which entered at the east was
only a quivering reflection from the marble walls and golden gates of
the Temple.  The chamber was immense, shadowy and draughty, the floor
of stone, the walls of Hermon's rock, relieved by massive arcades
supported on pilasters, and friezes of such images as were hieratically
approved.  The ceiling was so lost in height and cold dusk that its
structure could not be defined.  At the end opposite the doors was the
lectern of ivory and ebony, embellished with symbolical intaglios and
inlaid with gold.  Beside it stood the reader's chair, across which the
rug had been dropped as he had put it off his knees.  Before the
lectern, across and down the great chamber, were ranges of carven
benches, among which were lamps of bronze, darkened and green about the
reliefs and corrugations on the bowls, depending from chains or set
about on tripods.

But besides the three already noted, the Levite saw and expected to see
no others.  Eleazar regarded his ostentatious inspection of the room
with disgust.

"Thou hast a burden on thy soul, Joel," Saul urged mildly.  "Let us
bear it with thee."

The Levite came close and bent over the rabbis.

"Question your souls, brethren," he said.  "Hath Judea more to lose
than it hath lost?" he asked in a lowered tone.

"Its identity," Eleazar responded shortly.

But the Levite looked expectantly at Saul.

"Its faith," Saul suggested quietly.

The Levite nodded eagerly.

"Its faith," Saul continued, as if speaking to himself, "and after that
there is nothing more.  Yea, restore unto it its kings and its
dominions, yet withhold the faith and there is no Judea.  Desolate it
until the land is sown in salt and the people bound to the mills of the
oppressor, so but the faith abide, Judea is Judea, glorified!"

"What then, O Rabbi," the Levite persisted, "if the land be sown in
salt and the people bound to the mills of the oppressor, if the faith
be abandoned--what then?"

"God can not perish," Eleazar put in.  "Fear not; it can not come to
pass."

"Nay, but evil can enter the souls of men and point them after false
prophets so that God is forgotten," the Levite retorted.  His lean
figure bent at the hips and he thrust his face forward with triumph of
prophecy on it.  Saul looked at him.

"What hast thou to tell, Joel?" he asked with command in his voice.
The Levite accepted the order as he had worked toward it--with energy.

"Listen, then," he began in a whisper.  "Dost thou remember Him whom
they crucified at Golgotha, a Passover, four years ago?"

Eleazar nodded, but Saul made no sign.

"Know ye that they killed the plant after it had ripened," the Levite
hastened on.  "The seed of His teaching hath spread abroad and wherever
it lodgeth it hath taken root and multiplied.  Wherefore, there is a
multitude of offspring from the single stem."

Saul stood up.  He did not gain much in stature by rising, but the
temper of the man towered gigantic over the impatience of Eleazar and
the craft of the Levite.

"What accusation is this that thou levelest at Judea?" he demanded.

"A truth!" Joel replied.

"That Israel hath a blasphemer among them, which hath been spared,
concealed and not put away?" questioned Saul.

"Dare ye?" the Levite cried.

"Dare ye not!" Saul answered sternly.  "It is the Law!"

The Levite came toward him.  "Go thou unto the High Priest Jonathan,"
he whispered evilly; "he hath work for thee to do!"

Eleazar doubled his huge hand and whirled his head away.  There was
tense silence for a moment.

"Is there a specific transgression discovered?" Saul demanded.

The Levite weighed his answer before he gave it.

"Rumor hath it," he began, "that certain of the sect are in the city
preaching--"

"Rumor!" Saul exclaimed.  "Hast rested on the testimony of rumor?"

"Can ye track pestilence?" he asked craftily.

"By the sick!" was the retort.  "Go on!"

"It is the High Priest's vow to attack it," Joel declared.  "He hath no
other thought.  It is said that one of the disputants, who yesterday
troubled them in the Cilician synagogue with an alien doctrine,
preached the Nazarene's heresy."

"In the Cilician--in mine own synagogue!" Saul repeated, in amazement.

"In thine, in the Libertine, the Cyrenian and the Alexandrian."

"And they suffered him?" Saul persisted with growing earnestness.

"They did not understand him, then; he is but a new-comer from Galilee."

"And I was not there; I was not there!" Saul exclaimed regretfully.
"What is he called?"

"Stephen."

There was a sound from the direction of the silent pupil.  They looked
that way to see that he had dropped his scroll and had sprung to his
feet.  The Levite dropped his head between his shoulders and
scrutinized him sharply.  But the young man had fixed his eyes upon
Saul, as if waiting for his answer.

"Stephen of Galilee," the Levite added, watching the young man.  "A
Hellenist; and he wrapped his blasphemy so subtly in philosophy that
none detected it until after much thought."

The young man turned his face toward the speaker and a glimmer of anger
showed in his black eyes.

"It is bold blasphemy which ventures into a synagogue," Saul said half
to himself.

"Ah! thou pointest to the sign of peril," the Levite resumed.
"Boldness is the banner of strength; strength is the fruit of numbers;
and numbers of apostates will be the ruin of Judea and the forgetting
of God!"

Saul caught up his scrip which lay beside him, but Eleazar continued to
gaze at the beam of light penetrating the chamber.

"Wherefore the High Priest is troubled, and, laying aside all his
private ambitions, henceforward he will devote himself to the
preservation of the faith," the Levite continued.

"Which means," Eleazar interrupted, "the persecution of the apostate."

The Levite spread out his hands and lifted his shoulders.  The Rabbi
Eleazar forged too far ahead.

"It is our duty, Eleazar," Saul said, "to discover if this Galilean
preaches heresy.  Let us go to the synagogue."

Eleazar arose, a towering man, broad, heavy and slow, but his rising
was as the rising of opposition.

"I am enlisted in the teaching of the Law, not in the suppression of
heresy," he said bluntly.  "Furthermore, my work here is not yet
complete.  Wilt thou excuse me, my brother?"

"Let me not keep thee from thy duty," Saul answered courteously.

"Joel!  Come with me," Eleazar commanded, and together the two
disappeared into the interior of the college.

Then the young man who had held his place came out of the shadows into
the broad beam of the sun, which fell now over Saul.

"Peace to thee, Saul," he said; "peace and greeting."  The voice, in
contrast to the tones of the men who had lately discussed, was very
calm and level, restrained by cultivation, yet one which is never
characteristic of an undecided nature.

"Thou, Marsyas!" Saul exclaimed in sudden recognition.  He extended his
hands to meet the other's in a greeting that was more affectionate than
conventional.  The young man with sudden impulsiveness raised the hands
and pressed them to his breast.

"Saul!  Saul!" he repeated with a quiver of emotion in his voice.

"And none hath supplanted me in thy loves, Marsyas?" Saul smiled.  "Art
thou come hither for instruction?  Am I to have thee by me now in
Jerusalem?"

The glow of warmth in the rabbi's manner did not contribute its
confidence to the young man.  He seemed not less troubled than moved.
With searching eyes, he looked down from his superior height into
Saul's face.  As the two stood together, physical extremes could not
have been more perfect.

The rabbi was not well-formed, and his frame had a note of feebleness
in its make-up in spite of its youth and flesh.  The face was pale, the
eyes so deep-set as to appear sunken, the hair, thin, curling and
lightly silvered, the beard, short, full and touched with the same
early frost.  Though no recent alien blood ran in his veins, his
features were only moderately characteristic of the sons of Jacob.  He
was not erect, and the stoop in his shoulders was more extreme than the
mere relaxation from rigidity, yet less pronounced than actual
curvature.  The veins on the backs of his hands stood up from the
refined whiteness of the flesh, and when his head turned, the great
artery in his throat could be seen irregularly beating.  It was the
physique of a man not only weak but sapped by a subtle infirmity.

He wore the head-dress and the voluminous white robes of a rabbi,
girded with the blue and white cord of his calling.  But his class as a
Pharisee was marked by the heavy undulating fringes at the hem of his
garment, and by the little case of calf-skin framing a parchment
lettered in Hebrew which was bound across his forehead.  Herein, by
fringe, phylactery and the traditional colors, he published his
submission to the minutiae of the Law.

In so much the rabbi could have had twenty counterparts over Judea, but
his aggressive nature stamped him with an individuality which has had
no equal in all time.  Over his countenance was a fine assumption of
humility curiously inconsistent with a consciousness of excellence
which made an atmosphere about him that could be felt.  Yet, holding
first place over these conflicting attributes was the stamp of
tremendous mental power, and a heart-whole sweetness that was
irresistible.  The union of these four characteristics was to produce a
man that would hold fast to theory, though all fact arise and shouted
it down; who would maintain form, though the spirit had in horror long
since fled the shape.  Thus, inflexibly fixed in his convictions, he
was unlimited in his capacity for maintaining them.  In short, he was a
leader of men, a zealot, a formalist and an inquisitor--one of great
mentality dogmatized, of great spirit prejudiced, of immense
capabilities perverted.

Such was Saul of Tarsus.

But the other was a Jew of blood so pure, of type so pronounced, that
the man of mixed races before him appeared wholly foreign.  His line
had descended from the persistent love of Jacob for Rachel, through the
tents of them that slew the Midianitish women in the wilderness,
through the households of Esdras and the camps of Judas Maccabaeus.

He was above average height, and built ruggedly, as were Judah the
lion, and Jacob who wrestled with the angel.  One of in-door habit, he
was fair on the forehead, under the soft young beard and the shining
black curls at his temples.  But his cheeks were crimson, his eyes
intensely black and sparkling, his teeth, glittering ranges of shaded
ivory.  And the bold strength of his profile and the brilliance of his
color seemed finished by the deep cleft distinctly discernible.

On his face was written an attribute common among men of a time of
Messianic hopes and crises.  Asceticism with its blank purity of brow
set him apart from the sordid souls in his walk.  Yet about him there
seemed to be an atmosphere surcharged with physical radiations, with
human electricity that fairly sparkled in its strength.

Even Saul, his long-time friend, on this occasion of sudden meeting,
remarked this equal power of body and spirit.  The Pharisee glanced at
the young man's garments,--simple robes without fringes, without gaud,
and white as the snows of Hermon.

"Strange," the Pharisee said after his peculiar manner of talking with
himself, "strange that thou shouldst elect to be an Essene."  A little
proud surprise appeared on Marsyas' face.

"I can not be anything else," the young man answered.

"Thou hast not ventured.  But, nevertheless, thou wilt be noted in the
college.  The Essenes are very few these days in Jerusalem; En-Gadi
receives them all.  And thou art a doctor of Laws--a master Essene.
How long wilt thou study here?"

"Five years, Rabbi."

Yet the young man was at least twenty-five years of age.  What course
of instruction was it which carried a man into middle life before it
was finished?  What but the tremendous complexities of the Mosaic and
the Oral Law.  But these things had been taught the young man in the
forecourt of the little synagogue in Nazareth where he was born.  So,
because his learning extended beyond the reach of the provincial
Essenic philosopher who had taught him in his youth, the young man had
quitted the little hill town in Galilee to come to the feet of the
master Essene in the great college of Jerusalem.

To be an Essene was to live a celibate under the regime of community
laws, under a common roof, at a common board; to be bodily and
spiritually spotless, to believe in the resurrection of the soul, the
brotherhood of man, and the frailty and the incontinence of women; to
accept no hospitality from one not an Essene and to own no possessions
apart from the common ownership of the order.  But to be an Essenic
doctor was to be the most ascetic scholar and the most scholarly
ascetic in the world, at that time.

But Marsyas had no thought on Saul's contemplation of him.

"I heard the talk of the Levite," he said.  "Because it concerns me
much, I could not shut mine ears against it.  I, too, have heard the
creed of the Nazarenes."

"How, Marsyas?  Harkened unto the heretics?"

"I have heard their creed," he persisted in his calm way.  "It differs
little from the teachings of mine own order, the Essenes, except that
they believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and the receptiveness
of the Gentile."

"And thou callest that a little difference?"

"Not so great that one going astray after the Nazarenes could not be
satisfied with the Essenes, if he were obliged to give up his apostasy.
I seek a remedy."

"Moses supplied the remedy," Saul averred with meaning.

"The Essenes are not inflicters of punishment," was the even reply.

The Pharisee made a conciliatory gesture.  "It is then only a
discussion of the practices of my class and of thine."

But Marsyas was not satisfied.

"Thou knowest Stephen?" he asked after a pause.

"Stephen of Galilee?  Only by report."

"Perchance, then, thou knowest Galilee," the Essene resumed after a
short pause.  "Galilee that sitteth between Phoenicia the menace and
Samaria the pollution, and is not soiled; that standeth between the
Middle Sea, the power, and the Jordan, the subject, and is not humbled.
She is Israel's brawn, not easily governed of the mind which is
enthroned Jerusalem.

"We are rustics in Galilee, tillers of the soil, mountaineers and
fishers, simple rugged folk who live in the present, expecting
miracles, seeing signs, discovering prophets and wonders.  We are
patriots, bound and hooped against an alien, but bursting wide with
whatever chanceth to ferment within us.  Let there but arise a Galilean
who hath a gift or a grudge or a devil, and  proclaim himself anointed,
and he can gather unto himself a following that would assail Caesar's
stronghold, did he say the word."

He paused and seemed to recall what he had said.

"Yet, we are good Jews," he added hastily, "faithful followers of the
Law and such as Israel might select to die singly for Israel's sake.
No Galilean is ashamed of himself except when he permits himself to be
led so far into folly that he can not turn back."

The Pharisee foresaw intuitively the young man's climax.

"The Law does not remit punishment for blasphemy, even if a soul turn
back from its folly," he observed.

Marsyas' face became grave and he gazed at the place on the wall where
quivered the reflection from the splendors of the Temple.

"Stephen is my friend," he said earnestly, "a simple soul, generous,
fervid, and a true lover of God."

"If he be such, he is safe," Saul replied.

The young man fingered the scarf that girded him.

"The brothers at En-Gadi would receive him," he said.

"What need of him to retire from the world if he be a good Jew?" Saul
persisted.

Again the young man hesitated.  Saul was driving him into a declaration
that he would have led forth gradually.  Then he came to the Pharisee
and laid a persuading band on his arm.

"Go not to the synagogue," he entreated.  "Wait a little!"

"Wait in the Lord's business?" Saul asked mildly.

"Be not hastier than the chastening of the Lord; if He bears with
Stephen, so canst thou a little longer.  Give love its chance with
Stephen before vengeance undoes him wholly!"

"Marsyas," Saul protested in a tone of kindly remonstrance, "thou dost
convict him by thy very concern."

"No!" the young Essene declared, pressing upon the Pharisee in
passionate earnestness.  "I am only troubled for him.  Let me go first
and understand him, for it seems that there is doubt in the hearts of
his accusers, and after that--"

"Thine eye shall not pity him," Saul repeated in warning.

"Saul!  Saul!  He is my beloved friend!"

"Moses prepared us for such a sorrow as apostasy among those whom we
love.  What says the Lawgiver--'thy friend, which is as thine own soul,
thy hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death!'"

The lifted hands of the young Essene dropped as if they had been struck
down.

"Death!" he repeated, retreating a step.  "Wilt thou kill him?"

"I am more thy friend, Marsyas," the Pharisee went on, "because I am
zealous for the Law.  The heresy is infectious and thou art no more
safe from it than any other man.  And I would rather sit in judgment
over Stephen, whom I do not know, than over thee, who art dear to me as
a brother."

The young man drew near again.

"Dear as a brother!" he said.  "Stephen is that to me.  Even now didst
thou ask if any had supplanted thee in my loves.  No; yet my loves have
broadened, so that I can take another into my heart.  The Lord God be
merciful unto me, that I may not be driven to choose one, for defense
against the other!  Even as ye both love me, love one another!  Saul!
Thou wast my earlier friend!  I can no more endure Stephen's peril than
I can uproot thee from my heart!"

Saul flinched before the concealed intimation in the words.  A wave of
pallor succeeded by hardness swept over his face, and Marsyas,
observing the change, seized the Tarsian's hands between his own.

"Wait until I have seen him," he besought, "and if there be any taint
in his fidelity to the faith, I shall stop at no sacrifice to save him.
He is, if at all, only momentarily drawn aside, and as the Lord God
daily forgives us our sins, let us forgive a brother--"

Saul tried to draw away, but the young Essene's imploring hands held
his in a desperate clasp.

"I will give up mine instruction," he swept on.  "I will retire into
En-Gadi and take him with me!  I will give over everything and become
one of their husbandmen; I will have no aim for myself, but for
Stephen!  And if I fail I will take sentence with him!  Wait!  Wait!
Let me return to Nazareth and get my patrimony!  I will come then and
take him at once to En-Gadi!  Saul!"

But Saul threw off the beseeching hands and stepped back from the young
man.  The two gazed at each other, the Pharisee to discover a crisis in
the Essene's look; the Essene to see immovability in the Pharisee.

Then the distress in Marsyas' face changed swiftly, and an ember burned
in his black eyes.  He straightened himself and stretched out a hand.

"I have spoken!" he said.  Turning purposefully away, he went back to
his place and took up his scroll.  For a moment he held it, his eyes on
the pavement.  Slowly his fingers unclosed and the scroll
dropped--dropped as if he had done with it.

Catching up his white mantle, he walked swiftly out of the chamber and
Saul looked after him, yearning, wistful and sad.

Joel came out of the interior of the building.

"I will go with thee to the synagogue," he offered.

The Pharisee looked at him with cold dislike in his eyes, and,
inclining his head, led the way out.

At the threshold of the porch he halted.  In the street opposite two
young men were walking slowly.  One was slight, young, graceful and
simply clad in a Jewish smock.  The other was Marsyas, the Essene, who
went with an arm over the shoulders of the first, and, bending, seemed
to speak with passionate earnestness to his companion.  The faces of
the two young men thus side by side showed the same spiritual mode of
living, and youthful purity of heart.  But the expression of the
slighter one was less ascetic than happy, less rigorous than confident.

As Marsyas spoke, the other smiled; and his smile was an illumination,
not entirely earthly.

Joel seized Saul's arm, and held it while the two approached,
unconscious of the watchers in the shadow of the porch.

"That is he," he whispered avidly.  "That is he!  Stephen, the
apostate!"

Stephen turned his head casually, and, catching the Pharisee's eye,
returned the gaze with a little friendly questioning; then he raised
his face to Marsyas and so they passed.

The pallor on Saul's face deepened.




CHAPTER II

A PRUDENT EXCEPTION

After he had separated from Stephen, Marsyas went to the house of a
resident Essene with whom he made his home, to be fed, to be washed, to
offer supplication and to announce his decision to go on a journey.  At
the threshold of his host's house he put aside his sandals and let
himself in with a murmured formula.  In a little time he came forth
with a wallet flung over his shoulder and took the streets toward
Gennath Gate.  It was not written in the laws of his order that he
should make greater preparation for a journey.  He had already
acquainted himself with the abiding-places of Essenes in villages
between Jerusalem and Nazareth and, assured of their hospitality and
the provision of the Essene's God, he knew that he would fare well to
the hill town of Galilee.

So he passed through the city by the walk of the purified, garments
well in hand lest they touch women or the wayside dust, meeting the eye
of no man, proud of his humility, punctilious in his simplicity, and
wearing unrest under his shell of calm.  He had an unobstructed path, a
path ceremonially clean.  He had but to hesitate on the edge of a
congestion, and the first gowned and bearded Jew that observed him
signed his companions and the way was opened.  For the Essenes were the
best of men, the truly holy men of Israel.

He went down between the fronts of featureless houses, through the
golden haze of sun and dust that overhung the narrow, stony mule-ways,
until the distant dream towers of Mariamne, of Phasaelus and of Hippicus
became imminent, brooding shapes of blackened masonry, and the wall cut
off the mule-ways and the great shady arch of the gate let in a glimpse
of the country without.  On one hand was the Praetorium, the Roman
garrison encamped in the upper palace of Herod the Great; on the other,
the houses of the Sadducees, the Jewish aristocrats, covered the ridge
of Akra.  Marsyas came upon an obstruction.  At a gate opening into the
street, camels knelt, servants of diverse nationality but of one livery
clustered round them, several unoccupied Jewish traveling chairs in the
hands of bearers stood near.  In the center of the considerable crowd,
a number of Sadducees, priests of high order and Pharisees in garments
characteristic of their several classes were taking ceremonious
farewell of a man already seated in a howdah.  No one took notice of
the Essene, who stood waiting with assumed patience until he should be
given room.

Presently the camel-drivers cried to their beasts which arose with a
lurch, priests and Sadducees hurried into their chairs, the servants
fell into rank, the crowd shifted and ordered itself and a procession
trailed out alongside the swaying camels toward Gennath Gate.  A
distinguished party was taking leave under escort.

Marsyas repressed the impatient word that arose to his lips and
followed after the deliberate, moving blockade.

The rank of the departing strangers did not encourage the city rabble
to follow, and as the escort kept close to the head of the procession
the hindmost camel was directly before Marsyas and the occupant of the
howdah in his view.  Over head and shoulders the full skirts of a vitta
fell, erasing outline, and, contrasting the stature with that of the
attending servant, he concluded that the small traveler was a child.

Under the dripping shade and chill of the ancient Gate they passed and
out into the road worn into a trench through the rock and dry gray
earth and on to the oval pool which supplied Hippicus, where a halt for
a final farewell was made.  Again Marsyas was delayed, and for a much
longer time.  He might have climbed out of the sunken roadway and
passed around the obstruction, but the banks above were lined with
clamoring mendicants, women and lepers, and he could not escape
ceremonial defilement that might more seriously delay his journey.

Meanwhile the courtly leave-taking progressed with dignified sloth.
Gradually Sadducee, priest and Pharisee moved one by one from the
departing aristocrat.  At the hindmost camel the Pharisees stopped not
at all, but saluting without looking at the traveler, the priests
merely raised their hands in blessing; but the Sadducees to a man
salaamed profoundly, and passed on if they were old, or lingered
uncertainly if they were young.

A little flicker of enlightenment showed in the young Essene's
brilliant eyes, an angry tension in his lips straightened their curve
and he drew himself up indignantly.  The young aristocrats tarried and
laughed his precious time away with a woman!  That was the traveler in
the last howdah!  Twice and thrice the time they had spent speeding the
rest of the party they consumed bidding the woman farewell, and every
moment carried danger nearer to Stephen.

Then an old voice, refined and delicate as the note of an ancient lyre,
lifted in laughing protest from the front, the young men laughed,
responding, but moved away to their chairs, the camel swung out into a
rapid walk, and crying farewells the party separated.

With abating irritation Marsyas moved after them.  At the intersection
of the first road, he would pass these travelers and hasten on.

A breeze from the hills cut off the smell of the city with a full
stream of country freshness.  Marsyas lifted his head and drew in a
long breath that was almost a sigh.  His first trouble weighed heavily
upon him and its triple nature of distress, heart-hurt and
apprehension, sensations so new and so near to nature as to be at wide
variance with anything Essenic, moved him into a mood essentially
human.  Then an exhalation from aft the fragrant spring-flowered groves
stole into the pure air about him, bewildering, sweet, and through it,
as harmoniously as if the perfume had taken tone, a distant hill bird
sent a single stave of liquid notes.  The small figure in the howdah at
that moment turned and looked back, and Marsyas for the first time in
his life gazed straight into the eyes of a beautiful girl.

Spring-fragrance, bird-song and flower-face were harmony too perfect
for Essenism to discountenance.  Without the slightest discomposure,
and absolutely unconscious of what he was doing, Marsyas gazed and
listened until the vitta fell hastily over the face, the bird flew away
and the garden incense died.

He passed just then the intersecting road, but he continued after the
last camel.  He walked after that through many drifts of fragrance, and
many hill birds sang, but he knew without looking that the flower face
was not turned back toward him again.

He halted for the night at a little village and sought the hospitality
of an Essene hermit that lived on the outskirts.  But in the night,
terror for Stephen, of that unknown kind which is conviction without
evidence and irrefutable, seized him.  He endured until the early
watches of the morning and took the road to Nazareth while the stars
still shone.

He had forgotten his fellow wayfarers of the previous afternoon until
their camels, speeding like the wind, overtook him beyond Mt. Ephraim.
In a vapor of flying scarves he caught again a glimpse of the flower
face turned his way.

Then for the first time in his life he reviled his poverty that forced
him to walk when the life of the much-beloved depended upon despatch.
Nazareth, clinging like a wasps' nest under the eaves of its chalky
hills, was many leagues ahead, and the sun must set and rise again
before he could climb up its sun-white streets.

His hope was not strong.  His plan had won such little respect from him
that he had not ventured to propose it to Stephen.  It was extreme
sacrifice for him to make, a sacrifice lifelong in effect, and in that
he based his single faith in its success.  Stephen loved him and would
not persist in the fatal apostasy, if he knew that his friend, the
Essene, was to deny himself ambition and fame for Stephen's sake.

He would get his patrimony of the old master Essene who held it in
trust for him, formally give over his instruction, bind himself to the
perpetual life of husbandry and seclusion, and then tell Stephen what
he had done and why he had done it.

Everything else but the appeal to Stephen's love for him had failed,
and he had shrunk from forcing that trial.

But Saul had meant to go to the Synagogue at once; there were
innumerable chances that he was already too late.

At noon he came upon the party of travelers again.  A fringed tent had
been pitched under a cluster of cedars and the slaves were putting away
the last of the meal.  He saw now as he hurried by that there was a
spare and elegant old man, in magistrate's robes, reclining with
singular grace on a pallet of rugs before the lifted side of the tent.
The girl sat near.  He noted also that the master and the slaves fell
silent as he approached and looked at him with interest.

But he sped on, forgetting that it was the noon and that he was hungry,
heated and weary, and remembering only that the time and the distance
were deadly long.

There was the soft pad-pad of a camel-hoof behind him and a servant of
the aristocrat that he had passed drew up at his side.  With a light
leap the man dropped from the beast's neck and bowed low.  The ease of
his salaam and the purity of his speech were strong evidences of
training among the loftiest classes of the time.  The attitude asked
permission to address the Essene.

Marsyas signed him to speak.

"I pray thee accept my master's apologies," the man said, "for
interrupting thy journey.  He bids me say that he is a stranger and
unfamiliar with the land.  We have found no water for the meal.  Wilt
thou direct us to a pool?"

Marsyas checked his impatience.

"Save that I am in great haste I would tarry to direct him.  But let
him send hence into the country to the westward, half a league to the
hill of the flat summit.  There is a grove by a well of sweet water."

"Nay, the country is as obscure to us as the whereabouts of the pool,"
the servant protested.  "We are Alexandrians and as good as lost in
these hills.  If thou wilt speak to my master, he will understand
better than his foolish servant."

Irritation forced its way up through the Essenic calm.  The servant
salaamed again.

"The Essenes are noted even in Alexandria for their charity," he said
deftly.  Marsyas turned with him and went back to the fringed tent.

The old aristocrat still lounged gracefully, as no thirsty man does, on
his pallet of rugs, but the girl had drawn farther away and her eyes
were veiled.

"I perceived by thy garments that thou art an Essene," the old man
said, "and therefore a safe guide in this land of few milestones."

Marsyas thanked him and waited restlessly on the inquiry.

"We have not found a well since mid-morning and I crave fresh drink.
The water we bear is brackish."

"Bid thy servants go westward without deviation for less than half a
league, until they come unto a hill with a flat summit, which can be
seen afar off.  They will find there a grove with a well."

"And none is nearer?" the old man asked idly.

"There is none nearer."

"My servants were bred to the desert; they are ill mountaineers.  Thou
wilt show them the way?"

"They can not lose the way," Marsyas protested; "it is the flock's well
and all the hill paths lead to it.  Think not ill of me, that I can not
go, for I am in haste."

The old man smiled a little.

"An Essene, and he will not stop to give an old man water?"

Marsyas frowned resentfully, but turned to the servant at hand.

"Get thy fellows and the water-skins and follow!"

He turned off the Roman road and struck into the hills to the west.
The servitors of the Alexandrian caught up amphoras and hastened after
him.

In less than an hour he reappeared before the man under the fringed
tent.

"Thy servants are returned.  Peace and farewell."

"Nay, but it is the noon.  Wilt thou not tarry and rest?"

"I go," Marsyas said resolutely, "to save a life."

"Ah, then I did wrong to delay thee!  I remember that Essenes are
physicians."

"We can not cure the wicked of their evil intent, so I haste to save
one threatened with another's malice.  My friend is in peril.  I must
go unto Nazareth and return unto Jerusalem, before I can save him.  And
even now I may be too late!"

The magistrate searched the young man's face and then the
half-incredulous curiosity passed out of his manner.

"Pardon mine idle wasting of thy precious minutes," he said soberly.
"Go, and the Lord speed thee!"

Marsyas bowed low, and keeping his eyes fixed on the gray earth, lest
they stray in search of the flower face, he turned again toward
Nazareth.  He heard a very soft, very hurried and almost imperious
whisper, as he moved away, but he knew that it was not for him to hear,
and he did not tarry.  But a word from the magistrate brought him up.

"Stay!  It is not customary for any outside of thine order to offer an
Essene assistance, since we would spare thee the pain of refusal.
But--it hath been suggested that thy haste may permit thee to waive thy
scruples and accept help from me--as it hath been suggested--I filched
precious time from thee.  Thou canst ride with us, if thou wilt, and
take my daughter's camel.  She will come with me."

The brilliant eyes no longer obeyed the restraint which would keep them
from the flower face.  He turned to the girl, shyly withdrawn under the
shade of the fringed tent, and knew by the lowered eyes and the warmer
flush mantling the cheek that it was she that had made these
suggestions.

Twenty reasons why he should accept the magistrate's offer arose to
combat the single stern admonition of Custom.  He was not yet under the
Essenic vow to accept hospitality from none but Essenes, though he had
lived in its observance all his life; he could not reach Nazareth under
a day's journey and these swift beasts could carry him into the village
by midnight.  And Stephen's life depended on it.

"We depart even now," the magistrate added, "and I promise thee no
further delay."

Ancient usage accused the young man on account of the woman, but by
this time she had arisen and passed out of his sight, as if in good
faith that he should not be troubled by her presence.

"Thou yieldest me invaluable aid," he said in a lowered tone, "and
since I am not an elected Essene, but a ward of the brotherhood and a
postulant, I am free and most glad to have thy help.  Be thou blessed."

The magistrate acknowledged the young man's acceptance by a wave of a
withered white hand and the slaves made the camels ready to proceed.

At midnight, the rocking camels sped without apparent weariness up the
uneven streets of Nazareth, white under the stars.  At the lewen of the
single khan, the drivers drew up and Marsyas alighted to go forward and
thank his host, but the magistrate slept, even while his servants
lifted him down from the howdah.  As he turned away, regretfully, he
confronted the veiled girl, almost childlike in stature under the
protection of her tall handmaiden.  She dropped her head modestly and
moved aside to let him pass, but he hesitated, and stopped.  Few indeed
had been the words he had addressed to women in his lifetime, and now
his speech was more than ever unready.

"Thy father sleeps, yet I would not depart with my thanks unsaid.  Be
thou the messenger and give him my gratitude when he waketh."

"It shall be my pleasure," she answered softly, "and may thy hopes come
to pass.  Farewell."

"Thou hast my thanks.  The peace of the Lord God attend thee.
Farewell."




CHAPTER III

THE FIRST MARTYR

Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year.  It was a
time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds.
Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompassed
Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur.
Above it the leaning cedars, newly-tipped with verdure, spread their
peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over
the soil.  Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in
fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were
scarlet and gold in shallows of green.  Almond orchards snowed in the
valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear
cold water.  The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in
mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with
undulating vapors, smoky and illusory.

The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which
denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers.
Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles
and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun.

It was late afternoon and without the cedar hedge of Gethsemane, where
the ancient green wall cut off the streaming wind, was a group sitting
close together on the earth.

One, much covered in garments barbarously striped, and who bestirred
long meager limbs now and then, was an Arab.  Next to him a Jewish
husbandman from Bethesda squatted awkwardly, the length of his coarse
smock troubling him, while his hide sandals had been put off his hard
brown feet.  His neighbor was a Damascene, and two or three others sat
about two who were employed in the center of this racial miscellany.

One of these was a Greek, the ruin of a Greek, not yet thirty and
bearing, in spite of the disfigurement of degradation, solitary
evidences of blood and grace.  Opposite him sat a Roman, in a scarlet
tunic.

The two were playing dice, but the end of the game was in sight, for
the neat pile of sesterces beside the Roman was growing and the Greek
had staked his last on the next throw.

Presently the Greek took the tesserae and threw them.  The Roman glanced
at the numbers up and smiled a little.  The Greek scowled.

"The old defeat," he muttered.  "Fortune perches on the standards of
Rome even in a game of dice.  Oh, well, we have had our day!"

The Roman stowed away the sesterces in a wallet and hung it again
inside his tunic.

"Yes, you have had your day," he replied.  "Marathon, Thermopylae and
Plataea--in my philosophy you can afford to lose a game of dice to a
wolf-suckled Roman!"

The Greek sat still with his chin upon his breast, and the Roman,
getting upon his feet, scrutinized the sluggish group of on-lookers.

His interest was not idle curiosity in the men.  Such as they were to
be seen cumbering the markets and streets of Jerusalem by day or by
night throughout the year.  They were types of that which the world
calls the rabble--at once a strength and a destruction, a creature or a
master, as the inclination of its manipulators is or as the call of the
situation may be.  Individually, it has a mind; collectively, it has
not; at all times it is a thing of great potentialities overworked, and
of great needs habitually ignored.  That the man in scarlet should scan
each one of these, as one appraises another's worth in drachmae, was a
natural proceeding, old as the impulse in the shrewd to prey upon the
unwary.  Out of this or that one, perhaps he could turn an odd denarius
at another game of dice.

But when he looked reflectively at the west, where the broad brow of
the hills was outlined against a great radiance, he calculated on the
hour of remaining daylight and the distance from that point to another
in Bezetha far across Jerusalem, and felt of his wallet.

It was bulky enough for one day's winnings, and entirely too bulky to
be lost to some of the criminals or vagrants that would walk the night.
With a motion of his hand he saluted the defeated Greek and the gaping
group which sat in its place and watched him, and turned down the Mount
toward Jerusalem.

To a casual observer it would appear that he was a Roman.  He wore the
short garments characteristic of the race, was smooth-shaven, and
displayed idolatrous images on his belt, and, in disregard of Judean
custom, uncovered his head.  But his features under analysis were
Arabic, modified, not by the solidity of Rome but by the grace of the
classic Jew.

He was built on long, narrow lines, spare as a spear stuck in the sand
before a dowar, but Judean flesh rounded his angles and reduced the
Arabian brownness of complexion.  He was strikingly handsome and tall;
not imposing but elegant, modeled for symmetry of his type, not for
ideality, for refinement, not for strength.  His hands were delicate
almost to frailty, his feet slender and daintily shod.  Never a Roman
walked so lightly, never a Jew so jauntily.

His presence was captivating.  Naivete or impudence, carelessness or
recklessness, gravity or mockery were ever uncertain in their
delineation on his face, and one gazed trying to decide and gazing was
undone.  Never did he reveal the perspective of a single avenue in his
intricate and indirect disposition.  He forwent the human respect that
is given to the straight-forward man, for the excited interest which
the populace pays to the elusive nature.

It was hard to name his years.  He was too well-knit to be young, too
supple to be old.  The only undisputed evidence that he was past
middle-age was not in his person but behind the affected mood in his
soft black eyes.  There was another nature, literally in ambush!

He had reached the gentler slopes of the Mount, when a young man
dressed wholly in white approached from the north.  The wayfarer walked
hesitatingly, his eyes roving over the towered walls of the City of
David.  There were other wayfarers on Olivet besides the man in white
and the man in scarlet.  There were rustics and traveling Sadducees, in
chairs borne by liveried servants, Pharisees with staff and scrip,
marketers, shepherds, soldiers on leave and slaves on errands, men,
women and children of every class or calling which might have affairs
without the walls of Jerusalem.  But each turned his steps in one
direction, for the night was not distant and Jerusalem would shelter
them all.

The hill was busy, but many took time to observe the one in white.  The
men he met glanced critically at his fine figure and passed; the women
looked up at him from under their wimples, and down again, quickly;
some of the children lagged and gazed wistfully at his face as if they
wanted his notice.  Even the man in scarlet, attracted by the wholesome
presence of the comely young man, studied him carelessly.  He was a
little surprised when the youth stopped before him.

"Wilt thou tell me, brother, how I may reach the Gate of Hanaleel from
this spot?" he asked.  His manner was anxious and hurried, his eyes
troubled.

"Thou, a son of Israel, and a stranger in the city of thy fathers?" the
other commented mildly.

"The Essenes are rare visitors to Jerusalem," was the reply.

"Ah!" the other said to himself, "the bleached craven of En-Gadi.  Dost
thou come from the community on the Dead Sea?" he asked aloud.

"I journey thither," the Essene answered patiently.  "I come from
Galilee."

The man in scarlet looked a little startled and put his slender hand up
to his cheek so that a finger lay along the lips.  "Now, may thy haste
deaden thy powers of recognition, O white brother," he hoped in his
heart, "else thou seest a familiar face in me."

He lifted the other arm and pointed toward the wall of the city.

"Any of these gates will lead thee within," he said.

"Doubtless, but once within any but the one I seek, I am more lost than
I am here.  Wilt thou direct me?"

The man in scarlet motioned toward a splendid mass of masonry rising
many cubits above the wall toward the north.  "There," he said.  "Go
hence over the Bridge of the Red Heifer and follow along the roadway on
the other side of Kedron."

As the man in white bowed his thanks, his elbow struck against an
obstruction which yielded hastily.  The two looked, to see the Greek
who had been defeated at dice make off up the hill.  The Essene caught
at his pilgrim wallet which hung at his side and found it open.

"Ha! a thief!" the man in scarlet cried.  "Did he rob thee?"

His quick eyes dropped to the wallet.  There were many small round
cylinders wrapped in linen within, evidently stacks of coin of various
sizes from the little denarius to the large drachma; a handful of loose
gold and several rolls of parchment which might have been bills of
exchange.  The Essene frowned and closed the mouth of the purse.

"A trifle is gone," he said.  "He was discovered in time."

"If thou carryest this to the Temple, friend," the older man urged,
"get it there to-night, else thou walkest in danger continually."

"I give thee thanks; I shall be watchful; peace to thee,"--and the
young man walked swiftly away.

"Wary as the eyes of Juno!" the man in scarlet said to himself.
"Essenes never make offering at the Temple; that treasure goes into the
common fund of the order.  Now, what a shame that the unsated maw of
the Essenic treasury should swallow that and hold it uselessly when I
need gold so much!  Would that I had been born a good thief!"

He sauntered after the young Essene and idly kept him in sight.

"He walks like a legionary and talks like a patrician, but doubtless he
hath the spirit of an ass, or he would not have let that knave of a
Greek make off with so much as a lepton.  I wonder if I should not seek
out the thief and win his pilferings from him."

The Essene in the distance, just before he reached the Bridge of the
Red Heifer, unslung his wallet and resettled the strap over his
shoulder, but the purse did not reappear at his side.  He had concealed
it within his gown.

"I wish he were not in such uncommon haste; I might persuade him to
loan it me.  Money-lending is second nature to a Jew.  There must be
several thousand drachmae in that wallet--enough to take me to
Alexandria.  I wonder if he sped so all the way from--_Hercle!_  What
an aristocrat!"--noting the Essene draw aside his robes from contact
with the unclean mob at the opposite end of the causeway.

"What! do they resent it?" he exclaimed, lifting himself on tiptoe to
watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up
by rapidly assembling numbers.

Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a mass,
Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded
up clambering, running people.  The hurry was directed along the brook
outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering
hundreds, flung itself toward the north.

The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in
the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd.

But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth
this demonstration.  The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Hanaleel
was discharging a struggling mass that instantly expanded in the open
into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep.  The flying body the man
in scarlet believed to encompass the young Essene swept up to the
circle and melted into it.

Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the
marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers,
who had watched him defeat the Greek.  Focalizing at the Bridge of the
Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and
precipitated him into its heart.  Rushed toward the road on the
opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast,
let the mass stream by him.

When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely
drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts.  But he
could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him.

"What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him.  The man shook
his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe.

Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back.
In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of
daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the
center.  A young man stood there.  About his forehead was bound the
phylactery of a Pharisee.  At his feet was a tumbled heap of white
outer garments.  Then the breach closed up.

"A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself.  But such a deduction
would not answer for the behavior of the crowd.  Its temper was
ferocious.  They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands
above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they
cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious
grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost
rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the
rearmost which was perfectly in the dark.

It was typically the voice of the Beast in man.  Some circumstance,
unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint.  Therefore the
wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the
wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"

Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the
incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous,
was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery.
Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of
the jackal in man.  Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and
upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with
strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the
man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this
demonstration.

The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders.  He had suddenly
evolved an explanation--the blood of a fellow man.  He turned away, not
because he had revolted--he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus
in Rome--but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned
the particulars of the uproar.  A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry,
as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on
the brink of Kedron.  He mounted it and sat.  Yes; he would wait, also,
till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the
ring.  It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to
pass untried.

The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the
forward ranks.  Movement which had been general throughout the interval
increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing.

The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines
already purpling with night.  Only the glory on the summit of Moriah
blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the
gold of the sunset.

Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried
back through Hanaleel into the city.  Hardly had they disappeared
before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which
broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle.  The
flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into
a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds.  Another sort of clamor
arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic
and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to
disperse a crowd.

A solid core of fugitives drove through the gate beside Hanaleel and
the Sheep Gate; fragments, detachments and individuals rolled down the
banks into Kedron; screaming, tumbling, falling bodies fled north and
south by the roadway and wherever there was a gate or a niche or a
crevice it received fugitives who appeared no more.  Dust arose and
obscured everything but the flash of arms and armor which rived through
it like lightning in a cloud.  The uproar began to subside, and
presently the laughter and jests of the soldiers mounted above the
protest.  Fainter and fainter the cries grew, fewer the sounds of
flying feet, and at last, strong, harsh and biting as the clang of a
sledge upon metal, the command of the centurion to fall in settled even
the shouts of the soldiers.

There was the even, musical ring of whetting armor as the column filed
back through Hanaleel, and silence.  The man in scarlet, who had sat on
his ash-heap and smiled throughout the dispersing of the mob, a royal
creature enthroned and entertained by the discomfiture of the mass,
suddenly realized that the obscurity, which he had expected to lift,
was the shadow of night.  He arose and, dusting off his scarlet skirt,
moved out into the road.

At that moment, a figure moving nearer the wall passed him, walking
swiftly.  It was the Essene.

"Ho! a discreet youth! a cautious youth!" the man in scarlet said to
himself; "profiting by experience, he waited in safety somewhere until
this light-fingered rabble was dispersed.  That must be a fat purse, a
fat purse!  And I am looking for such!"

He quickened his pace to overtake the young man and in his interest
forgot the late riot.  Suddenly the young Essene stopped as if he had
been commanded.  The man in scarlet brought up and looked.

Before them was an immense trampled dusty ring.  In the falling
twilight, he saw several huddled shapes, in attitudes of suffering and
sorrow, kneeling together in its center over something which was
stretched on the sand.

A strangling gasp attracted the older man's attention once more to the
Essene.  His figure seemed to shrink, his cheeks fell in.  Swiftly
about his lips crawled the gray pallor of one physically sick from
shock to the senses.  His eyes flared wide and the next instant he flew
at the mourning cluster about the prostrate shape in the ring.  One or
two fell back under his hand, and he leaned over and looked.

A cry, heartrending in its agony, broke from his lips.  He dropped to
his knees and fell forward with his face in the dust.  A murmur of
compassion arose from the little group around him, and the man in
scarlet lifted his shoulders and turned his back on the blighting
spectacle of the young man's anguish.

He walked hurriedly out of the falling night on the Mount, through
Hanaleel, into the lights and noise of the City of David.  Soldiers on
the point of closing the great gate paused to let him through.

"Comrade," he said to one, "what did they out yonder?"

"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen," was the reply.

[Illustration: "They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen"]




CHAPTER IV

THE BANKRUPT

Somewhat subdued, the man in scarlet walked through the night in the
City of David.  After his first sensations he was discomfited.

"Now this is what comes of the irregular barbarity in Judean
executions," he ruminated.  "In Rome this Nazarene would have been
despatched in order and his body borne away to the puticuli and no
opportunity given for that painful scene outside.  Doubtless I should
have convinced the young man and borrowed his gold of him, by this
time.  Certainly, Fortune is a haughty jade when once offended.  But I
shall be fortunate again; by all the gods, Jewish or Gentile, I will
compel her smiles!

"It would be my luck never to see him again; he will probably linger
only to see this dead man buried, and go on to En-Gadi, as he said he
would.  It would hardly be seemly to approach him about his gold, in
his unhappiness, or I would waylay him, yet.  A pest on the zealots!
Why did they not hold off this stoning for a day?"

Moodily occupied by his thoughts, he passed unconscious of the careless
people about him.  The huge tower of Antonia set on the brink of Mount
Moriah frowned blackly over the street and in its shadow the idle life
of the night laughed and reveled and sauntered.  The woman of the city
was there, the Roman soldier in armor, the alien that bowed to Brahm or
Bel, the son of the slow Nile, of the Orontes and of the yellow Tiber.
It was not the resort of the lowest classes, but of those that were at
variance with the spirit of the city, or the times and their
philosophies.  Light streamed from open doorways, the wail of lyres and
the jingle of castanets resounded within and without.  Now and then
belated carters, driving slow donkeys, would plod through the
revelry--a note of relentless duty which would not be forgotten.
Again, humbler folk would retreat into wagon-ways or hug the walls to
permit the passage of a Sadducee and his retinue, or a decurion and his
squad--rank and power asserting their inexorable prerogative.

Presently there approached the click of hoofs upon flagging.  A
soldier, passing through a broad shaft of light from a booth, stopped
short, drew himself up and swung his short sword at present.  Up the
street, from lip to lip of every arms-bearing man, ran his abrupt call
to attention.

A body of legionaries appeared suddenly in the ray of light--brassy
shapes in burnished armor, picked for stature and bearing.  Not even
the plunge into blackness again broke the precision and confidence of
that tread before which the world had fled as did now the mule-riders
and the pedestrians of Jerusalem.

After them, the beam of light projected two horsemen into sudden view.
There was the rattle and ring of saluting soldiers by the way.  The
radiance showed up a typical Roman in the armor of a general, but in
deference to Israelitish prejudice against images, the eagle was
removed from his helmet, the bosses of Titan heads from breastplate and
harness.  This was Vitellius, Proconsul of Syria and the shrewdest
general on Caesar's list.  By his side rode Herrenius Capito, Caesar's
debt-collector, a thin-faced Roman in civilian dress, and with the
ashes of age sprinkled on his hair.

The man in scarlet took one glance at the gray old countenance frowning
under the sudden light of the lamp and slid into the obscurity of an
open alley at hand.  He did not emerge till the hoof-beats had died
away.

"So thou comest in search of me, sweet Capito," he muttered, "and I am
penniless.  But it is comforting to know that thou hast no more hope of
getting the three hundred thousand drachmae which I owe to Caesar, than I
have of paying it!"

After a little silence, he said further to himself, with added regret:

"Now, had I that young Essene's gold, Capito would not find me in
Jerusalem!  O Alexandria!  I must reach thee, though I turn dolphin and
swim!"

He continued on his way to the north wall, where he found exit
presently into Bezetha, the unwalled suburb of Jerusalem.  Here the
houses were comparatively new, less historic, less pretentious than
those in the old city.  Here were inns in plenty, relaxed order and a
general absence of the racial characteristics and the influence of
religion.  The middle classes of Jerusalem dwelt here.

It was dark, poorly paved, and the man in scarlet laid his hand on his
purse under his tunic and walked with circumspection toward a khan.  It
was no surprise to him to hear the sounds of struggle and outcry.  He
stopped to catch the direction of the conflict that he might avoid it.
It came out of a street so narrow, in a district so squalid, that
happiness seemed to have fled the spot.  If ever the wealthy entered
the place, it was to seek out human beings hungry enough to sell
themselves as slaves.

The commotion centered before a hovel, a tragedy in sounds, ghastly
because the night made it unembodied.  The man in scarlet located it as
out of his path and would have continued but for the insistent screams
of a woman in the struggle.  Harsh shouts attempted to cry her down,
but desperation lent her strength and the suburb shuddered with her mad
cries.

The man in scarlet lagged, shook his shoulders as if to throw off the
influence of the appeal and finally stopped.  At that moment several
torches of pitch, lighted at once, threw a smoky light over the scene.
The passage was obstructed by a group of men uniformly dressed, and
several spectators attracted by the commotion.  Assured that this was
arrest and not violence, the curiosity of the man in scarlet drew him
that way.  At a nearer view, he saw that the aggressors were Shoterim
or Temple lictors, under command of a Pharisee wearing the habiliments
of a rabbi.  The man in scarlet identified him as the referee in the
center of the ring about the stoning.  The sudden lighting of the
torches convinced him that the attack had its inception in secret.

In the center of the fight was a middle-aged woman clinging desperately
about the bodies of a young man and a young woman.  It was the efforts
of the Shoterim to tear her away and her resistance that had made the
arrest violent.

Shouts and revilings told the man in scarlet the meaning of the
disturbance.  The ferrets of the High Priest, Jonathan, had discovered
a house of Nazarenes and were taking them.

"More ill-timed zeal!" he muttered to himself.  "Or let me be exact:
more bloody politics!"

He had turned to leave when a figure in white, directed from the city,
drove past him and through to the center of the crowd, with the
irresistible force of a hurled stone.  Spectators fell to the right and
left before it and the man in scarlet drawing in a breath of amazement
turned to see what the light had to disclose.

It was the young Essene, hardly recognizable for the distortion of
deadly hate and passion on his face.  There were dark stains on his
garments and dust on his black hair.  Every drop of blood had left his
cheeks, but his eyes blazed with a light that was not good to see.

He went straight at the Pharisee.  His grasp fell upon Saul's shoulder,
drove in and seized upon its sinews.  The startled Tarsian turned and
the young Essene with bent head gazed grimly down at him.  An
interested silence fell over both captor and captive.  The blaze in the
young man's eyes reddened and flickered.

"I have been seeking thee, Saul of Tarsus," he said in a voice of
deadly silkiness.  "Thou hast been most zealous for the Law in
Stephen's case.  Look to it that thou fail not in the Law, for I shall
profit by thy precept!  And even as Stephen fell, so shalt thou fall;
even as Stephen came unto death, so shalt thou come!  Mark me, and
remember!"

The words were menace made audible; it was more than a threat: it was
prophecy and doom.

A tingle of admiration ran over the man in scarlet.  He who could leave
the bier of a murdered friend to visit vengeance on the head of the
murderer was no weakling.

"A Roman, by the gods!" he exclaimed to himself.  "A noble adversary! a
man, by Bacchus!"

A threatening murmur arose from the spectators.  But there was no
responsive fury kindled in Saul's eyes.  Instead he looked at Marsyas
with unutterable sorrow on his face.  Presently his shoulders lifted
with a sigh.

"The city festereth with Nazarenes as a wound with thorns," he said to
himself; aloud he called, "Joel."

The Levite materialized out of obscurity and bowed jerkily.

"Bear witness to this young man's behavior.  Lictors, take him.  We
shall hold him for examination as a Nazarene and an apostate."

Marsyas started and his hand dropped.  Plainly, he had not expected to
be accused of apostasy.  But the old mood asserted itself.

"This for thy slander of Stephen in the college," he said with
premonitory calm when the Levite approached him, and struck with
terrific force.  The Levite's body shot backward and dropped heavily on
the earth.  The rest of the lictors precipitated themselves upon the
young man, and, in desperation and in fury, the one man and the numbers
fought.

Meanwhile the man in scarlet thought fast.  His Roman love of defiance
and war had roused in him a most compelling respect for the young
Essene, but cupidity put forth swift and convincing argument even
beyond the indorsement of admiration.  If the Shoterim took the young
man in ward, he would be executed and the treasure come into the hands
of the state for disposition.  In view of the fact that Herrenius
Capito had traced the bankrupt to Jerusalem, Jerusalem was no longer
tenantable for the bankrupt.  He had to have money to escape to
Alexandria and the Essene was too profitable a chance to be lost to the
murdering hands of fanatics.

Excited and bent only on preventing the arrest, the man sprang into the
crowd and forced his way to the Essene's side.  But the next instant he
also was sent reeling by a blow delivered by Marsyas in his blind
resolution not to be taken without difficulty.  Before the bankrupt
could recover, the united force of spectators and lictors flung itself
upon Marsyas.

Steadying himself, the man in scarlet urged his bruised brain to think.
Half of his life for a ruse! for nothing but a ruse could save the
young man, now.

Then, with a half-suppressed cry of eagerness, the bankrupt took to his
heels and ran toward the city as only an Arab trained in Roman gymnasia
could run.

The sentry at the gate passed him and he entered on the marble
pavements of the streets for the finest exhibition of speed he had
shown since he had carried off the laurel in Rome.  He knew the city as
a hare knows its runways.  He cut through private passages, circled
watchful constabulary, eluded congestions, and took the quick slopes of
Jerusalem's hills as though the deep lungs of a youth supplied him.

When the broad, marble-paved street, which let in some glimpse of the
starry sky upon the passer, opened between the rich residences of the
Sadducees, the white luster of many burning torches lighted an area on
a distant slope at its head.  The running man sped on, taking the rise
of Mount Zion without slackening, until he rushed upon a sentry
obscured under the brooding shadow of a heavy wall.

"Halt!"  The challenge of the sentry brought him up.

"Without the password, comrade," he panted.  "Call the officer of the
guard.  And by our common quarrels in Rome do thou haste, for if I see
not Vitellius and Herrenius Capito this instant I expire!"

The cry of the sentry passed from post to post until the centurion of
the guard emerged from a small gate.

"One cometh without the countersign," the sentry said.

"A visitor for Vitellius and Herrenius Capito," the bankrupt explained.

"The general and his guest have retired," was the blunt reply.

"Hip! but thou art the same glib liar thou always wast, Aulus," the
bankrupt laughed.  "Take me into the light, and slap me with thy sword
if I am frank beyond the privileges of mine acquaintance with thee!"

The gate-keeper, in response to a short word from the dubious Aulus,
let down the chains with a rattle and a small side portal swung in,
revealing an interior of semi-dusk.

The centurion conducted his visitor within.  Torches stuck in sconces
high up in the walls lighted a quadrangle of tessellated pavement,
terminating distantly in banks of marble stairs of such breadth and
stature that their limits were lost in the unilluminated night.

After a quick glance, the centurion started and slapped his helmet in
salute to the bankrupt.  The other responded with a skill and grace
that could not have been assumed for the moment.  The dexterity of the
camp was written in the movement.

"I am expected of Capito," the bankrupt said, which was true only in a
very limited sense.

"I know, and do thou follow.  Thou shalt see him.  Were he dead and
inurned he would arise to thee."

The man in scarlet smiled a little grimly and followed his conductor
out of the light up the marble heights of stairs duly set with
sentinels, to a porch that even the Royal Colonnade of the Temple could
not shame.  A huge cresset with a jeweled hood, depending from a
groining so high that its light was feeble, showed dimly the giant
compound arch of the portal.  An orderly, a veritable pygmy within the
outline of the dark entrance, appeared and saluted.

"A visitor for the proconsul and his guest," the centurion said,
passing the man in scarlet to the orderly.

He was led through a valve groaning on its granite hinges into the
vestibule of Herod the Great's palace.

It was a lofty hall, nobly vaulted, lined with costly Indian onyx and
florid with pagan friezes, arabesques and frescoes.  Yet, though its
jeweled lamps were dark and cold, its fountains still, its hangings and
its carpets gone, its bloody genius held despotic sway from a shadowy
throne, over the note of brute force which the Roman garrison had
infused into it.

At the far end was a small carven table at which two Romans sat, a lamp
and a crater of wine at their elbows, the tesserae of a dice-game
between them.

Without waiting for the orderly to speak, the man in scarlet stepped
forward.

"Greeting, Vitellius.  Capito, I salute you," he said.  His voice was
that of a composed man speaking with equals.

Vitellius turned his head toward the speaker; Capito drew up his lids
and his lower jaw relaxed.  Slowly then both men got upon their feet.

"By the bats of Hades--" Vitellius began.

"By the nymphs of Delphi!" Capito's aged falsetto broke in.  "It is the
Herod himself!"

"Herod Agrippa!" Vitellius exclaimed.

"From the faces of you," Agrippa declared, "I might have been the shade
of my grandsire.  But I have been hunting you.  I need help.  And as
thou hopest to return three hundred thousand drachmae to Caesar from my
purse, do thou aid me in urging Vitellius to yield it, Capito."

"Help," Capito repeated.

"What manner of help?" Vitellius demanded, fixing Agrippa with a
suspicious eye.

"Arrest me an Essene from the hands of Jonathan."

"Jonathan!" the proconsul exclaimed darkly.

"The High Priest, the Nasi, thy sweet and valued friend!" the Agrippa
explained with amiable provoke.  "He has arrested an Essene on a
trifling charge of apostasy and he is my voucher before the Essenic
brotherhood for a loan to repay Caesar.  I left him in the hands of the
Shoterim, in Bezetha.  If he be not speedily rescued, they will stone
him without the walls to-morrow and my debt to Caesar--" he drew up his
shoulders and spread out his hands in a gesture highly Jewish.

Capito frowned and Vitellius glowered under his grizzled brow at
Agrippa.

"It is one to me," Agrippa continued coolly, as he noted signs of
dissent in the contemplation.  "I am just as happy and as like to
escape Caesar's displeasure by failing to pay it, as thou wilt be,
Capito, if thou failest to collect it."

Capito nervously fingered the tesserae at his hand.

"Meanwhile," added the Herod, perching himself on the edge of the
table, "the youth proceeds to Jonathan's stronghold."

Vitellius looked at Caesar's debt-collector.  "Dost thou see anything
more in this than appears on the face of it?" he asked.

Capito scratched his white head.  He had learned to look for ulterior
motives in every move of this slippery Herod, but he was too little
informed in the matter to see more than the surface.

"We--can look into it, first," he opined.

"Jonathan will not await your pleasure," Agrippa put in.  "He is
hurried now with the responsibility of executing enough blasphemers to
save himself popular favor.  The Sanhedrim may sit to-morrow, the
prisoner come for trial and be executed--even more expeditiously
because the Nasi expects thee to interfere, Vitellius."

The proconsul bit through an expletive.  Jonathan was a thorn in his
side.

"What is it you wish me to do?" he demanded.

"Arrest me this youth.  The claim of the proconsul's charge will take
precedence over the hieratic."

"But he has not offended--"

"Save the protest; he has; he struck me, a Roman citizen.  But draw up
the warrant, good Vitellius, and send a centurion after the young man.
Thou canst make no error by so doing and thou canst save Capito the
favor of his emperor."

Vitellius summoned a clerk and while the warrant for Marsyas' arrest
was written, despatched an orderly for an officer.  One of the
contubernalis to Vitellius, or one of the sons of a noble family
serving his apprenticeship in warfare, appeared.

"Take four," Vitellius said grimly, in compliance with Herod's demand,
when the young centurion approached, "and go with this man.  Arrest by
superior claim the High Priest's prisoner, who shall be pointed out.
Fetch him and this man back to me!"

The young centurion saluted and Agrippa assented with a nod.

"Thanks," he added nonchalantly.  "Come, brother," he said to the young
officer, "if we be late it may take the whole machinery of Rome to undo
the work of Jonathan."

Agrippa and the Roman legionaries passed out of the Praetorium and
turned directly up the slanting street toward the palace of Jonathan,
which stood a little above the camp.

The Herod had lost little time and the progress of the arresting party
toward the stronghold would not have been rapid with the resistance of
Marsyas and the friends of the Nazarenes to retard the movement.  After
a quick walk of a short distance, the Roman group came upon the
Temple's emissaries, entering from an intersecting street.

Saul and Joel walked a little ahead of the broken-spirited prisoners
who were centered in a group of armed lictors and a hooting escort of
half a hundred vagrants.  The flaring torch-light shone down on bowed
heads and disordered garments, and showed fugitive glints of manacles
and knives.

Among them, unbroken and silent, was Marsyas, heavily shackled.  He was
marked with blows, but several besides the Levite Joel staggered as
they walked, and Agrippa, lifting himself on tiptoe to point out his
prisoner to the centurion, eyed the young man with approval.

The officer nodded abruptly and broke through the crowd.  The light
dropping on his shining armor instantly displayed his authority to halt
the group.  His command to stop elicited almost precipitate obedience.
The hooting vagrants scattered.

The centurion laid his hand on Marsyas' shoulder.

"Thou art a prisoner of the proconsul," he said.

The halt and the dismayed silence caught Saul's attention.  He turned
back and pushed his way into the center of the circle.

"Unhand him," he said to the centurion.  "He is wanted of the
Sanhedrim."

The young officer smiled derisively and thrust off the hold of the
apprehensive lictors.  The four made way through the crowd and the
officer passed Marsyas into their hands.

"Make my excuses to the Sanhedrim," the officer said sarcastically.
The Pharisee glanced over the Roman's party.  Then he stepped without
ostentation in the centurion's way--a weak, small figure in fringes and
phylactery, living up to his nature as he fronted brassy Rome.

"Show me thy warrant," he said quietly.

The centurion drew forth the parchment and flourished it.  Saul took it
with a murmured courtesy, and, holding it near a torch, read it
carefully.  Then he passed it back.

"After the proconsul hath done with this young man," he observed, "the
Sanhedrim will claim him.  Say this much to the proconsul.  We shall
wait.  Peace!"

He motioned his party to proceed and the crowd moved on, leaving
Marsyas in the hands of new captors.

"Back to the Praetorium," the centurion said to Agrippa.




CHAPTER V

AGRIPPA IN REPERTOIRE

On the way two dark figures emerged from the shadows and halted to let
the soldiers pass.  Agrippa peered at them intently through the gloom,
and raising his arm made a peculiar gesture.  Both figures approached
immediately.

"Do thou fetch my civilian's dress, Silas, to the gate of the Praetorium
to-morrow, early, and my umber toga broidered with silver.  And thou,
Eutychus, prepare our belongings so thou canst carry them and bring
them also that we may proceed at once to En-Gadi.  I remain at the
Praetorium to-night.  Be gone and fail not!"

The two men bowed and disappeared.

When the party reentered the gates of the camp, Herod's vestibule was
dark.  The prisoner and Agrippa were led to the barracks and turned
into a cubiculum, or sleeping-chamber.  One of the four was manacled to
Marsyas and the bolts shot upon them.

The soldier immediately stretched himself on the straw and, bidding the
others hold their peace, fell asleep promptly.

After a long time, when the sounds from the pallet assured Agrippa that
the soldier could not be easily aroused, he arose and came over to the
side of the young Essene.

The torch-light for the officer of the guard, flaring on the wall
without, shone through the high ventilation niche in the cell and cast
a faint illumination over the dusky interior.  Under the half-light the
face of Marsyas looked fallen and lifeless,--his dark hair in disorder
on his forehead, his shadowed eyes and slight black beard making for
the increase of pallor by contrast.  Agrippa looked at him a moment
before the young man had noticed his approach.

"The medicine for thy hurts, young brother," he said to himself, "is
only one--the comforting arms of a woman.  I have had experience; I
know!  But if thou art an Essene that comfort is denied thee.  Now, I
wonder what demon-ridden Jew it was who first thought of an order of
celibates!"

He drew closer and the somber eyes of the young man lighted upon him.

"So thou dost not sleep," Agrippa said in Hebrew.  Marsyas' face showed
a little surprise at the choice of tongue, but he answered in the same
language.

"Why am I here?" he asked.

"Better here than there," Agrippa responded under his breath,
indicating the direction of Jonathan's stronghold.

"Listen," he continued, "and may Morpheus plug this soldier's ears if
he knows our fathers' ancient tongue.  Canst see my face, brother?"

Marsyas signed his assent.

"Thou sayest thou art a Galilean," Agrippa pursued.  "Look now and see
if thou discoverest aught familiar in me."

Marsyas raised himself on an elbow and gazed into the Herod's face.
Finally he said slowly:

"I have seen thee in Tiberias--in power--as--as prefect!  Thou art
Herod Agrippa!"

There was silence; the Essene's eyes filled with question and the Herod
gave him time to think.

"I had thee arrested," Agrippa resumed when he believed that Marsyas'
ideas had reached the point of asking what the Herod had to do with
him.  "To-morrow thou wilt be fined for striking me and turned
loose--to Jonathan--unless thou art helped to escape."

"I understand," said Marsyas with growing light, but without enthusiasm.

"Thou seest I am virtually a prisoner here.  I became so, to save thee
from Jonathan."

"For me!  Thou becamest a prisoner to save me?" Marsyas repeated,
astounded.

"Because I need thee as much as thou needest me," was the frank
admission.

"What can I do for thee that thou shouldst need me?" Marsyas asked
softly, but still wondering.

"Hast--hast thou ever lacked friends so wholly that thou wast willing
to purchase one?" Agrippa asked.

"I am thy grateful servant; yet I am an Essene, poor, persecuted,
homeless, hungry and heartbroken.  What wilt thou have of me?"

In that was more earnestness than blandishment, more appeal than
offering.  The young man published his helplessness and asked after the
other's use of him.  Agrippa was silent; after a pause Marsyas put out
his hand and lifting the hem of the pagan tunic pressed it to his lips.
The act could not fail to reach to the innermost of the Herod's heart.
His head dropped suddenly into his hands, and the young Essene's touch
rested lightly on his shoulder.

Finally Agrippa raised his head.

"Dost thou know my history, brother?" he asked.

"From the lips of others, yes; but let me hear thee."

"Thou art a just youth; nothing so outrages a slandered man as to pen
his defense within his lips.  Hear me, then.  To be a Herod once meant
to be beloved by the Caesars.  In my early childhood, after the death of
my young father, I was taken to Rome by my mother and reared among
princes and the sons of consuls.  Best of all my friends was Drusus,
Caesar's gallant son, and we studied together, raced and gambled and
feasted together, loved and hated--and fought together, and never was
there a difference between us except in purse!

"While he lived, I lived as he lived, but when he died his sire drove
me out of Rome because I had been the living Drusus' shadow and it
stung the father that the shadow should live while the sweet substance
perished.

"When Drusus died my living died with him, and when I took ship at
Puteoli for Palestine I owed three hundred thousand drachmae to Caesar
and forty tradesmen barked about my heels.

"I had a ruined castle in Idumea.  I forgot that I owned it till I was
in actual want of shelter.  Thither I went.  But I was a young man,
hopeless, and young hopelessness is harder than the hopelessness of
age.  I should have put an end to myself, but Cypros, my princess,
prevented me by the gentle force of her love and devotion.

"She could not have balked me more thoroughly had she tied me hand and
foot.  I railed, but while I railed she wrote and sent a messenger, and
in a little time an answer came.  It was from my brother-in-law, Herod
Antipas, who is tetrarch of Galilee.  Cypros had besought him to help
us.  He wrote courteously, or else his scribe, for it is hard to
reconcile that letter with the man I met, and begged me come and be his
prefect over Tiberias.  I went."

The prince paused and when he went on thereafter it seemed as if his
account were expurgated.

"At Tyre before an hundred nobles assembled at a feast he twitted me
with my poverty and boasted his charity.  I tore off the prefect's
badge and flung it in his face.  And that same night I took the road to
Antioch, my princess with me, a babe on either arm.

"The proconsul of Antioch took us in, but there was treachery against
me afoot in his household, and I lost his friendship through it.  His
was my last refuge under roof of mine own rank.  I heard recently that
Alexander Lysimachus, Alabarch of Alexandria, was in Jerusalem,
presenting a Gate to the Temple, and sending my wife and children to
Ptolemais, I hastened hither to get a loan of him.  But he had departed
some days before I came.  So here am I as a player of dice to win me
money enough to take me back to Ptolemais.  But Herrenius Capito,
Caesar's debt-collector, hath found me out."

He looked down at Marsyas' interested face.

"Let me be truthful," he corrected.  "I found him.  I could have flown
him successfully, but for thy close straits.  All that would save thee
would be the interference of Rome, and I could command it at sacrifice."

Public version of Agrippa's story had enlarged much on certain phases
of his adventures which he had curtailed, and these minutiae had not
been to Herod's credit.  Yet, though Marsyas knew of these things, his
heart stirred with great pity.  His was that large nature which turns
to the unfortunate whether or not his misfortune be merited.  It seemed
to him that the prince's fall had been too hapless for comment.  But
the word here and there, which suggested the prince's intercession in
his behalf, stirred him.

"How shall I make back to thee thy effort in my behalf?" he asked
earnestly.  "Thou sayest that thou needest me; what can I do?"

"First let me know of thyself."

Marsyas relinquished his thought on Agrippa to turn painfully to his
own story.

"I am Marsyas, son of Matthew, of Nazareth.  He was a zealot who fought
beside Judas of Galilee.  I was born after his death, and at my birth
my mother died, and being the last of their line, I am, and have been
all my life alone.  I was taken in mine infancy by the Essenic master
of the school in Nazareth and reared to be an Essene.  But I developed
a certain aptness for learning and in later youth a certain aptness for
teaching, and my master by the consent of the order, whose ward I was,
designed me for the scholar-class of Essenes, which do not reside in
En-Gadi but without in the world.  The vows of the order were not laid
upon me; they are reserved for the sober and understanding years when
my instruction should be completed."

Agrippa frowned.  "Art thou not a member of the brotherhood, then?" he
asked.

"No, I am a neophyte, a postulant."

The Herod ran his fingers though his hair, and Marsyas went on.

"I had two friends, both older than I.  One was Saul of Tarsus; one,
Stephen of Galilee.  Neither knew the other.  Stephen was born an
Hellenist, and until the coming of his Prophet, a good Jew.  But when
Jesus arose in Nazareth, Stephen followed Him, and, after the Nazarene
was put away, he remained here in Jerusalem.  When I came hither to
complete mine instruction in the college, I found the synagogue aroused
against him.

"Chief among the zealous in behalf of the Law is Saul of Tarsus.  Him I
most feared, when the rumors of Stephen's apostasy spread abroad.  An
evil messenger finally set Saul upon Stephen, and I pleaded with him to
spare Stephen, until I could win him back to the faith.  But Saul would
not hear me.

"I meant to give over mine ambition to become a scholar and take
Stephen into the refuge of En-Gadi--"

He stopped for control and continued presently with difficulty.

"But when I returned from Nazareth, whither I had gone to get my
patrimony which the Essene master held in ward, his enemies stoned him
before mine eyes!"

Stephen's death and not his own peril was the climax of his story and
he ceased because his heart began to shrink under its pain.

"And this Saul of Tarsus, whom I heard you threaten over in Bezetha,
mistaking your natural grief and hunger for vengeance as signs of
apostasy, would stone you also," Agrippa remarked, filling in the rest
of the narrative from surmise.  Marsyas assented; it hurt him as much
to think on Saul as it did to remember that Stephen was dead.

"It was doubtless his intent."

"Implacable enough to be Caesar!  And thou art not a member of the
Essenic order--only a neophyte.  That is disconcerting.  Hast thou any
influence with the brethren?"

"None whatever."

Perplexity sat dark on the Herod's brow.  Marsyas, with his eyes on the
prince's face, observed it.

"Can I not help thee?" he asked anxiously.

"I thought once that thou couldst; but thou sayest that thou hast no
power with the Essenes.  Now, I do not know."

"What is it thou wouldst have had me do?"

"I have said that I owe three hundred thousand drachmae to Caesar.
Unless I discharge it, under the Roman law I can be required to become
the slave of my creditor.  That I might secure intercession in thy
behalf, I had to promise Capito and Vitellius that thou couldst help me
to repay this sum."

"I!" Marsyas cried, sitting up.

The legionary stirred and Agrippa laid a warning finger on his lip.
The two sat silent until the sleeper fell again into total
unconsciousness.

"Three hundred thousand drachmae!" Marsyas repeated.  "I, to get that!"

"I knew that the Essenic brotherhood have a common treasury and that
they are believed to be rich.  I thought that thou couldst persuade
them to lend me the sum."

Marsyas shook his head.  "They are poor, poor!  Their fund is not
contributed in great bulk, and the little they own must be expended in
hospitality and in maintaining themselves.  Their treasury would be
enriched by the little I bring."

"O Fortune!" Agrippa groaned aloud.  "I am undone and so art thou!"

Marsyas lapsed into thought, while the Herod looked at the solid door
that stood between him and liberty.  He had set the subject aside as
profitless and was a little irritated when Marsyas spoke again.

"What hopes hast thou in Alexandria?"

"The alabarch, Alexander Lysimachus, is my friend.  He is rich; I could
borrow of him."

"Take thou my gold and go thither," Marsyas offered at once.

"It is not so easy as it sounds, for the sound of it is most generous
and kindly.  How am I to get out of Capito's clutches, here?"

Marsyas gazed straight at Agrippa with the set eyes of one plunged into
deep speculation.  Then he leaned toward the prince.

"Will this gold in all truth help thee to borrow more in Alexandria?"

"I know it!"

"And then what?"

"To Rome!  To imperial favor!  To suzerainty over Judea!"

Marsyas laid hold on the prince's arm.

"Thou art a Herod," he said intensely.  "Ambition natively should be
the very breath of thy nostrils.  Yet swear to me that thou wilt
aspire--aye, even desperately as thy grandsire!  Swear to me that thou
wilt not be content to be less than a king!"

At another time, Agrippa might have found amusement in the young man's
earnestness, but the cause was now his own.

"Thou tongue of my desires!" he exclaimed.  "I have sworn!  Being a
Herod, mine oaths are not idle.  I have sworn!"

"Then, let us bargain together," Marsyas said rapidly.  "I have told
thee my story: thou heardest my vow to-night!  For my fealty, yield me
thy word!  As I help thee into power, help me to revenge!  Promise!"

"Promise!  By the beard of Abraham, I will conquer or kill anything
thou markest; yield thee my last crust, and carry thee upon my back, so
thou help me to Alexandria!"

"Swear it!"

Agrippa raised his right hand and swore.

The legionary roused and growled at the two to be quiet.  Marsyas fell
back on the straw and lay still.  Agrippa made signs and urged for more
discussion, but the Essene, masterful in his silence, refused to speak.
Presently the Herod lay down and slept from sheer inability to engage
his mind to profit otherwise.

A little after dawn the following morning, the Essene and the Herod
were conducted into the vestibule of Herod the Great, for a hearing
before Vitellius and Herrenius Capito.  But Marsyas' offense against a
Roman citizen was held in abeyance; it was Agrippa's debt to Caesar
which engaged the attention of the judges.

Vitellius was in a precarious temper and Capito looked as grim as
querulous old age may.  Agrippa's nonchalance was only a surface air
overlaying doubts and no little trepidation.  But Marsyas, white and
sternly intent, was the most resolute of the four.

Capito stirred in his chair and prepared to speak, but Vitellius cut in
with a point-blank demand on the young Essene.

"Dost thou know this man?" he asked, indicating Agrippa.

"I do, lord," Marsyas answered, turning his somber eyes on the legate.

"He owes three hundred thousand drachmae to Caesar; he says that thou
canst help him pay it; is it so?"

"It is, lord."

Agrippa's eyes were perfectly steady; it would not do to show amazement
now.

"How?" was the next demand flung at the Essene.

"I can place him in the way of certain wealth," was the assured reply.

"How?"

"The noble Roman's pardon, but there are certain things an Essene may
not divulge."

Agrippa's well-bred brows lifted.  Was this evader and collected
schemer the innocent Essene he had met on the slopes of Olivet the
previous evening?

"Answer!  Dost thou promise to provide the Herod with three hundred
thousand drachmae which shall be paid unto Caesar's treasury?"

"I promise to place the prince where he will provide himself with three
hundred thousand drachmae.  If he pay it not unto Caesar, the fault shall
be his, not mine."

"Will the Essenes do it?"

"It shall be done," Marsyas replied, his composure unshaken by the
menace implied in the questioning.

"Capito, what thinkest thou?" Vitellius demanded.

The old collector shuffled his slippered feet, and his antique treble
took on an argumentative tone.

"Caesar wants his money, not a slave; I want the emperor's commendation,
not his blame.  But let us bind this young Jew to this."

Vitellius motioned to an orderly.  "Send hither a notary; and let us
take down this Jew's promise.  Now, Herod, speak up.  There are no
rules of an order to bind you.  Where shall you get this money?"

"Of two sources," Agrippa declared, unblushing.  "From the young man
himself and from the Essenes."

"If you had so many moneyers, why have you not paid your debt long ago?"

"I had not the indorsement of this young Essenic doctor to validate my
note, O Vitellius," the Herod responded with equanimity.

The two Romans frowned; the clerk finished his transcription.

"Sign!" Vitellius ordered Marsyas threateningly.

Marsyas calmly wrote his name in Greek under the voucher.  After him
Agrippa signed the document.

"Now, listen," Vitellius began conclusively.  "I believe neither of
you.  But for the fact that Caesar would be burdened with a useless
chattel I should let Capito foreclose upon you, Agrippa.  But there is
a chance that this rigid youth may be telling the truth; if he is
not--" the legate closed his thin lips and let the menace of his hard
eyes complete the sentence.  Marsyas contemplated him, unmoved,
undismayed, no less inflexible and determined.

"The punishment for his offense against you, Agrippa, is remitted.  Get
you gone.  Capito!  Follow them!"

Totally undisturbed by this sudden entanglement in a supposedly clear
skein, Agrippa waved his hand and smiled.

"Many thanks, Vitellius," he said.  "Would I could get my debts paid if
only to deserve thy respect once more.  But thy hospitality must be a
little longer strained.  The wolves of Jonathan wait without to lay
hands on this young man.  He must be passed the gates in disguise.  I
provided for that last night.  Admit my servants, I pray thee."

"Have your way, Herod, and fortune go with you, curse you for a winsome
knave," Vitellius growled.

Agrippa laughed, but there was no laughter in his eyes.

The two were led through a second hall instinct with barbaric
splendors, to a small apartment where they were presently attended by
two servants.

One was a slow, stolid Jew of middle-age, with stubbornness and honesty
the chief characteristics of his face.  The other would have won more
interest from the casual observer.  He was young, well-formed, but of
uncertain nationality.  His head was like a cocoanut set on its smaller
end, and covered with thick, stiff, lusterless black hair, cut close
and growing in a rounded point on his forehead.  One eye was smaller
than the other and the lid drooped.  The fault might have given him a
roguish look but for the ill-natured cut of his mouth.  Both wore the
brown garments of the serving-class.

When Agrippa and Marsyas stood up from the ministrations of these two,
they were fit figures for a procession of patricians on the Palatine
Hill.  Marsyas' soiled white garments had been put off for a tunic and
mantle of fine umber wool, embroidered with silver.  A tallith of silk
of the same color was bound with a silver cord about his forehead.
Agrippa's garments were only a short white tunic of extraordinary
fineness belted with woven gold, and a toga of white, edged with
purple.  But the prince examined Marsyas with an interested eye.

"By Kypris!" he said aloud, "and thou art to entomb thyself in En-Gadi!"

But Marsyas did not understand.

Capito awaited them when they emerged, and announced himself ready to
proceed.  Procedure was to be an elaborate thing.  A squad of soldiery
had been detailed as escort, and stood prepared in marching order; the
collector's personal array of apparitors was assembled; his baggage
sent forth to his pack-horses,--himself, duly arrayed after the fashion
of a conventional old Roman afraid of color.

Agrippa placed himself beside the collector with an equanimity that was
almost disconcerting.  The old man signed his apparitors to proceed and
followed with his two virtual prisoners.

Through the envelope of grief and rancor, the grave difficulties of his
predicament reached Marsyas.  Unless he could be rid of the
surveillance of Capito, both he and the Herod were in sore straits.
But Agrippa's amiable temper presaged something, and Marsyas merged the
new distress with the burden of misery which bowed him.

They passed out of the simpler portions of the royal house into the
state wing and emerged in the great audience-chamber.

It would have been impossible for a scion of that bloody house to pass
for the first time in years through that royal chamber without comment
upon it.  Agrippa after crossing the threshold slackened his step and
his eyes took on the luster of retrospection.

"I remember it," he said in a preoccupied way, "but only as a dream.  I
went this way when my father and mother fared hence to Rome!"

Capito lagged also, and Marsyas and the men following slackened their
steps, until by the time the center of the vast hall was reached they
paused as if by one accord.

The hall was an octagonal, faced half its height, or to the floor of
its galleries, in banded agate from the Indies; from that point upward
the lining was marble panels and frescoes, alternating.  The galleries
were supported by a series of interlaced oriental arches, rich with
tracery and filigree.  With these main features as groundwork, the
barbaric fancy of Herod the Great threw off all restraint and reveled
in magnitude, richness and display.  He did not permit Greece, the
_arbiter elegantarium_, to govern his building or his garnishment.  He
harkened to the Arab in him and made a bacchanal of color; he
remembered his one-time poverty and debased the hauteur of gold to the
humility of wood and clay and stone.  He imaged Life in all its forms
and crowded it into mosaics on his pavement, subjected it in the
decoration of his scented wood couches, tables, taborets, weighted it
with the cornices of his ceilings, the rails of his balustrades, the
basins of his fountains--until he seemed to shake his scepter as despot
over all the beast kind.  He was a hunter, a warrior and a statesman;
the instincts of all three had their representation in this, his high
place.  He was a voluptuary, a tyrant, and a shedder of blood; his
audience-chamber told it of him.  Thus, though he had crumbled to ashes
forty years before, and the efforts of the world to forget him had
almost succeeded, he left a portrait behind him that would endure as
long as his palace stood.

The light of the Judean sun came in a harlequinade of twenty colors,
but, where it fell and was reproduced, Nature had mastered the
kaleidoscope and made it a glory.  The immense space, peopled with
graven images, yet animated with ghostly swaying of hangings, had its
own shifting currents of air, drafts that were streaming winds, cool
and scented with the aromatic woods of the furniture.  The portals were
closed, and there was no sound.  Sun, wind and silence ennobled Herod's
mistakes.

The four stood longer than they knew.  Then Agrippa made a little
sound, a sudden in-taking of the breath.

"See!" he whispered, laying a hand on Capito's shoulder and pointing
with the other.  "That statue!"

Following his indication, their eyes rested on the sculptured figure of
a woman, cut from Parian marble.  It was a drowsy image, the head
fallen upon a hand, the lids drooping, the relaxation of all the
muscles giving softness and pliability to the pose.  So perfect was the
work that the marble promised to be yielding to the touch.  Some
imitator of Phidias had achieved his masterpiece in this.  Indeed, at
first glance there was startlement for the four.  A warm human flush
had mantled the stone, and Marsyas' brows drew together, but he could
not obey the old Essenic teaching and drop his eyes.

"A statue?" Capito asked, uncertainly taking his withered chin between
thumb and forefinger.

"A statue," Agrippa assured him.  "The illumination is from the
batement light above.  Come nearer!"

He led them to the angle in which the image stood, not more than three
paces from the wall.

"It is my grandsire's queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for
ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall.

"Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity.

"He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love.  They said that
the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there,
drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this
fair marble's knees in such agony of passion and remorse and grief that
life would desert him.  They would come in time to find him there,
stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead!  And
it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief
after he had been borne away."

Capito shivered.

"What punishment!" he exclaimed.

"Punishment!  They who curse Herod's memory could not, if they had
their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!"

But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue.

"She was beautiful," he said after a silence.

"Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly.  The collector's back was
turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he
answered with rapt eyes.

"Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden.  So I saw
her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her
beauty usually hidden was unveiled."

"Well for thee my grandsire never knew," Agrippa put in, leaning
against one of the cestophori which guarded a blank panel in the wall.

"He never knew; but I would have died before I would give over the
memory of it.  She was slight, willowy, with the eyes of an Attic
antelope, yet braver and more commanding than any woman-eye that ever
bewitched me.  Her mouth--Praxiteles would have turned from Lais' lips
to hers."

Agrippa's hand slid down the side of the cestophorus and fumbled a
little within the edge of the molding.

"Her hair was loose," the old man went on, "the sole drapery of her
bosom--a very cloud of night loomed into filaments--"

An inert, moldy breath reached Marsyas.  He turned his head.  The panel
between the cestophori was gone and a square of darkness yawned its
miasma into the hall.

The prince made a lightning movement; noiselessly the two servants
dived into the blackness; Marsyas followed; after him, the prince.

An eclipsing wall began to slide between them and the hail they had
left.

"Her arms were languidly lifted--arms that for whiteness shamed this
marble--" the old man was saying as the panel glided back into place
and shut them in darkness.

"Ow!" Agrippa whispered in delight, "he tells that story better every
year!"




CHAPTER VI

MARSYAS ASSUMES A CHARGE

Agrippa crowded past the three that had preceded him into the black
passage and, whispering a command to follow, led on.  They kept track
of him by the sound of his shoes on the stone, but the absolute
darkness and the unfamiliar path made their steps uncertain and slow.
Frequently the sure footfall before them receded and in fear of losing
their guide they stumbled forward in nervous haste.

Presently the darkness about them lifted; the sensation was not that
light had entered in, but that the darkness had simply failed in
strength.  There was a perceptible increase in temperature and the
atmosphere, changing from a chill, became muggy and oppressive.
Marsyas, drawing in a full breath in search of freshness, told himself
that this was the original air of chaos, penned in at the hour of
creation.

The floor under his feet became irregular, the instinctive realization
that a roof was imminent overhead, passed, and, when the darkness
became sufficiently feeble, they discovered that they were following
through an immense chamber.  Light came in through air-holes in the
rock above.

Agrippa spoke aloud.

"This is a quarry-chamber.  It was also my grandsire's secret
stronghold, trial-chamber and tomb where many of his private grudges
were satisfied.  But there are no evidences, now.  The place was open
to the hill-jackals, by another passage which, if my memory has not
failed me, shall lead us out."

One of the servitors, whose teeth had been chattering, made a
shuddering sound.  Agrippa laughed.

"Thou, Eutychus?" he said.  "Comfort thee; the jackals have ceased to
haunt the place since their hunger was last satisfied, thirty years
ago."

An irregular spot of blackness in one of the walls swallowed up the
prince as he spoke.  Eutychus halted at the edge and drew back with a
whimper.  But the second servitor, who had not spoken since Marsyas had
first seen him, muttered contemptuously some inarticulate word and
pushed Eutychus into the blackness.  Marsyas followed.

Thereafter it was only time which ensued.  Sound, sight and, except for
the stone under their feet, feeling were defeated.  They moved
interminably.  Once or twice Eutychus became hysterical from the
depression, but the stolid servitor smote him and bundled him on.
Ahead a light laugh floated back to them in appreciation of the humor
in Eutychus' predicament.

In time a yellow star with ragged points appeared ahead of them, high
above the level upon which they had been walking.  Eutychus trembled
before it, but Agrippa quickened his steps.

"What a memory I have," he observed cheerfully.  "Any other than myself
would have been hopelessly entangled in these galleries and perished
miserably some days hence."

The star enlarged, lost substantiality and presently Eutychus with a
gasp of joy faltered that it was daylight.  Several minutes later they
emerged through an open tomb into high noon over Judea.

Before their blinded vision, the green hills swimming in sunlight
upheaved between them and all points of the horizon.  The City of David
was nowhere to be seen; the sun stood directly in the zenith.  Marsyas
was lost; but the prince smiled in immense satisfaction and, seeking a
grassy spot, sat down and breathed deeply.  Presently he motioned to
the others to sit.  Marsyas came close to him; the others remained at a
respectful distance.

For a long time no one spoke.

At last Agrippa fell to inspecting his delicate hands and his garments
for marks of the long journey under the earth, and the embroidered
shoes for evidences of contact with jagged rock.  Satisfied that he was
clean and intact, he laughed a little.

"By the hat of Hermes, this was noble apparel to wear through the
bowels of the earth.  _Eheu_!  I was at my best, and not so much as a
she-bat saw me!"

Eutychus, entirely recovered, chuckled, and a grin overspread the face
of Silas; but Marsyas was plunged in his own reflections.

"This is the country-side west of Jerusalem," Agrippa resumed
presently, for the young Essene's information.  "Yonder," pointing
north, "the road runs which shall lead us hence.  We are an hour's
journey by daylight above ground, from the Tower of Hippicus.  But we
are not beyond the zone of danger yet."

Marsyas did not answer.  Reaction had set up within him against the
foreign interest which had engaged his attention since sunrise.  He had
thought of himself and had been concerned for Agrippa; he had planned
and had achieved ends.  Entanglements straightened, immediate danger
passed, the cloud of his sorrow embraced him wholly.  He did not want
to see that Canaan was beautiful, indeed a land of milk and honey.  The
wind laden with spring sweets struck a chill in his soul; the singing
birds hurt him with a pain greater than he could endure.  His heart was
bruised, his every sensation sore and weighted with a numb
consciousness that a dread thing had happened and that it was useless
to pray and hope now.  The presence of others was an obstacle, vaguely
realized, that kept him from yielding to his desire to lie down on his
face and hate everything and give himself up to whatever chose to
befall him.  Agrippa's hand, presently laid on his shoulder, irritated
him.  He had to restrain himself to keep from shaking it off.  But the
prince spoke, and his words were helpful.

"Marsyas, I know thy pain.  I, too, had a beloved friend foully
murdered, and the agony of helplessness against the power that did him
to death sowed ashes on my heart.  But the time of the Lord God, slow
as it approaches, fell at last.  The only bitterness in my cup of
fierce triumph was that it was another, and not I, who accomplished, at
the end, the undoing of the murderer."

"The Lord God forfend any such misfortune from me!" was the bitter
rejoinder.  "Vengeance can not be vengeance, if it fall from any hand
but mine!"

"Thou speakest truly: be thy requital sweeter than mine!"

It was good to find the reflection of his own hurt in another's
experience.  It did not lessen his pain; but it gave him expression and
the assurance of sympathy.  Agrippa continued in his pleasant voice.

"This persecution will cease ere long.  It is only Jonathan's device to
make him noted as one zealous for the faith.  He is much disliked.  It
is reproach enough for a High Priest to be popular with the Sadducees:
it is well-nigh unforgivable to be set up by Rome; it is an
insurmountable obstacle to be other than eligible, Levitically; but
this man hath been wholly undone by these and an offensive personality.
Wherefore the people hate him with a fervor which Vitellius must
respect.  But Jonathan fancies that if he can make him a name as a
defender of the faith, the rabble will applaud, and thou and I and
Vitellius and the discerning Jews will achieve no more against him than
flies whining about a wall!  What folly!  How oft we believe a thing to
be so, because we wish it to be so!  Vitellius does not see how the
stoning of blasphemers indorses a man whom he dislikes.  So Jonathan's
time is short and the persecution will cease with him.  His minion will
be discountenanced with the master, and thine opportunity is made.  Be
of hope; thy day is not distant."

But Marsyas' brow blackened.

"A noble reflection!" he exclaimed passionately, "and one that should
soothe the Tarsian's dreams!  Binding and stoning and killing in his
zeal for an usurper of the robes of Aaron!  Shedding sweet blood--doing
irreparable deeds to serve a vain end, to further a useless attempt--a
thing to be given over to-morrow!  O thou God of wrath!  If it be not
sin to pray it, let him stumble speedily in the Law!"

Meanwhile Agrippa observed the sun, and after a little silence that his
return to spirits seem not to grate upon the young Essene's distress,
arose briskly.

"Up! up!" he said.  "It is not at variance with Vitellius' extreme
methods to empty the whole Praetorium into the hills in search of us.
Up, fellows!  To Ptolemais!"

Marsyas arose with the others, but he hesitated and glanced down at the
fine garments that covered him.  He remembered that he had not brought
his soiled Essenic robes with him.  He unslung his wallet and extended
it to Agrippa.

"Take it, and forget not that I shall ask payment from the strength of
that high place to which this may help thee!  The vengeful spirit is
not of choice a patient thing!  I shall wait--but to achieve mine ends.
God prosper thee!  If thy servants will lend me each a garment thou
shalt have back thy dress once more and I will depart."

"Whither?" asked Agrippa without taking the purse.

"To En-Gadi, for the present."

"But the brotherhood will then be guilty of befriending thee and thou
art a living example of that which befalls him who befriends one of
Saul's marked creatures."

"So I am become as a pestilence," Marsyas said grimly.  It was another
count against the Pharisee.

"Thou art much beset.  Doubt not that Vitellius will seek for thee in
En-Gadi, and it were better for thee and for the brotherhood that thou
be not found.  Thou must leave Judea, for the arm of the Sanhedrim is
long."

To leave Judea meant to be banished among the Gentiles, to step out of
four whitewashed walls into unknown turmoil; to leave the pleasures of
solitude, the peoples of parchment, the events of old history, the
ambitions of the soul and go forth amid arrogant heathen godlessness to
meet precarious fortunes.  The whole course of his life had been
entirely reversed in a few hours.  Resolute and strong as the Essene
was, his face contracted painfully.

Agrippa laid a hand on his arm.

"Remember, it is our faith that this persecution will cease and then
thou canst return to thy study in safety," he said as gently as if he
were speaking to a child.  But in that moment, Marsyas told himself
that there would be no returning to his old peace.

"Come with me," Agrippa continued.  "I will afford thee protection and
thou shalt provide me with funds."

He paused and, taking Marsyas' arm, led him down to a little meandering
vale, sweet with blossoming herbs.

"Look," he said, pointing back toward the east.

The hills stood aside in a long, full-breasted series, and revealed
through a narrow, green-walled aisle a distant view of Jerusalem, white
and majestic on her heights.  The morning blue that encroaches upon the
noon in early spring softened the spectacle with a tender atmosphere;
distance glorified its splendors, and the light upon it was other than
daylight--it was a nimbus, the ineffable crown.

Thus seen it was no longer the city of subjection, filled with wrongs
and griefs and hopelessness.  It was the Holy City, upright with the
godliness of David, lawful in the government of Solomon; sacred with
the presence of the Shekinah in the Holy of Holies.  Here, Sheba might
have stood first to be shown the glories of Solomon; here, Alexander
might have drawn up his Macedonian quadriga to behold what excellence
he was next to conquer.  Marsyas felt emotion seize him, the mighty
welling of tears in their springs.

"Behold it!" Agrippa said.  "We go forth beaten and ashamed, but thou
shalt return to it justified; I shall return to it crowned.  Believe in
that as thou believest in Jehovah!"

He drew the young Essene away and signed to the servitors.

In the days that followed, Agrippa tactfully and little by little won
Marsyas out of his brooding.  Delicately, he sounded the young man's
nature and discovered the channel into which his sorrowful thoughts
could be diverted.  Stirring incidents of the Herod's own astounding
history, graphic accounts of great pageants, of contests of famous
athletae, or of gorgeous cities, vivaciously told, engaged Marsyas'
attention in spite of himself.  Gradually his sharpened interest began
to choose for itself.  Expectancy of things to come communicated by
Agrippa presently possessed Marsyas.

All this was a new and inviting experience for the young Essene, as
well as an alleviation.  He had lived a placid, passionless life with
the old Essenic master and centered his broad loves on one or two.
Evil happenings had wrenched these from him and his affections wandered
and wavered, lost only for an hour.  By the time the journey to
Ptolemais was ended, Agrippa had stepped into his own place in the
heart of the bereaved young man.

Ptolemais was built for solidity and strength.  Its houses were
defenses, its public buildings were fortifications; its mole, harbor
front and wall the most unassailable on the Asiatic seaboard.  From the
plains of Esdraelon in their dip toward the sea, the city was seen, set
broadside to the waves, stanch, regular, square and bulky--embodied
defiance for ever uttered to whatever sea-faring nation turned its
triremes into her roadsteads.

In a narrow street near the southernmost limits of the city, Agrippa
stopped.  A house of a single story stood before them, its roof barely
higher than its door; a heavy wall before it, a narrow gate in that.

"Enter," said the prince to Marsyas, "into the unctuous hospitalities
of Agrippa's palace."

He unlatched the gate, and, leading his companion across a small court,
knocked at the door, which after a little wait swung open.

An uncommonly pretty waiting-woman stepped aside to let them enter.
Marsyas put off his sandals and followed the prince into a small recess
cut off by curtains from the interior of the house.  A bronze lamp was
in a niche in the wall and a taboret stood in the corner.  No other
furniture was visible.

The prince dismissed the two servitors and they passed behind the
curtains, Eutychus stumbling as he went, because his eyes were engaged
in attempting to attract the attention of the pretty waiting-woman, who
seemed quite oblivious of his glances.

"Send hither your mistress, Drumah," Agrippa said to her.  She bowed
and departed and presently one of the curtains lifted and a woman
hastened into the apartment.

With a low cry of joy she ran to the prince and flung herself on his
breast.

"Oh, that thou shouldst come and none to watch for thee!" she
exclaimed.  "That thou shouldst enter thy house and none but thy
hireling to meet thee!"

He laughed lightly and kissed her.

"I have brought also a guest, Cypros," he said.  For the first time her
eyes lighted on Marsyas and blushing she drew away from her husband.

"I pray thy pardon," she murmured.

The light from the day without shone full on her through a lattice, and
since his journey to Nazareth Marsyas had learned to look on women with
an interested eye.

She was small, but her figure showed the perfect outlines of the
matron, and the Jewish dress, bound about the hips with a broad scarf,
let no single grace lose itself under drapery.  But it was the face
that held the young Essene's attention.  There, too, was the blood of
the Herod, for Agrippa had married his cousin, but its attributes were
refined almost to ethereal extremes.  Flesh could not have been whiter
nor coloring more delicate.  The effect rendered was an impression of
exquisite frailty, produced as much by the pathos in the over-large
black eyes and the serious cut of the tender mouth as by the
transparency of the exceedingly small hand which lay on her breast as
if to still a fluttering heart.  Her beauty was not aided by strength
of character or intellectuality; it was distinctly the simple,
defenseless, appealing type which is an invincible conqueror of men.

"This is Marsyas of Nazareth, an Essene in distress, yet not so
unfortunate that he is not willing to help us.  What comfort canst thou
offer him from thy housekeeping?"

The Essenes were the holy men of Israel; the large eyes filled with
deference and she bowed.

"Welcome in God's name.  My lord has bread and a roof-tree.  I pray
thee share them freely with us."

Marsyas' formality so serviceable among the women of Nazareth suddenly
seemed infelicitous here, but it was all he had for response to this
different personage.

"The blessing of God be with thee; I give thee thanks."

She summoned the pretty waiting-woman.

"Let my lord and his guest be given food and drink; set wine and such
meats as we have, and let the children come and greet their father."

The prince thrust the curtains aside and, motioning to Marsyas', waited
until his princess and the young man had passed within.

The apartment was a second recess larger than the first, shut in by
hangings of sackcloth and furnished with rough seats and tables of
unoiled cedar.  It was a cheerless room, fit for the humblest man in
Ptolemais, but the unconquered Herod and his lovely princess ennobled
it.

There was a scarf of damask thrown over one of the tables and two or
three pieces of magnificent plate sat upon it.

"That," said Agrippa, pointing to the silver, "hath been my moneyer for
years.  I have lived a month on a flagon."

Cypros sighed, but three pretty children, a boy and two girls, rushed
in from the rear of the house and engaged the prince's attention.

Meanwhile, the attractive servant entered with plates for the table and
Eutychus followed with a platter of food.  As she passed the young
Essene she tripped on an unevenness in the floor and would have fallen,
but Marsyas, with a quick movement, more instinctive than gallant,
threw out a hand and stayed her.

She thanked him composedly and went about her work, but Marsyas,
chancing to raise his eyes to Eutychus' face, caught a look from the
servitor that was livid with hate.  Shocked and astonished, Marsyas
turned his back and wondered how he had crossed the creature.

Agrippa sat at the table, and, with Cypros at his left, bade Marsyas
sit beside him.  The children were carried protesting away.

The prince filled a goblet of silver with a pale wine, slightly
effervescent and exhaling a bouquet peculiarly subtle and penetrating.
He raised the frosty cup between his fingers--drink, drinker and cup of
a type--and looked at the strip of sky visible through the lattice.

"This to the gods," he said, "or whatever power hath fortune to give,
and a heart to be won of libation.  I yield you my soul for a laurel!"

The princess leaned her forehead against his arm and whispered:

"It is wicked--forbidden!"

"I poured but one glass: I make the prayer; I have not asked thee or
our young friend to pray it with me.  But my devices are exhausted.  I
make appeal now, haphazard, for I grope!"

"And didst thou fail in Jerusalem?"

"As I have failed from Rome to Idumea."

She drew in a little sobbing breath and hid her eyes against his
sleeve.  Marsyas sat silent.  This first evidence of despair on the
prince's part was most unwelcome.  His own fortunes were too much
entangled with Agrippa's for him to contemplate their fall.  He felt
the prince's eyes upon him.  The silver cup had been refilled and was
extended to him.

Marsyas took it.

"This to success," he said, "not fortune!"

Cypros stirred.  "Success is so deliberate!" she sighed.

Marsyas made no answer; would it be long before he should have his
bitter wish?

"Thou seest Judea," Agrippa began, "thou heardest me aspire to it and
thou didst abet me in mine ambition.  But learn, for thy own comfort,
Marsyas, the vagabond to whom thou hast attached thyself doth not grasp
after another man's portion.  Judea is mine!  And Rome must yield me
mine inheritance!"  The prince's eyes glowed with youth's ambition.

Marsyas listened intently.

"A Herod's word is in disrepute," the prince continued.  "Hence I am
limited to action to prove myself.  But look thou here, Marsyas.  Judea
is pillaged: so am I.  Judea is despised: so am I!  Judea weltereth in
her own blood: am I not sprung from a murdered sire, who was son of a
murdered mother--each dead by the same hand of father and husband?
Dear Lord, I am an offspring of the shambles, mother-marked with
wounds!"

He shuddered and drew his hand across his forehead.

"Having thus suffered the same miseries which are Judea's, is it not
natural that I should relieve her when I, myself, am relieved?  I
should rule Judea as Judea would rule herself--"

He broke off with a gesture of impatience.

"How I hate the blatant vower of vows!  Help me to mine opportunity,
Marsyas."

As between Rome and Herod the Great as sovereign, there was no choice.
Though the Asmonean Slave, as the Jewish patriots named the capable
fiend, gave Judea the most brilliant reign since the glories of Solomon
and the most monstrous since Ahab, the nominal independence offered by
his administration was absolutely submerged and lost in the terror of
his absolutism and the devilish genius in him for oppression.

Herod and Abaddon were names synonymous in Judea, and the mildness of
his sons or their inefficiency had not been able to set the reproach
aside.  No able Herod had arisen since the founder of the house,
except, as Marsyas hopefully believed, this man before him.  Herod
Agrippa was the son of Aristobolus, who was murdered in his youth
before his capabilities developed.  The Herods, Philip and Antipas, had
been mild because they were incapable.  The recurrence of mental
strength in the blood was an untried contingency.  All this came to
Marsyas, now, suggested by the implied self-defense in the prince's
words, and for a moment he wavered between concern for his people and
anxiety for his own cause.  Agrippa and Cypros watched him.

"Thou art a just youth," the prince went on in the winning voice that
had already made its conquest over the Essene.  "I can not prove myself
until I am given trial, and judgment without trial is an abomination
even unto the tyrant Rome!"

"I have not judged, lord," Marsyas protested.

"And thou wilt not until I have shown myself unworthy of thy
confidence.  Thou hast even now bespoken God's favor for me--be then,
His instrument!  Thou art the first ray of light in a decade of
darkness that has enveloped me and mine!"

Marsyas put out his hand to the prince.  The peril in the Herod blood,
in his calculations, had dropped out of sight.

"What dost thou say to me, my prince?" he said.  "How is it that thou
beseechest me--me, the suppliant, praying thy help for mine own ends?
But hear me!  Thou aspirest to that place of which I have no knowledge,
among peoples whose paths I never cross, into the calling of the great!
Yet, though most unequipped to yield thee support, I am thy substance.
Use me!  Thou knowest my price."

Agrippa smiled.

"Though I die owing even mine embalmer, I shall pay thee that debt.  I
have said.  And now to the process.  What money hast thou?"

Agrippa was silent and Marsyas, watching his face, waited.

"I need," the prince said slowly, "twenty thousand."

Marsyas got upon his feet, and for a moment there was silence.

"I will get it for thee," he said.




CHAPTER VII

THE BONDMAN OF HATE

In a city like Ptolemais, where many pagans lived extravagantly and
many Jews lived thriftily, there were, as naturally follows, many
money-lenders among the sons of Abraham.

"Seek them all," was Agrippa's charge, "but Peter, the usurer.  Him,
thou hadst better avoid."

The young Essene laid aside the prince's dress, with its embroidery of
precious metal, and, getting into a simpler garment affected by the
stewards to men of rank, went out into the city to borrow twenty
thousand drachmae.

He did not get the twenty thousand drachmae, but he found, instead, that
Herod Agrippa was the most notorious bankrupt in the world.  Being a
Jew and by heritage thrifty, the discovery shook him in his respect for
the prince, but at the same time a resolution shaped itself in him
against the usurers.  But, on a certain day, he returned to the little
house in the suburbs of the city to report that he had been placidly
refused by every money-lending Jew or Gentile, except Peter, in the
seaport.

But he delivered his tidings unmoved.

"Be of hope," he said to Cypros, whose head drooped at the news; "there
are many untried ways."

He went again into the city, and visited the khans.  There might be
new-comers who were money-lenders in other cities.

There were such as guests in Ptolemais, but from their lips he learned
that Agrippa was black-listed from the Adriatic to the Euphrates; but
Marsyas did not return to the house in the suburbs that night.  The
weight of his obligation was too heavy to endure the added burden which
the sight of Agrippa's suspense had become.

He went to the rabbis of Ptolemais; they told him that they were not
money-lenders.  He applied to the prefect of the city, who laughed at
him.  Hoping that the name of Agrippa as a bankrupt had not penetrated
into the fields he journeyed into the country-side of Syria and tried
an oil-merchant, a rustic, rich and unlettered.  But the oil-merchant
came up to Ptolemais and made inquiry, shrugged his shoulders, glowered
at Marsyas and went back to his groves.

An Egyptian seller of purple landed at Ptolemais from Alexandria.  The
name of the city of hope attracted Marsyas and he met the merchant at
the wharves.  But the seller of purple had been to Rome and the topmost
name on his list of debtors was Herod Agrippa.

At the end of three days, Marsyas returned to the house in the suburbs
to assure the prince that he had not deserted and went again on his
search.

His invariable failures began to teach him a certain shrewdness.  He
discovered early that Essenic frankness would not serve his ends.  He
found that men were approachable through certain channels; that it was
better to speak advisedly than frankly; to lay plans, rather than to
wait on events; to use devices rather than persuasion.  These things
admitted, he discovered that he had unconsciously subordinated them to
his use.  Though momentarily alarmed, he did not hate himself as he
should.  On the other hand, it was pleasurable to lay siege to men and
try them at their own scheming.

At night in a dutiful effort to cleanse himself of the day's
accumulation of worldliness, he went to the open proseuchae, where in
the dark of the great out-of-doors, he was least likely to be noticed,
to comfort himself with stolen worship, stolen profit from the Law.
But the Law was not tender to those who lived as Stephen lived, and
died as Stephen died.  Not in all that great and holy scroll which the
Reader read was there compassion for the blasphemer.  Also, he heard of
the great plague of persecution which Saul had loosed upon the
Nazarenes in Jerusalem and how the Pharisee had become a mighty man
before the Council, and an awe and a terror to the congregation.  So he
came away from the proseuchae, not only unhelped but harmed, embittered,
enraged, alienated from his faith, and hungering for vengeance.

By day, he walked through the commercial districts of Ptolemais and
pushed his almost hopeless search with an energy that did not flag at
continued failure.  He knew that if he obtained the twenty thousand
drachmae, he bound Agrippa the surer to his oath of allegiance to the
cause against Saul.  Despair, therefore, was a banished and forbidden
thing.

His plans, however, had been tried and proved fruitless.  Typically a
soldier of fortune, he was relying upon the exigencies of chance.

Ptolemais was a normal town, with large interest and pleasures, and the
fair day was too fleeting for one to stop and take heed of another.
Passers pushed and hurried him when he came upon those more busy than
he.  Sailors, bronzed as Tatars, were probably the sole loiterers
besides the inevitable oriental feature, the sidewalk mendicant.

So it was that on a certain day when Marsyas overtook a lectica in the
street, the old man within complained aloud and had no audience, except
his plodding bearers, or the attention of a glance, or a slackened step
now and again among the citizens.

"They rob me!" he was crying when Marsyas came up with him.

The young man turned quickly; the declaration was alarming.  His eyes
encountered the face of Peter, the usurer, a stout, gray old Jew, in
the apparel of a Sadducee.

Seeing that he had won the young man's notice the old usurer seized the
opportunity to enlarge.

"They ruin me!" he cried.

Marsyas bowed gravely.  "Thy pardon, sir," he said.  "May I be of
service?"

"They sap my life!" the old man continued more violently, as if the
young man's question had excited him.  "They take, and demand more;
they waste, and must be replenished!  I drop into the grave and there
will be nothing left to buy a tomb to receive me!"

The words were directed to Marsyas, and the young man having halted
could not go on without awkwardness.

"I pray thee," he urged, "tell me who plagues thee thus."

"The tradesmen!  Because I am wealthy, they augment their hire; because
I must buy, they increase their price; they hold necessities out of my
reach!  It is a conspiracy between them because I am of lowly birth,
and I go from one to another and find no relief!  Behold!"  He shook
out a shawl which had been folded across his knees.  "I must have it to
protect me against the cold.  It is inferior; it is scant; yet it cost
me fifteen pieces of silver!"

Marsyas glanced at the mantle; even with his little knowledge of
fabrics it appeared not worth its price.

"Thou hast servants, good sir, and camels," he said, drawn into
suggestion in spite of himself.  "Do I overstep my privilege to suggest
that thou mayest send to Anthedon or to Caesarea and buy in other
cities?"

"But the hire--the hire!  And how should I know that the knavery does
not extend to Anthedon and Caesarea?"

"Then," said Marsyas, "establish thine own booths here and undersell
the robbers."

There was silence; the small eyes of the old man narrowed and ignited.

"A just punishment," he muttered.  "A proper punishment!"

"Or this," Marsyas continued, interested in his own conspiracy.  "Thou
sayest they oppress thee because thou art a lowly man!  They are
foolish.  Display them thy power and punish them.  Thou art a great
usurer; powerful families here are in thy debt.  How strong a hand thou
holdest over them!  What canst thou not compel them to do!  Nay, good
sir; to me, it seemeth thou hast the whip-hand over these tradesmen!"

The old man rubbed his hands.  "An engaging picture," he said.  "But
unless I haste, they will ruin me yet!"

Marsyas shook his head.  "Not if the tales of thy famous wealth be
true."

The lectica had moved along beside him and he waited now to be
dismissed; but, contrary to custom of that rank which is privileged to
command, the old man waited for Marsyas to take his leave.

"Methinks," he began, "I have seen thee--"

"Doubtless," Marsyas interrupted hastily.  "I am a steward here in
Ptolemais.  But I have an errand here, good sir; by thy leave, I shall
depart."

The old man made a motion of assent, but he followed the young Essene
with a thoughtful eye.

"If I am to know the world's way," Marsyas said to himself, "I can use
it, if need be."

He did not visit another usurer, but on the following day went to those
places likely to be the haunts of Peter.  When, presently, he
discovered the old man near a fountain, Marsyas did not attempt to
catch his eye.  But one of Peter's servants touched him on the arm and
told him that the master beckoned, and he hastened to the old man's
side.

"Who is thy master?" Peter asked.

Marsyas winced, but restrained a declaration of his free-born state.

"A Roman citizen who is preparing to return to Italy."

"A Roman!" Peter repeated.  "But thou art a Jew, or the blood of the
race in thee lies."

"A Jew without taint of other blood in all the line."

"Art satisfied with thy service--serving a Roman?" was the demand.

"None has a better lord!" replied Marsyas quietly, but with an inward
delight in leading the old man on.

"But it should be more lawful for thee to serve a Jew," Peter declared.
"A Roman's slave, a slave for ever; a Jew's slave, a slave but six
years--"

Marsyas could rest no longer under the intimation of bondage.

"Good sir, I am not a slave."

"Ho! a hireling."

"No; a free man, unattached and serving for love."

Peter scratched his head.  "For love only?  Then why not come and be my
steward for wages?"

"Thou canst not pay my price," he said with meaning.

The old man lifted his withered chin.

"Thy price!" he repeated haughtily.  "And pray, sirrah, what is thy
price?"

A figurative answer to add to his first sententious remark was on
Marsyas' lips, but he halted suddenly, and a little pallor came into
his face.

"On another day, I shall tell thee," he said after a silence, and the
old man impatiently dismissed him.

Marsyas turned away from the heart of the city and went straight to the
house in the suburbs.

He found Agrippa stretched on a couch where the air entered through the
west lattice, and the place otherwise solitary.  The princess and the
children with the servants had gone into the city.

Marsyas came uncalled to Agrippa's side, and the prince noted the
change on the young man's face.  He looked expectant.

"My lord," Marsyas said, "thou didst say to me several days ago that
thou didst hate a vower of vows.  Yet no man is chafed by a vow except
him who finds it hard to keep.  Wherefore, I pray thee, for the
prospering of the cause and mine, assure me once more of thy good
intent toward Judea."

The Herod raised his fine brows.

"How now, Marsyas?  Has the knowledge that I am a Herod been slandering
me to you?"

"Nay, my lord; thou hast won me; and I shall not stop at sacrifice for
thy cause, which is mine."

"What canst thou do, my Marsyas?"

"Get thee money."

"I give thee my word, Marsyas.  It has been sorely battered dodging
debts, yet it is still intact enough to contain mine honor.  I give
thee my word."

Marsyas lingered with an averted face, which Agrippa tried in vain to
understand.  He added nothing to emphasize his avowal; perhaps he
realized at that moment, more keenly than ever afterward, how much a
man wants to be believed.

Presently the young man spoke in another tone.

"Who is this Peter, that I may not ask him for a loan?"

"I owe him a talent already," Agrippa answered with a lazy smile,
"which he advanced to me while he was yet my mother's slave."

"Then thou knowest him!  How--how is he favored in disposition?"

"How is Peter favored?  Are slaves favored?  Nay, they are tempered
like asses, cattle and apes--like beasts.  Wherefore, this Peter is
voracious, balky, amiable enough if thou yieldest him provender--not
bad, but, like any donkey, could be better."

Marsyas' eyes fell again; it seemed that he hesitated at his next
question, as though upon its answer turned a matter of great moment.

"Art thou in all truth assured that this Alexandrian will lend thee
money?" he asked presently, beset by the possibility of doubt.

Agrippa laughed outright.  "Jove, but this questioning hath a familiar
ring!  Surely thou wast sired of a money-lender, Marsyas, else his
inquiries would not arise so naturally to thy lips!  Will the
Alexandrian lend?  Of a surety!  And even if not, then will my mother's
friend, the noble Antonia, Caesar's sister-in-law.  If Caesar had not
been so precipitate and hastened me out of Rome, I should have borrowed
the sum of her ten years ago.  I have not borrowed of the Alexandrian
ere this because I had not the money to carry me thither."

After a pause, Agrippa anticipated a further question and continued.

"The Alexandrian is Alexander Lysimachus, the noblest Jew a generation
hath produced.  Even Rome, that hath such little use for our blood,
waives its ancient judgment against Lysimachus.  He is alabarch of the
Jews in Alexandria, able as a Roman, just as a Jew, refined as a Greek,
versatile as an Alexandrian.  I saw him four years ago, here, in
Jerusalem, when he brought his wife's remains to bury them on sacred
soil.  He had with him two sons, one a man, grown, with his father's
genius, but without his father's soul; the other a handsome lad of
undeveloped character, and a daughter, a veritable sprite for beauty,
and a sibyl for wits.  I was afraid of her; I, a Herod and a married
man, turning forty, was afraid of her!  But get me the twenty thousand
drachmae, Marsyas, and thou shall see her--_Hercle_--a thousand pardons!
I forgot that thou art an Essene!"

Marsyas stood silent once more, and Agrippa waited.

"And yet one other thing, my lord," the Essene said finally.  "I serve
thee no less for love, because I serve thee also for a purpose.  Thou
wilt not forget to serve me, when thou comest to thine own?"

"I give thee again my much misused word, Marsyas.  Believe me, thou
hast forced more truths out of me than any ever achieved before.
Cypros will make thee her inquisitor when next she suspects me of
warmth toward a maiden!"

Marsyas lifted the prince's hand and pressed it to his lips.  Without
further word, he went out of the chamber and returned to the city.

He sought out the counting-room of Peter the usurer, and found within a
commotion and a gathered crowd.  The old man himself stood in a
steward's place behind a grating of bronze, with lists and coffers
about him.  Without stood a brown woman, in a strange dress
sufficiently rough to establish her state of servitude, and she bore in
her hands a sheep-skin bag that seemed to be filled with coins.

About her was a group of men of nationalities so diverse and so
evidently perplexed that Marsyas immediately surmised that they had
been summoned as interpreters for a stranger whom they could not
understand.

The brown woman was passive: the usurer behind his grating in such a
state of great excitement and anxiety that moisture stood out on his
wrinkled forehead.  His eyes were on the sheep-skin bag; evidently the
brown woman was bringing him money, and his fear that the treasure
would escape made the old man desperate.

"Have ye forgotten your mother-tongues?" he fumed at the polyglot
assembly, "or are ye base-born Syrians boasting a nationality that ye
can not prove?  Hold!  Let her not go forth, good citizens; doubtless
she hath come from a foreign debtor to repay me!  Close the doors
without!"

Marsyas pressed through the crowd to the grating, and the old man
discovered him.

"Hither, hither, my friend," he exclaimed.  "See if thou canst tell
what manner of stranger we have here."

The young Essene had been examining the woman; with a quick glance,
now, he inspected her face.  Dark the complexion, the eyes olive-green
as chrysolite, mysterious and hypnotic; the features regular as an
Egyptian's, but stronger and more beautiful; the physique refined, yet
hardy.  The mystic air of the Ganges breathed from her scented shawl.
The young man's training in languages was not overtaxed.

"What is thy will?" he asked in the tongue of the Brahmins.

"To exchange Hindu money for Roman coin," was the instant reply.

Marsyas turned to Peter.

"This is an Indian woman," he explained.  "She wishes to exchange coin
of her country for Roman money."

"Good!" the old man cried, rubbing his hands.  "We shall oblige her.
Foreign coins are so much bullion; yet, we pay only its face value, in
Roman moneys!  Good!  I shall melt it, and deliver it to the Roman
mint!  Good!  But--but how shall I know one of these outlandish coins
from another?"

"I can tell you," Marsyas answered.

The assembled group drifted out of the counting-room and the usurer,
sighing his delight, opened a gate and bade Marsyas and the Hindu woman
come into the apartment behind the screen.  There the exchange was
made, and the old usurer, trusting to the Hindu's ignorance of the
language, permitted no moment to pass without comment on his profit.

Presently, Marsyas turned to the woman.

"You lose money by this traffic," he said deliberately.

"Rest thee, brother," was the calm reply, "I know it.  Yet I must have
Roman coin to carry me to Egypt."

Marsyas glanced at her apparel.  In spite of its humble appearance, it
was the owner of this treasure, that dwelt within it.

The exchange was made, amounting to something over twenty thousand
drachmae.  Marsyas, with wistful eyes, saw her put the treasure away in
the sheepskin bag.  He arose as she arose, and the two were conducted
out by Peter.

Without, it had grown dark.  The woman had made no effort to hide the
nature of her burden.  She made an almost haughty gesture of farewell
to Marsyas.

"I shall serve thee, perchance, one day," she said and passed out.

Marsyas followed her.  At the threshold, he wavered and stepping into
the street stopped.

She made a small, frail, dusky apparition, under the black shadows of
the bulky buildings of Ptolemais--a profitable victim for some
light-footed highwayman, less sorely in need of money than he.  But she
evidently felt no fear.

Then, he turned and went back into the counting-room.

Peter was behind his grating.

"Who and what art thou?" the usurer demanded, with no little admiration
in his tone.

"I am," Marsyas answered, "a doctor of Laws, a master of languages, a
doctor of medicines, a scholar of the College at Jerusalem, a postulant
Essene."

The reply was intentionally full.

"And a steward for love, only!"

"Only for a time.  When I can repay thee a debt long standing, I shall
cease to serve at all."

The usurer's eyes brightened.  "A debt," he repeated softly.  "Is this
my fortunate day?  Which of the bankrupts who owe me has been
replenished?"

"Not yet, the one of whom I speak," Marsyas replied.  "Hast thou heard
of Herod Agrippa?"

"Herod Agrippa!  Evil day that he borrowed a talent of me, never to
return it!"

"Perchance, some day--"

"Never!  Whosoever lends him money pitches it into the sea!"

"Yet the sea hath given up its treasure, at times.  But let me trouble
thee with a question.  What price did the costliest slave in thy
knowledge command?"

"What price?  A slave?  In Rome?  Nay, then, let me think.  A Georgian
female captive of much beauty was sold to Sejanus once for six hundred
thousand drachmae--"

"I speak of serving-men," Marsyas interrupted.

"Nay, then: Caesar owns a physician worth eighty thousand drachmae."

"Hath he cured any in Caesar's house of poisoning; can he speak many
languages; is he also a doctor of Laws and a good Jew?"

The usurer shook his head.

"What price, then, should I he worth to Caesar?" Marsyas demanded.

"Sell not thyself to Caesar," Peter cried, flinging up his hands.  "It
is forbidden!"

"I shall not sell myself," Marsyas said.  "I have come only to find how
to value my services."

"Whom dost thou serve?" the old man demanded.  Marsyas was not ready to
disclose his identity.

"A Roman.  Peace and the continuance of good fortune be thine."

He bowed and passed out of the counting-room.

The usurer stood a moment, then summoned his servants, and, getting
himself into street dress, hastened to follow the young man.  Marsyas
turned his steps toward the house in the suburbs.

There were several torches about the painted gate in the wall and the
light shone on a group alighting from a curricle.  Cypros and her
children had returned from the city, and Agrippa had come forth to
receive them.  Marsyas joined the group and Peter's lectica was borne
up to the circle of radiance under the torches.  The old man's eyes
filled with wrath when he recognized Agrippa.  He stood up and surveyed
him with scorn.

"A Roman!" he scoffed.  "A Roman, only to add the vices of the race to
the meanness of a Herod!  Back to my house, slaves!  We have taken
profitless pains!"

Agrippa's anger leaped into his face and Marsyas pursued and overtook
the litter.

"Thy pardon, sir," he began.

"I have a right to attach thee for the talent thy master owes me,"
Peter stormed.

"Peace, good sir!  I am not a slave."

Peter chewed his mustache impotently, but the young Essene dropped his
Greek and spoke in Hebrew, the language of the synagogue, the true
badge of Judaism.

"Perchance we may bargain together.  Wouldst have me for hire?"

Peter smoldered in sulky silence.

"I can not serve longer without compensation," Marsyas pursued.

"What sum in hire?" Peter demanded.

"Twenty thousand drachmae--"

Peter blazed, but Marsyas stopped his invective with a motion.

"Nay, peace!  I have not finished.  Twenty thousand drachmae in loan to
Agrippa, and I will serve thee gratis till he redeems me by paying the
principal and the talent he owes."

The usurer, with a snort, abruptly ordered the slaves to proceed.

The next day, Marsyas, loitering on purpose near the usurer's, was
approached by a servant and sent into the presence of Peter.

"Hath the bankrupt any hopes?" the money-lender demanded without
preliminary.

"He goes to Alexandria, for money, and thence to imperial favor in
Rome.  There is Antonia who will aid him, as thou knowest.  Unless thou
helpest him to reach either of these two places, he is of a surety
bankrupt; wherefore he can never pay thee the talent or even the
interest."

Peter dismissed him moodily and Marsyas returned to the prince.  But
the next day Peter appeared at Agrippa's door and was conducted to the
prince's presence, where Cypros sat with him and Marsyas waited.  The
old man made no greeting.

"Thou knowest me, Agrippa," he began at once.  "For thy mother's sake,
whose happy slave I was, I will take thine Essene at his terms, less
the interest on the twenty thousand drachmae."

"My Essene at his terms," Agrippa repeated in perplexity.  But Marsyas,
with a movement of command, broke in.

"The bargain is at first hand between thee and me, good sir," he said
to Peter.  "The second contract shall be between the prince and myself.
Bring the money here at sunset and the writings shall be ready for
thee."

"Twenty thousand drachmae, less mine interest on the sum," Peter
insisted.

"Less thine interest," Marsyas assented, and Peter went out.

Agrippa got upon his feet and gazed gravely at Marsyas.

"What is this?" he asked.

"I have bound thee to my cause," the young man answered.

"How?  Nay, answer me, Marsyas.  What hast thou done?" the prince
urged, impelled by affection as well as wonder.

"I have bought my revenge, and have paid for it with a season of
bondage."

"Hast thou given thyself in hostage for us?" Cypros cried, springing up.

Marsyas, without reply, moved to leave the room.  But Agrippa planted
himself in the young man's way, and Cypros in tears slipped down on her
knees at his side, and, raising his hand, kissed it.

"We shall not forget," she whispered to him.

"I shall not know peace till I have redeemed thee," Agrippa declared
with misted eyes.

Great haste to get away from the overwhelmed pair seized the Essene.
Trembling he shook off their hold and hurried out into the air.

He had to quiet a great amazement in him at the thing he had planned
for so many days to do.  After a long agitated tramp in search of
composure, he began to see more clearly the results of his extreme act.
He had fixed himself within reach of Vitellius and the Sanhedrim:
unless the ill fortune of the luckless prince improved, he had bound
himself to servitude for a lifetime.

But he drew his hand across his troubled forehead and smiled grimly.
He had made his first decisive step against Saul!




CHAPTER VIII

AN ALEXANDRIAN CHARACTERISTIC

Nothing but prescience could have inspired Alexander, the young
Macedonian conqueror, to decide to plant a city on the sandy peninsula
which lay hot, flat, low and unproductive between the glassy waters of
Lake Mareotis and the tumble of the Mediterranean.

For a century previous, a straggling Egyptian village, called Rhacotis,
eked out a precarious existence by fisheries; the port was filled with
shoals or clogged with water-growth, and the voluptuous fertility of
the Nile margin followed the slow sweep of the great river into the sea
twelve miles farther to the east.  No other port along the coast
presented a more unattractive appearance.  But Alexander, having no
more worlds to conquer, turned his opposition upon adverse conditions.

So he struck his spear into the sand, and there arose at the blow a
city having the spirit of its founder--great, splendid, contentious,
contradictory, impetuous and finally self-destructive through its
excesses.

He enlarged and embellished Rhacotis, which lay to the west of the new
city and left it to the tenantry of the Egyptians, poor remnants of
that haughty race which had been aristocrats of the world before Troy.
In its center arose that solemn triumph of Pharaonic architecture, the
Serapeum.

But it was they who approached from the south, with the sand of the
Libyan desert in their locks, who saw noble Alexandria.  Between them
and the city was first the strength of its fortifications, prodigious
lengths of wall, beautiful with citadels and towers.  Within was the
Brucheum, with the splendor of the Library, for the Alexandrian spirit
of contentiousness sharpened and forced the intellect of her
disputants, till her learning was the most faultless of the time and
its house a fit shape for its contents.  After the Library the pillared
facade of the Court of Justice; next the unparalleled Museum, and,
interspersed between, were the glories of four hundred theaters, four
thousand palaces, four thousand baths.  Against the intense blue of the
rainless Egyptian sky were imprinted the sun-white towers, pillars,
arches and statues of the most comely city ever builded in Africa.
Memphis, lost and buried in the sand, and Thebes, an echoing nave of
roofless columns, were never so instinct with glory as Egypt's splendid
recrudescence on the coast of the Middle Sea.

To the northeast, there was abatement of pagan grandeur.  Here were
quaint solid masses of Syriac architecture, with gowned and bearded
dwellers and a general air of oriental decorum and religious rigor
which did not mark the other quarters of the city.  In this spot the
Jews of the Diaspora had been planted, had multiplied and strengthened
until there were forty thousand in the district.

Those turning the beaks of their galleys into the Alexandrian roadstead
saw first the Pharos, a mist-embraced and phantom tower, rising out of
the waves; after it, the Lochias, wading out into the sea that the
palaces of the Ptolemies might hold in mortmain their double empire of
land and water; on the other hand the trisected Heptistadium; between,
the acreage of docking and out of the amphitheatrical sweep of the
great city behind, standing huge, white and majestic, the grandest
Jewish structure, next to Herod's Temple, that the world has ever
known--the Synagogue.

The Jews of Alexandria; as a class of peculiar and emphatic
characteristics, a class toward which consideration was due in
deference to its numbers, its wealth and its sensitiveness, were
necessarily the object of particular provision.  Therefore, that they
might be intelligently handled as to their prejudices, they were
provided with a special governor from among their own--an alabarch;
permitted to erect their own sanctuaries and to practise the customs of
race and the rites of religion in so far as they did not interfere with
the government's interests.

Thus much their privileges; their oppressions were another story.

Peopled by three of the most aggressive nations on the globe, the
Greek, the Roman and the Jew, Alexandria seemed likewise to attract
representatives of every country that had a son to fare beyond its
borders.  Drift from the dry lands of all the world was brought down
and beached at the great seaport.  It ranged in type from the
fair-haired Norseman to the sinewy Mede on the east, from the Gaul on
the west to the huge Ethiopian with sooty shining face who came from
the mysterious and ancient land south of the First Cataract.

It followed that such a heterogeneous mass did not effect union and
amity.  That was a spiritual fusion which had to await a perfect
conception of liberty and the brotherhood of man.  The racial mixture
in Alexandria was, therefore, a prematurity, subject to disorder.

So long as a Jew may have his life, his faith and his chance at
bread-winning, he does not call himself abused.  These things the Roman
state yielded the Jew in Alexandria.  But he was haughty, refined,
rich, religious, exclusive, intelligent and otherwise obnoxious to the
Alexandrians, and, being also a non-combatant, the Jew was the common
victim of each and all of the mongrel races which peopled the city.

The common port of entry was an interesting spot.  The prodigious
stretches of wharf were fronted by packs of fleets, ranging in class
from the visiting warrior trireme from Ravenna or Misenum, to the squat
and blackened dhow from up the Nile or the lateen-sailed fishing-smack
from Algeria to the papyrus punt of home waters.  Its population was
the waste of society, fishers, porters, vagabonds, criminals, ruffian
sea-faring men, dockmen, laborers of all sorts, men, women and
children--the pariahs even of the rabble and typically the Voice of
Revilement.

Agrippa, landing with his party, attracted no more attention than any
other new-comer would have done, until Silas gravely inquired the way
into the Regio Judaeorum.

"Jupiter strike you!" roared the man whom the sober Silas had
addressed.  "Do I look like a barbarian Jew that I should know anything
about the Regio Judaeorum!"

His words, purposely loud, did not fail to excite the interest he meant
they should.

"Regio Judaeorum!" cried a woman under foot, filling her basket with
fish entrails.  "What say you, Gesius?  Who, these?  Look,
Alexandrians, what tinsel and airs are hunting the Regio Judaeorum!"

"Purple, by my head!" the man exclaimed.  "Roman citizens with the bent
nose of Jerusalem!"

"Agrippa, or I am a landsman!" a sailor shouted.  "Fugitive from
debtors, or I am a pirate!"

"Jews!" another woman screamed; "coming to collect usury!"

A howl of rage, threatening and lawless, greeted this cry, out of which
rose the sailor's voice with a shout of laughter.

"Usury!  Ha, ha!  He has not a denarius on him that is not borrowed!"

The Jewish prince had lived a life of diverse fortune, but never until
then had he been the object of popular scorn.  A surprise was aroused
in him as great as his indignation; he stood transfixed with emotion.
Cypros, thoroughly terrified, came out from among her servants and
clung to his arm.  On her the eyes of the fishwives alighted.

[Illustration: Cypros, thoroughly terrified, clung to his arm (missing
from book)]

"Look!  Look!" they cried.  "Sparing us our husbands by hiding her
beauty!  The rag over her face!  Bah! for a plaster of mud!"

"Fish-scales will serve as well," another cried, snatching up a handful
and throwing it at the princess.

"Have mine, too, Bassia!  Thou art a better thrower than I!" a third
shouted, handing up her basket.

"Be sure of your aim, Bassia!"

The uproar became general.

"A handful for the simpering hand-maid, too!"

"Don't miss the she-Herod!"

"Fall to, wives; don't leave it all to Bassia!"

"'Way for the proconsul!"--a distant roar came up from the water's edge.

"Bilge-water in my jar, there, mate; it will mix their perfumes!"

"'Way for the proconsul!" the distant roar insisted.

"Don't soil the proconsul, women!"

"'Ware, Bassia!  The proconsul is coming!"

"Perpol! he will not see!  He is the best Jew-baiter in all Alexandria!
Sure aim, O Phoebus of the bow!"

"'Way for the proconsul!"

"Pluto take the legionaries; here they come!"

"One more pitch at them, though Caesar were coming!"

"No privileges exclusive for thyself, Bassia!  _Habet_!  More scales!"

"Scales; shells; water!  Scales; sh--"

"Fish-heads!  _Habet_!"

"Entrails--"

"'Way for the proconsul!"

"Directly, comrades!  Shells, water!"

"Ow!  You hit a soldier!"

"Bad aim, Bassia!"

"The legionaries!  Scatter!"

The centurion at the head of a column now appeared, with his brasses
dripping with dirty water, threw up his sword and shouted.  The column
flung itself out of line and went into the mob with pilum butt or point
as the spirit urged.

Pell-mell, tumbling, screaming, scrambling, the wharf-litter fled,
parting in two bodies as it passed Agrippa's demoralized group, one
half plunging off the masonry on the sands or into the water, the other
scattering out over the great expanse of dock.  The soldiers pressed
after, and, following in the space they had cleared, came a chariot, a
legate in full armor driving, his charioteer crouching on his haunches
in the rear of the car.

His apparitors brought up against Agrippa's party.  They did not
hesitate at the rank of the strangers; it was part of the blockade.
Eutychus took to his heels and Silas went down under a blow from a
reversed javelin.  Agrippa, besmirched with the missiles of his late
assailants and blazing with fury, breasted the soldiers and cursed them
fervently.  Two of them sprang upon him, and Cypros, screaming wildly,
threw off her veil and seized the foremost legionary.

The legate pulled up his horses and looked at the struggle.  Cypros'
bared face was presented to him.  With a cry of astonishment, he threw
down the lines and leaped from the chariot.

"Back, comrades!" he shouted, running toward them.  "Touch her not!
Unhand the man!  Ho!  Domitius, call off your tigers!"

"How now, Flaccus!" Agrippa raged.  "Is this how you receive Roman
citizens in Alexandria?"

The legate stopped short and his face blackened.

"Agrippa, by the furies!  I knew the lady, but--" with a motion of his
hand he seemed to put off his temper and to recover himself.  "Tut,
tut!  Herod, you will not waste good serviceable wrath on an
Alexandrian uproar when you have lived among them a space.  They are no
more to be curbed than the Nile overflow, and are as natural to the
place.  But curse them, they shall answer for this!  Welcome to
Alexandria!  Beshrew me, but the sight of your lady's face makes me
young again!  Come, come; bear me no ill will.  Be our guest, Herod,
and we shall make back to you for all this mob's inhospitality.  Ah, my
lady, what say you?  Urge my pardon for old time's sake!"

He turned his face, which filled with more sincerity toward Cypros than
was visible in his voluble cordiality to Agrippa.  Cypros, supported by
the trembling Drumah, put her hand to her forehead and tried to smile
bravely.

"But thou hast saved us, noble Flaccus; why should we bear thee ill
will?  Blessed be thou for thy timely coming, else we had been killed!"

Agrippa, still smoldering, with Silas at his feet, alternately brushing
the prince's dress and rubbing his bruises, took the word from Cypros.

"What do Roman citizens, arriving in Alexandria, and no proconsul to
meet them?  Perchance Rome's sundry long missing citizens have been
lost here!" intimated Agrippa.

"Ho, no!  They never kill except under provocation.  Yet I shall have a
word with the wharf-master and the praetor.  But come, have my chariot,
lady.  Apparitor," addressing one of his guards, "send hither
conveyance for my guests!"

"Thy pardon and thanks, Flaccus," Agrippa objected shortly, "we are
expected by the alabarch."

"Then, by the Horae, he should have been here to meet you.  Forget him
for his discourtesy and come with me.  Beseech your husband, sweet
lady; you were my confederate in the old days."

She smiled, in a pleased way.  "But we did not inform the alabarch when
we expected to arrive," she answered.  "He hath not failed us."

"And perchance," Agrippa broke in, "it might disturb Alexandria again
to know that the proconsul had entertained Jews!"

"Still furious!" Flaccus cried jocosely.  "Oh, where is that elastic
temper which made thee famous in youth, Herod?  But here are our
curricles; at least thou wilt permit me to conduct thy party to the
alabarch's."

It was the bluff courtesy of a man who assumes polish for necessity's
sake, and suddenly envelopes himself with it, momentarily for a
purpose.  Agrippa, looking up from under his brows, glanced critically
at the proconsul's face for some light on his unwonted amiability, but,
failing to discover it, submitted with better grace to the Roman's
offers.

The proconsul was near Agrippa's age, and on his face and figure was
the stamp of unalloyed Roman blood.  He was of average height, but so
solidly built as to appear short.  His head was round and covered with
close, black curls; his brows were straight thick lines which met over
his nose, and his beardless face was molded with strong muscles on the
purple cheek and chin.  He was powerful in neck and arm and leg, and
prominent in chest and under-jaw.  Yet the brute force that published
itself in all his atmosphere was dominated by intellect and giant
capabilities.

He was Flaccus Avillus, Proconsul of Egypt, finishing now his fourth
year as viceroy over the Nile valley.  One of the few who stood in the
wintry favor of Tiberius, the imperial misanthrope of Capri, his was
the weightiest portfolio in all colonial affairs; his state little less
than Caesar's.

Wherever he walked, industry, pleasure and humankind, low or lofty,
stood still to do him honor.  So, when he headed a procession of
curricles and chariots up from the wharves of Alexandria, he did not go
unseen.  Many of the late disturbers watched with strained eyes and
gaping mouths and saw him turn his horses into the street which was the
first in the Regio Judaeorum, and not a few stared at one another and
babbled, or pointed taut or shaking fingers at the prodigy.  Flaccus,
the most notorious persecutor of the Jews among the long list of
Egyptian governors, was visiting the Regio Judaeorum escorting Jews!

The sight created no less wonder and astonishment under the eaves of
the Jewish houses, and throughout their narrow passages, but there was
no demonstration.  Each retired quietly to his family, or to his
neighbor, and gravely asked what new trickery was this.

But Agrippa's party, following their conductor, proceeded through the
less densely settled portion of the quarter into a district where the
streets opened up into a stately avenue, lined by the palaces of the
aristocratic Jews of Alexandria.

Before one, not in the least different from half a dozen surrounding
it, their guide halted.  The residence was square, with an unbroken
front, except for a porch, the single attribute characteristic of
Egypt, and the window arches and parapet relieved the somber masonry
with checkered stone.  The flight of steps leading up to the porch was
of white marble.

One of the proconsul's apparitors knocked and stiffly announced his
mission to the Jewish porter that answered.  Immediately the master of
the house came forth, followed by a number of servants to take charge
of the prince's effects.

The master of the house, Alexander Lysimachus, alabarch of Alexandria,
was a Jew by feature and by dress, but sufficiently Romanized in
disposition to propitiate Rome.  He wore a cloak, richly embroidered,
over a long white under-robe; and the magisterial tarboosh, with a
bandeau of gold braid, was set down over his fine white hair.  His
figure was lean and aged, a little bent, but every motion was as steady
as that of a young man, and his air had that certain ease and grace
which mark the courtier.

His first quick glance sought Flaccus, for the visit was without
precedent and highly significant.  But there was neither hauteur nor
suspicion in his manner.  The bluff countenance of the proconsul showed
a little expectancy, but there was even less to be seen on the Jew's
face that should betray his interpretation of the visit.  The
magistrates bowed, each after his own manner of salutation--the Jew
with oriental grace, the Roman with an offhand upward jerk of his head
and a gesture of his mailed hand.

"Behold your guests, Lysimachus," Flaccus said, "or what is left of
them after an encounter with the rabble at the wharf.  You should have
been there to meet them."

"So I should, had I been forewarned," the alabarch explained, the
peculiar music of the Jewish intonation showing in mellow contrast to
the Roman's blunt voice.  "What!  Is this how the accursed vermin have
used you!"

He put out his old waxen hands to the prince and searched his face.

"O thou son of Berenice!" he said softly.  "Welcome to the worshiping
hearts of Jews, once more."

"Thanks," replied Agrippa, embracing the old man.  "My latest adventure
with Gentiles has well-nigh persuaded me to remain there!"

"God grant it; God grant it!  And thy princess?"

Cypros had uncovered her face and was reaching him her hands.

"Mariamne!" he exclaimed in a startled way.  "Mariamne, as I live!"

Flaccus, who had fixed his eyes on Cypros the instant her veil was
lifted, started.

"Mariamne!  The murdered Mariamne!" he repeated.

"Ah, sir!" the alabarch protested, smiling.  "Thou wast not born then.
But I knew her: as a young man I knew her!  But enter, enter!  Pray
favor us with thy presence at supper, noble Flaccus.  It shall be an
evening of festivity."

He led them through a hall so dimly lighted as to appear dark after the
daylight without, and into one of the noble chambers characteristic of
the opulent Orient.  The whole interior was lined with yellow marble,
and the polish of the pavement was mirror-like.  The lattice of the
windows, the lamps, the coffers of the alabarch's records, the layers
for the palms and plantain, the clawed feet of the great divan were all
of hammered brass.  The drapery at arch and casement, the cushions and
covering of the divan were white and yellow silk, and, besides a
sprawling tiger skin on the floor, the alabarch's chair of authority,
and a table of white wood, there was no other furniture.

The alabarch gave Flaccus his magistrate's chair, and, seating his two
noble guests and their children, clapped his hands in summons.

A brown woman, with eyes like chrysolite and the lithe movements of a
panther, was instantly at his elbow.

The alabarch spoke to her in a strange tongue, and the servant
disappeared.

"I send for my daughter," he explained to his guests.  "The
waiting-woman does not understand our tongue.  My daughter--the only
one I have, and unmarried!"

"I remember her," Agrippa said with a smile.

At that moment in the archway leading into the interior of the house a
girl appeared.  She lifted her eyes to her father's face, and between
them passed the mute evidence of dependence and vital attachment.

She wore the classic Greek chiton of white wool without relief of color
or ornament, a garb which, by its simplicity, intensified the first
impression that it was a child that stood in the archway.  She was a
little below average height, with almost infantile shortening of curves
in her pretty, stanch outlines.  But the suppleness of waist and the
exquisite modeling of throat and wrist were signs that proved her to be
of mature years.

Her hair was of that intermediate tint of yellow-brown which in adult
years would be dark.  It fell in girlish freedom, rough with curls, a
little below her shoulders.  There was a boyishness in the noble
breadth of her forehead, full of front, serene almost to seriousness,
and marked by delicate black brows too level to be ideally feminine.
Her eyes were not prominent but finely set under the shading brow,
large of iris, like a child's, and fair brown in color.  In their
scrutiny was not only the wisdom of years but the penetration of a
sage.  Though her tips were not full they were perfectly cut, and
redder than the heart of any pomegranate that grew in the alabarch's
garden.

But it was not these certain signs of strength which engaged Agrippa.
Beyond the single glance to note how much the girl had developed in
four years he gave his attention to certain physical characteristics
which called upon his long experience with women to catalogue.

As she stood in the archway, the prince had let his glance slip down to
her feet, shod in white sandals, and her ankles laced about with white
ribbon.  One small foot upbore her weight, the other unconsciously, but
most daintily, poised on a toe.  She swayed once with indescribable
lightness, but afterward stood balanced with such preparedness of young
sinew that at a motion she could have moved in any direction.  Foremost
in summing these things, Agrippa observed that she was wholly
unconscious of how she stood.

"Terpsichore!" he said to himself, "or else the goddess hath withdrawn
the gift of dancing from the earth!"

"Enter, Lydia, and know the proconsul, the noble Flaccus," the alabarch
said.  The girl raised her eyes to the proconsul's face and salaamed
with enchanting grace.  Flaccus checked a fatherly smile.  He would
wait before he patronized a girl-child of uncertain age.

"And this," the alabarch went on, "thou wilt remember as our prince,
Herod Agrippa."

"Alas! sweet Lydia," Agrippa said, fixing soft eyes upon her.  "Must I
be introduced?  Am I in four years forgotten?"

"No, good my lord," she answered in a voice that was mellow with the
music of womanhood--a voice that almost startled with its abated
strength and richness, since the illusion of her youth was hard to
shake off, "thou art identified by thy sweet lady!"

Agrippa stroked his smooth chin and Flaccus shot an amused glance at
him.  Meanwhile the girl had opened her arms to Cypros.  The children,
one by one, greeted her.  The alabarch went on.

"My sons are no longer with us," he said.  "They are abroad in the
world, preparing themselves to be greater men than their father.  But
go, be refreshed; it shall be an evening of rejoicing.  Lydia, be my
right hand and give my guests comfort."

He bowed the Herod and his family out of the chamber and they followed
the girl to various apartments for rest and change of raiment.

The alabarch turned to the proconsul.

"If thou wilt follow me, sir--"

"No; I thank thee; I shall return to my house and prepare for thy
hospitality.  But tell me this: what does Agrippa here?"

"He comes to borrow money, I believe."

"Of you?"

"Doubtless."

"Put him off until you have consulted me.  He is not a safe borrower."




CHAPTER IX

"--AS AN ARMY WITH BANNERS!"

Agrippa emerged at sunset from his apartment and descended to the first
floor of the alabarch's mansion.  The hall was vacant and each of the
chambers opening off it was silent, so he wandered through the whole
length of the corridor, composedly as a master in his own house.  No
one did he see until he reached the end of the hall, when there
appeared suddenly, as if materialized out of the gloom, the brown
serving-woman.  The olive-green of her immense eyes glittered in the
light of a reed taper she bore.  She stepped aside to let him pass and
proceeded to light the lamps.

Agrippa stopped to look at her, simply because she was lithe and
unusual, but she continued without heeding him.  On one of the
lamp-bowls the palm-oil had run over and the reed ignited it; but with
her bare hand the woman damped it and went her way with a running flame
flickering out on the back of her hand.

"Perpol!" the prince exclaimed to himself as he rambled on.  "No wonder
the phenix comes to Egypt to be born."

At the end of a corridor he passed through an open door into a
colonnade fronting a court-garden of extraordinary beauty.  It was
carpeted with sod, interlined with walks of white stone which led at
every divergence to a classic Roman exedra.  The awning which usually
sheltered the inclosure from the sun had been rolled up and the cooling
sky bent loftily over it.  The inert summer airs were heavy with the
scent of lotus, red lilies and spice roses which were massed in an oval
bed in the center.

At that moment he caught sight of an indolent figure, half sitting,
half lying in one of the sections of the exedra.

He knew at first glance that it was not the alabarch's daughter, and,
remembering that his last glance in the mirror after his servant had
done with him had shown him at his best, he moved without hesitation
toward the unknown.

As he approached she raised her eyes and coolly scrutinized him.  Her
face, thus lifted for inspection, showed him a woman in the later
twenties, and of that type which since the beginning could look men
between the eyes.  She was a Roman, but never in all the Empire were
other eyes so black and luminous, or hair so glossy, or cheek so
radiant.  Her face was an elongated oval, topping a long round neck,
which broadened at the base into a sudden and exaggerated slope of
marble-white shoulders.  The low sweep of the bosom, the girdle just
beneath it, shortening the lithe waist, the slender hips, the long lazy
limbs completed a perfect type, distinct and unlimited in its powers.

For a fraction of a second the two contemplated each other; perhaps
only long enough for each to confess to himself that he had met his
like.  Then Agrippa came and sat down beside her, and she did not stir
from her careless posture.  So many, many of the kind had each met and
known that they could not be strangers.

"The alabarch should turn his prospective son-in-law into his garden if
he would speed the marrying of his daughter," the prince observed.

"He hath the daughter, the garden, and the notion to dispose of her,"
she answered, "but it is the son-in-law that is wanting."

"But in my long experience with womankind," he replied, "it would not
seem improbable to believe that it is the lady and not the lover that
makes the witchery of the garden a wasted thing.  I have heard of
unwilling maids."

"Unwilling in directions," she replied with a smile, "and under certain
influences.  For if there were any to withstand my conviction, I am
ready to wager that there never lived a woman before whom all the world
of men could pass without making her choice."

"And perchance," he said promptly, "if there were any to withstand my
conviction, I would wager that there never lived a man before whom the
world of women could pass without making his choice,--again and again!"

"Which declaration," she responded evenly, "publishes thee a married
man; the single gallant declares only for one."

"O deft reasoning! it establishes thee a Roman.  What dost thou here,
in Alexandria where there is no court, no games, no senators, no
Caesar--naught but riots and Jews?"

"Jews," she said, scanning a rounded arm to see if its rest on the back
of the exedra had left a mark on it, "Jews are red-lipped, and eyed
like heifers.  Sometimes brawn and force weary us in Rome; wherefore we
go into Egypt or the East to seek silky and subtle devilishness."

Agrippa moved along the exedra and looked into her eyes.  He saw there
that peculiar expression which he had expected to find.  It was a set
questioning, one that runs the scale from appeal to demand--the asking
eye, the sign of continual consciousness of the woman-self and her
charms.

"Why make the effort?  Only tell us of the East that you want us and
the East will come to you."

"What?  Oriental love-philters, simitars, poisoning, silks and
mysticism in the shadow of the Fora and within sound of the
Senate-chamber?  No, my friend; we must hear the lapping of the Nile or
the flow of the Abana, behold camels and priests, and the far level
line of the desert, while we languish on bronze bosoms and breathe
musks from oriental lips."

"It is not then the Jews," he objected.  "They are a temperate, a
passionless lot, that carry the Torah like hair-balances in their
hearts to discover if any deed they do weighs according to the Law.
No, Jews are a straight people.  Thou speakest of the--Arab!"

She turned her eyes toward him and measured his length, surveyed his
slender hands, and glanced at the warm brown of his complexion.

"So?" she asked with meaning.  "An Arab?"

He continued to smile at her.

"And every Jew is thus minded?" she asked, observing later the
unmistakable signs of Jewish blood in his profile.

"Unless he is tinctured with the lawlessness of Arabia."

"Ah!"  She moved her fan idly and looked up at the sky.

"It is then, of a truth, the Arab, we seek," she added presently.  "The
Arab that knows no manners but his fathers' manners; who eats, drinks,
loves, hates and conquers after his own fashion."

"Without having seen Jerusalem, or Rome?" he asked.

"Rome!" she repeated, looking at him again.  "Yes, without having seen
Rome or Jerusalem or Alexandria."

Agrippa tilted his head thoughtfully.

"Then, it is good only for a time--for as long as the surfeit of
civilization lasts--which lasts no longer the moment one realizes the
Arab is not devoted to the bath and that he counts his women among his
cattle!"

She laughed outright.  "I remember thou didst indorse him not a moment
since!  Wherefore the change?"

"Refinement in all things!  To get it into an Arab, he has to be
modified by alien blood."

"A truce!  I am in Alexandria; her poetic wickedness has not been
entirely exhausted.  I--meet new, desirable things--daily!"

Her fan was between them as she spoke and he took the stick of it just
above where she held it and was putting it aside when the proconsul,
resplendent in a tunic of white and purple, appeared in the colonnade.
Beside him was Cypros in her Jewish matron's dress.

Agrippa put the fan out of the way and made his answer.

"Forget not that the East, whether Arab or Alexandrian, is
intense--once won.  It might harass thee, if thou weariest of it,
before it wearies of thee--even to the extreme of pursuing thee to
Rome."

The proconsul and the princess approached.  The deep-set eyes of the
Roman wore a peculiarly satisfied look.

"Men seek for stray cattle in the fields of sweet grass, look for lost
jewels in the wallets of thieves, and missing Herods in the company of
beautiful women," he observed.

"It is good to have an established reputation, whether we be cattle or
jewels or Herods," Agrippa laughed; "for, thou seest, we are disjointed
and unsettled, seeing Flaccus now enduring a Jew, again attending a
lady.

"Again," said the beauty, "we mark the work of circumstances, which led
us into difference just now, O thou disputatious."

"Well said, Junia," the proconsul declared; "some ladies would make
gallants out of the fiends!  Know ye all one another?" the proconsul
continued.

"Except my lovely neighbor," Agrippa replied.

"The Lady Junia, daughter of Euodus, who with her father hath been
transplanted here from Rome."

In the colonnade Lydia, the daughter, appeared and beside her a man, by
certain of the more obvious signs, of middle-age.  But when he drew
closer the more obvious gave way to the indisputable testimony of
smooth elastic skin, long lashes and strong, white, unworn teeth that
the man was not yet thirty.  He was a little above medium height,
spare, yet well-built except for a slight lift in the shoulders,
beardless, colorless, with straight dark hair, bound with a classic
fillet.  His general lack of tone brought into noticeable prominence
the amiability and luster of his fine brown eyes.

That he was a Jew was apparent no less by dress than by feature.  His
Jewish garments differed only in color and texture from those worn by
his fathers in Judea.  The outer gown was of light green scantly shot
with points of gold.

The pair walked slowly as if unconscious of the presence of others, and
the attitude of the man, bending to look into Lydia's face as she
walked, was clearly more attentive than ordinary courtesy demanded.

"Approacheth Justin Classicus," said Flaccus.  "In that garment he
looks much like a chameleon that has strayed across an Attic meadow in
spring."

"Behold, already the witchery of the garden!" Agrippa said softly to
Junia.

"This," added the proconsul, introducing the new-comer, "is Justin
Classicus, the latest fashion in philosophers, the most popular Jew in
Alexandria."

Classicus bowed, glanced at Junia and again at Agrippa, and made a
place for Lydia on the exedra, so that he might sit on a taboret at her
feet.

"What news, good sir," Agrippa asked, "among the schools over the
world?"

"News?" Classicus repeated.  "Nothing.  Philo is silent; Petronius is
mersed in affairs in Bithynia; Rome's gone a-frolicking, scholars and
all, to Capri."

"Alas!" said Flaccus; "nothing happens now but scandal; even the
ancient miracles of divine visitations, phenixes, comets and monsters
have ceased."

"But you say nothing of religion," said Classicus.  "Yet possibly it
follows, now, in order."

"After monsters, phenixes and the rest," put in Agrippa.

"What is it?" Flaccus asked.

"Perchance thou hast heard," Classicus responded.  "It issues out of
Judea, which adds to its interest, since we are accustomed to nothing
but sobriety from Palestine."

"What is it?" Flaccus insisted.

"A new Messiah!"

"Oh," Agrippa cried wearily, "a new Messiah!  How many in the past
generation, Cypros?  Ten, twenty, a hundred?  Alas!  Classicus, that
thou shouldst serve up as new something which every Jew hath expected
and discovered and rejected for the last three thousand years."

"O happy race!" Junia exclaimed; "which hath something to which to look
forward!  But what is a Messiah?"

"A god," said Agrippa.

"The anointed king," Cypros corrected hastily, "of godly origin that
shall restore the Jews to dominion over the world!"

"_Mirabile dictu!_" Junia cried.

"Olympian Jove!" Flaccus exclaimed, smiting his muscular leg.  "What a
task, what an ambition, what an achievement!  I behold Caesar's dudgeon.
Go on, Classicus; though it be old to thy remarkable race, used to
aspiring to the scope of Olympus, let us hear, who have never wished to
be more than Caesar!"

"It is not so much of the Messiah," Classicus responded, smiling, "as
his--school, if it may be so called.  One of the followers appeared at
the Library some time ago, perchance as long as three years ago--an
Egyptian of the upper classes, much traveled, and told such a
remarkable tale of the Messiah's birth and death that he instantly lost
caste for truthfulness."

"Alas!" Lydia exclaimed in a tone of disappointment.  "Why will they
insist that the Messiah must be a miraculous creature, demeanored like
the pagan gods and proceeding through the uproar of tumbling satrapies
to the high place of Supreme Necromancer of the Universe!"

"Sweet Lydia!" Agrippa protested.  "Roman hard-headedness hath turned
thee against our traditions!"

"But the Egyptian did not picture such a man," Classicus said very
gently.  "He went to the other extreme, so far that his hearers had to
contemplate an image of a carpenter's son, elected to a leadership over
a horde of slaves and outcasts and visionary aristocrats; who taught a
doctrine of submission, poverty and love, and who finally was crucified
for blasphemy during a popular uproar."

"It hath the recommendation of being different!" Lydia declared
frankly.  "Tell me more."

"There is no more."

"What!  Is it dead?" she insisted.  "Dead as all the others?  Then it
is different only in its inception."

"No," said Agrippa thoughtfully; "it is not dead, but dying hard.  The
Sanhedrim is punishing its followers in Jerusalem at present.  Thou
rememberest, Cypros; Marsyas was charged with the apostasy."

"So material as to engage the Sanhedrim?" Lydia pursued.

"We hear," responded Classicus, "that Jerusalem and even Judea are
unsafe for them, and numbers have appeared in the city of late--"

"Among us?" Lydia asked.

"No; in Rhacotis," replied Classicus; whereupon Flaccus raised an
inquiring eye.

"Is that the sect that the prefect has been warned to observe?" he
demanded.

"Doubtless; it seems that their foremost fault is rebellion against
authority," Classicus made answer.  "So much for their doctrine of
submission."

"Tell us that," Lydia urged.

"Apostasy," Agrippa answered for Classicus, "flagrant apostasy; for the
Sanhedrim came out of the hall of judgment to stone an offender, for
the first time in seven years.  I saw the execution; in fact, in a way
I was brought close to the circumstances by a friend of the apostate
who was attached to my household."

"Is he with thee?" Flaccus asked pointedly.

"No, we left him in Ptolemais.  But the note of their presence in
Alexandria must have been sounded early, directly they arrived, for I
departed from Jerusalem the day following the first movement against
the sect, and thence to Ptolemais and Alexandria with ordinary
despatch."

"They did not announce themselves," Flaccus replied.  "Vitellius
announced them.  He wants an Essene who is believed to be among them."

Agrippa raised his head and looked straight at Flaccus.  He remembered
that he had betrayed Marsyas' refuge.  Cypros drew in a breath of alarm.

"That was simply done, Flaccus," Agrippa remarked coolly.

The princess laid her hand on the ruddy flesh of the proconsul's arm.

"We have been frank with thee, my lord," she said, "and thou art a
noble Roman--therefore a safe guardian of our unguarded words."

The others maintained a wondering silence.  Flaccus smiled.

"Vitellius hath bidden me to look for him, adding with certain fervid
embellishments that he hath sought everywhere but in Egypt and Hades.
Vitellius is no diplomat.  Whistling finds the lost hound sooner than
search."

"But thou wilt not find him, noble Flaccus," Cypros besought in a
lowered tone.  "Yield us thy promise that thou wilt not betray him!"

"My promise, lady!  Indeed, I gave it in my heart a moment since.  Hear
it now.  Alexandria is subject to thee.  Let him come and be our ward."

"I shall depend on that," Agrippa said decidedly.  "For I shall
despatch a servant for the man, the instant I can so do!"

"And yet," Cypros insisted, still distressed, "if Vitellius requires
him at thy hands, how shalt thou avoid giving him up?"

Flaccus smiled at her with softened eyes.

"O gentle lady, the day the young man should arrive, I shall set the
prefect on the Nazarenes in Rhacotis.  If he be not found, none without
this trustworthy circle shall have cause to believe that I am not in
all conscience striving to help a brother proconsul run down a
fugitive."

"A shrewd strategy," Lydia said dryly, "but one rather costly for the
Nazarenes."

"The Nazarenes!  Who wastes tears over them?  Thine own straight people
condemn them, lady."

"An exhilarating recreation, indeed," she repeated as if to herself,
"for the prefect, the rabble Alexandrians and the Nazarenes!  O seekers
of esthetic sport, that will be a rare occasion!  Yield me thy promise,
my Lord Agrippa, that thou wilt tell us the day the young man arrives!"

Flaccus' face darkened for a moment, but at that moment the alabarch
appeared in the colonnade.

"Here comes our host," said Agrippa.  "Hast ordered the garlands,
Lysimachus?"

"The feast is prepared," Lysimachus replied, and, turning to Flaccus,
continued: "Thou shalt see, now, good sir, how Jews feast.  In all
thine experiences, thou hast never broken bread with a Jew."

"Not so!" Flaccus retorted, "for I was present at the Lady Cypros'
wedding-feast!"

"Ho!  Flaccus remembering a wedding-feast!" Agrippa laughed, as he
arose, taking Junia's hand.  "Mars, cherishing a confection!"

"Perchance," Cypros ventured, pleased and coloring, "if Mars'
confections were more plentiful and the noble Flaccus' wedding-feasts
less rare, they both might forget the one!"

"Never!" Flaccus declared, "though I were Hymen himself!"

As they proceeded toward the colonnade, Cypros drew closer to him.

"Thou canst not know what service thou hast done us by that promise,"
she said.  "It is more than the youth's security; it means my husband's
success.  For in this young man, we have found Fortune itself!"

The proconsul made no answer, for his gray-brown eyes flickered
suddenly as if a candle had been moved close by them.




CHAPTER X

FLACCUS WORKS A COMPLEXITY

Near sunset the following day the alabarch appeared in the porch of the
proconsul's mansion,--an incident which would speedily have spread
wildly over the Brucheum had not the shrewd Lysimachus come in Roman
dress, unostentatiously and hidden by the dusk.  The slave who
conducted the visitor to the master's presence was suspicious, but he
did not lapse from courtesy.  If he had prejudices they had to await a
popular uproar for expression, and popular uproars at present against
the Jews were manifestly in disfavor with the proconsul.

Flaccus received the alabarch in the great gloom of his atrium.  The
torches had not been lighted, the cancelli admitted only dusk.  The
shadowy shape of the proconsul, relaxed in his curule, alone and
immovable, thus surrounded by meditative atmosphere, suddenly appealed
to the alabarch as out of harmony with the legate's blunt nature.

As the Jew drew near, he saw rolls and parcels of linen and parchment,
petitions and memorials, scattered about on the pavement, as if the
Roman had let them roll off his table or drop from his hand
unconsciously.  His elbow rested on the ivory arm of his curule, his
cheek on his clenched hand.  The undimmed gaze of the Jewish magistrate
detected lines in the hard face that he had never seen before.

But Flaccus stirred and drew himself up to attention.

"Come up, Lysimachus," he said.  "There is a chair here, for thee."

The alabarch advanced and dropped into the seat that Flaccus had
indicated.

"This," he observed, nodding toward the dark torch at the proconsul's
side, "would lead me to believe thou art inventing rhymes."

"Or conspiracies.  Plots and poetry demand the same exciting dusk.
Well, has the Herod sued?"

"Not he, but his lady."

"His lady!  By Hecate, the mystery is solved.  Thus it is that he hath
been able to borrow every usurer poor from Rome to Damascus!"

"He wins upon her virtue; but withhold thy interpretation of my words
until I show thee what they mean.  She is beautiful and virtuous; a
Herod and married--a conjunction of circumstances in these days so rare
as to be out of nature--therefore, phenomenal.  So we toss our yellow
gold into her lap in recognition of the entertainment she hath
afforded--being unusual."

"Virtuous; that means, faithful to the man she married.  No woman is
faithful except she loves her love.  A just procession in the order of
the Furies' reign.  The warm of heart, unrewarded; the unworthy,
anointed and worshiped."

"This melancholy twilight hath made thee morbid, Avillus.  You Romans
take womankind too seriously."

"When womankind or a kind of woman can drain the world's purse,
methinks she is a serious matter.  What sum does she want?"

"Three hundred thousand drachmae."

"O Midas; give her the touch!  Let all her possessions be gold!  Didst
advance it to her?"

"If thou wilt remember, it was thy command that I consult thee, first."

"Temperate Jew!  To remember a consular suggestion, while a lovely
woman, and a Herod at that, besought thee for the contents of thy
purse.  Oh, thou art an old, old man, Lysimachus!"

The alabarch laughed and frowned the next moment.

"Beshrew the jest!  Men who make light of virtue deserve incontinent
wives.  And there is this one thing apparent, which should make me
serious.  The Herod is absolutely penniless, and I can not turn that
tender woman and her babes out of doors to take the roads of Egypt."

"Rest thee in that small matter.  Thou and I can spare her sesterces
enough to ship her back to Judea."

Lysimachus was silent for a moment.

"She would not be satisfied," he said at last.  "She wants three
talents, though she never had afterward a crust of bread.  It seems
that they permitted a free-born man to pawn himself for that sum in
Ptolemais and accepted the money from him!"

"Shade of Herod!" the proconsul exclaimed.

"It seems also that the man is in peril of the authorities, having
placed himself in jeopardy to save Agrippa from Herrenius Capito, who
had run Agrippa to earth for a debt he owes to Caesar--"

"O, that is the way of it!  I know of that man!  Well, then, perchance
it is not so much because she loves her husband as because the debt to
the pawned one chafes.  I hear that he is young and comely."

"Forget the slanderous jest, Flaccus; I am ashamed of it.  What shall I
do in this matter?"

"Lend her three talents."

"She would buy the man's freedom, but what then?  She would still be
here in Alexandria as penniless as ever."

"The consular suggestion, it seems, only held thee a moment in
abeyance," the proconsul said slyly.  "She will get the three hundred
thousand drachmae, yet!"

"She will not," the alabarch declared, "First, because I have it not;
next, because I am not eager to pay a Herod's debts."

"Or, chiefly, because thou shouldst never see it again."

The alabarch tapped the pavement with his foot and looked away.  The
attitude was confession to a belief in the proconsul's convictions.

"What sum couldst thou lend by pinching thyself?

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