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Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face

by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #6308 · 955,006 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face

Author: Charles Kingsley


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6308]
                Most recently updated: November 9, 2016

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by P. J. Riddick, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HYPATIA — OR NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE ***




Produced by P. J. Riddick









HYPATIA

or

NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE


By Charles Kingsley





PREFACE


A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which
will be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will
do well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very hideous,
though a very great, age; one of those critical and cardinal eras in
the history of the human race, in which virtues and vices manifest
themselves side by side--even, at times, in the same person--with the
most startling openness and power. One who writes of such an era labours
under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how evil people were;
he will not be believed if he tells how good they were. In the present
case that disadvantage is doubled; for while the sins of the Church,
however heinous, were still such as admit of being expressed in words,
the sins of the heathen world, against which she fought, were utterly
indescribable; and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the
sake of decency, to state the Church’s case far more weakly than the
facts deserve.

Not, be it ever remembered, that the slightest suspicion of immorality
attaches either to the heroine of this book, or to the leading
philosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever base and
profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the great
Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid and
ascetic virtue.

For a time had arrived, in which no teacher who did not put forth the
most lofty pretensions to righteousness could expect a hearing. That
Divine Word, who is ‘The Light who lighteth every man which cometh into
the world,’ had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral craving never
before felt in any strength, except by a few isolated philosophers or
prophets. The Spirit had been poured out on all flesh; and from one end
of the Empire to the other, from the slave in the mill to the emperor
on his throne, all hearts were either hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, or learning to do homage to those who did so. And He who
excited the craving, was also furnishing that which would satisfy
it; and was teaching mankind, by a long and painful education, to
distinguish the truth from its innumerable counterfeits, and to find,
for the first time in the world’s life, a good news not merely for the
select few, but for all mankind without respect of rank or race.

For somewhat more than four hundred years, the Roman Empire and the
Christian Church, born into the world almost at the same moment, had
been developing themselves side by side as two great rival powers, in
deadly struggle for the possession of the human race. The weapons of
the Empire had been not merely an overwhelming physical force, and a
ruthless lust of aggressive conquest: but, even more powerful still, an
unequalled genius for organisation, and an uniform system of external
law and order. This was generally a real boon to conquered nations,
because it substituted a fixed and regular spoliation for the fortuitous
and arbitrary miseries of savage warfare: but it arrayed, meanwhile,
on the side of the Empire the wealthier citizens of every province, by
allowing them their share in the plunder of the labouring masses below
them. These, in the country districts, were utterly enslaved; while
in the cities, nominal freedom was of little use to masses kept from
starvation by the alms of the government, and drugged into brutish good
humour by a vast system of public spectacles, in which the realms of
nature and of art were ransacked to glut the wonder, lust, and ferocity
of a degraded populace.

Against this vast organisation the Church had been fighting for now four
hundred years, armed only with its own mighty and all-embracing message,
and with the manifestation of a spirit of purity and virtue, of love
and self-sacrifice, which had proved itself mightier to melt and weld
together the hearts of men, than all the force and terror, all the
mechanical organisation, all the sensual baits with which the Empire
had been contending against that Gospel in which it had recognised
instinctively and at first sight, its internecine foe.

And now the Church had conquered. The weak things of this world
had confounded the strong. In spite of the devilish cruelties of
persecutors; in spite of the contaminating atmosphere of sin which
surrounded her; in spite of having to form herself, not out of a race
of pure and separate creatures, but by a most literal ‘new birth’ out
of those very fallen masses who insulted and persecuted her; in spite of
having to endure within herself continual outbursts of the evil passions
in which her members had once indulged without cheek; in spite of
a thousand counterfeits which sprang up around her and within her,
claiming to be parts of her, and alluring men to themselves by that very
exclusiveness and party arrogance which disproved their claim; in spite
of all, she had conquered. The very emperors had arrayed themselves
on her side. Julian’s last attempt to restore paganism by imperial
influence had only proved that the old faith had lost all hold upon the
hearts of the masses; at his death the great tide-wave of new opinion
rolled on unchecked, and the rulers of earth were fain to swim with the
stream; to accept, in words at least, the Church’s laws as theirs; to
acknowledge a King of kings to whom even they owed homage and obedience;
and to call their own slaves their ‘poorer brethren,’ and often, too,
their ‘spiritual superiors.’

But if the emperors had become Christian, the Empire had not. Here and
there an abuse was lopped off; or an edict was passed for the visitation
of prisons and for the welfare of prisoners; or a Theodosius was
recalled to justice and humanity for a while by the stern rebukes of
an Ambrose. But the Empire was still the same: still a great tyranny,
enslaving the masses, crushing national life, fattening itself and its
officials on a system of world-wide robbery; and while it was paramount,
there could be no hope for the human race. Nay, there were even those
among the Christians who saw, like Dante afterwards, in the ‘fatal gift
of Constantine,’ and the truce between the Church and the Empire, fresh
and more deadly danger. Was not the Empire trying to extend over the
Church itself that upas shadow with which it had withered up every
other form of human existence; to make her, too, its stipendiary
slave-official, to be pampered when obedient, and scourged whenever she
dare assert a free will of her own, a law beyond that of her tyrants; to
throw on her, by a refined hypocrisy, the care and support of the masses
on whose lifeblood it was feeding? So thought many then, and, as I
believe, not unwisely.

But if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at the
beginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still more so.
The universal fusion of races, languages, and customs, which had gone
on for four centuries under the Roman rule, had produced a corresponding
fusion of creeds, an universal fermentation of human thought and faith.
All honest belief in the old local superstitions of paganism had
been long dying out before the more palpable and material idolatry of
Emperor-worship; and the gods of the nations, unable to deliver those
who had trusted in them, became one by one the vassals of the ‘Divus
Caesar,’ neglected by the philosophic rich, and only worshipped by
the lower classes, where the old rites still pandered to their grosser
appetites, or subserved the wealth and importance of some particular
locality.

In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancient
moorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt, and
especially in the more metaphysical and contemplative East, attempted to
solve for themselves the questions of man’s relation to the unseen by
those thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it is a disgrace to
the word philosophy to call them by it), on the records of which the
student now gazes bewildered, unable alike to count or to explain their
fantasies.

Yet even these, like every outburst of free human thought, had their use
and their fruit. They brought before the minds of churchmen a thousand
new questions which must be solved, unless the Church was to relinquish
for ever her claims as the great teacher and satisfier of the human
soul. To study these bubbles, as they formed and burst on every wave of
human life; to feel, too often by sad experience, as Augustine felt,
the charm of their allurements; to divide the truths at which they aimed
from the falsehood which they offered as its substitute; to exhibit the
Catholic Church as possessing, in the great facts which she proclaimed,
full satisfaction, even for the most subtle metaphysical cravings of a
diseased age;--that was the work of the time; and men were sent to do
it, and aided in their labour by the very causes which had produced the
intellectual revolution. The general intermixture of ideas, creeds,
and races, even the mere physical facilities for intercourse between
different parts of the Empire, helped to give the great Christian
fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries a breadth of observation,
a depth of thought, a large-hearted and large-minded patience and
tolerance, such as, we may say boldly, the Church has since beheld but
rarely, and the world never; at least, if we are to judge those great
men by what they had, and not by what they had not, and to believe, as
we are bound, that had they lived now, and not then, they would have
towered as far above the heads of this generation as they did above the
heads of their own. And thus an age, which, to the shallow insight of
a sneerer like Gibbon, seems only a rotting and aimless chaos of
sensuality and anarchy, fanaticism and hypocrisy, produced a Clement and
an Athanase, a Chrysostom and an Augustine; absorbed into the sphere of
Christianity all which was most valuable in the philosophies of Greece
and Egypt, and in the social organisation of Rome, as an heirloom for
nations yet unborn; and laid in foreign lands, by unconscious agents,
the foundations of all European thought and Ethics.

But the health of a Church depends, not merely on the creed which
it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great
ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.
The _mens sana_ must have a _corpus sanum_ to inhabit. And even for the
Western Church, the lofty future which was in store for it would have
been impossible, without some infusion of new and healthier blood into
the veins of a world drained and tainted by the influence of Rome.

And the new blood, at the era of this story, was at hand. The great tide
of those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German are the
purest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from Gibraltar to
St. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements of strength,
was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady south-western current,
across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping and recoiling when
it reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Those wild tribes were
bringing with them into the magic circle of the Western Church’s
influence the very materials which she required for the building up of
a future Christendom, and which she could find as little in the Western
Empire as in the Eastern; comparative purity of morals; sacred respect
for woman, for family life, law, equal justice, individual freedom, and,
above all, for honesty in word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditary
effeminacy, hearts earnest though genial, and blessed with a strange
willingness to learn, even from those whom they despised; a brain equal
to that of the Roman in practical power, and not too far behind that of
the Eastern in imaginative and speculative acuteness.

And their strength was felt at once. Their vanguard, confined with
difficulty for three centuries beyond the Eastern Alps, at the expense
of sanguinary wars, had been adopted wherever it was practicable, into
the service of the Empire; and the heart’s core of the Roman legion
was composed of Gothic officers and soldiers. But now the main body had
arrived. Tribe after tribe was crowding down to the Alps, and trampling
upon each other on the frontiers of the Empire. The Huns, singly their
inferiors, pressed them from behind with the irresistible weight of
numbers; Italy, with her rich cities and fertile lowlands, beckoned them
on to plunder; as auxiliaries, they had learned their own strength and
Roman weakness; a _casus belli_ was soon found. How iniquitous was the
conduct of the sons of Theodosius, in refusing the usual bounty, by
which the Goths were bribed not to attack the Empire!--The whole pent-up
deluge burst over the plains of Italy, and the Western Empire became
from that day forth a dying idiot, while the new invaders divided Europe
among themselves. The fifteen years before the time of this tale had
decided the fate of Greece; the last four that of Rome itself. The
countless treasures which five centuries of rapine had accumulated
round the Capitol had become the prey of men clothed in sheepskins and
horse-hide; and the sister of an emperor had found her beauty, virtue,
and pride of race worthily matched by those of the hard-handed Northern
hero who led her away from Italy as his captive and his bride, to found
new kingdoms in South France and Spain, and to drive the newly-arrived
Vandals across the Straits of Gibraltar into the then blooming
coast-land of Northern Africa. Everywhere the mangled limbs of the Old
World were seething in the Medea’s caldron, to come forth whole, and
young, and strong. The Longbeards, noblest of their race, had found a
temporary resting-place upon the Austrian frontier, after long southward
wanderings from the Swedish mountains, soon to be dispossessed again by
the advancing Huns, and, crossing the Alps, to give their name for ever
to the plains of Lombardy. A few more tumultuous years, and the Franks
would find themselves lords of the Lower Rhineland; and before the hairs
of Hypatia’s scholars had grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa would
have landed on the shores of Kent, and an English nation have begun its
world-wide life.

But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every other
quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in Constantinople,
which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and manners of Asia. The
Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern doom, from the only influence
which could have regenerated it. Every attempt of the Gothic races to
establish themselves beyond the sea, whether in the form of an organised
kingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of
brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a
praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or as
religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruption
and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform in
morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal
conquerors worked in North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost more
than they gave. Climate, bad example, and the luxury of power degraded
them in one century into a race of helpless and debauched slave-holders,
doomed to utter extermination before the semi-Gothic armies of
Belisarius; and with them vanished the last chance that the Gothic
races would exercise on the Eastern World the same stern yet wholesome
discipline under which the Western had been restored to life.

The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour not
for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and decrepitude
were already but too manifest in them. That very peculiar turn of the
Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the then
world, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to speculation;
and the races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate, over-civilised,
exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh blood had
come to renew the stock. Morbid, self-conscious, physically indolent,
incapable then, as now, of personal or political freedom, they afforded
material out of which fanatics might easily be made, but not citizens of
the kingdom of God. The very ideas of family and national life-those two
divine roots of the Church, severed from which she is certain to wither
away into that most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religious
world-had perished in the East from the evil influence of the universal
practice of slaveholding, as well as from the degradation of that Jewish
nation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those ideas; and
all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed, ‘the old Adam’
in every man and in every age--were shifting the blame of sin from their
own consciences to human relationships and duties--and therein, to the
God who had appointed them; and saying as of old, ‘_The woman whom thou
gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._’ The
passionate Eastern character, like all weak ones, found total abstinence
easier than temperance, religious thought more pleasant than godly
action; and a monastic world grew up all over the East, of such vastness
that in Egypt it was said to rival in numbers the lay population,
producing, with an enormous decrease in the actual amount of moral
evil, an equally great enervation and decrease of the population. Such
a people could offer no resistance to the steadily-increasing tyranny of
the Eastern Empire. In vain did such men as Chrysostom and Basil oppose
their personal influence to the hideous intrigues and villainies of the
Byzantine court; the ever-downward career of Eastern Christianity went
on unchecked for two more miserable centuries, side by side with the
upward development of the Western Church; and, while the successors
of the great Saint Gregory were converting and civilising a new-born
Europe, the Churches of the East were vanishing before Mohammedan
invaders, strong by living trust in that living God, whom the
Christians, while they hated and persecuted each other for arguments
about Him, were denying and blaspheming in every action of their lives.

But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mind
was still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful metaphysic
subtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often unmeaning to
our grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most important spiritual
realities, and felt that on the distinction between homoousios and
homoiousios might hang the solution of the whole problem of humanity,
was set to battle in Alexandria, the ancient stronghold of Greek
philosophy, with the effete remains of the very scientific thought to
which it owed its extraordinary culture. Monastic isolation from family
and national duties especially fitted the fathers of that period for the
task, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with
a lifelong earnestness impossible to the more social and practical
Northern mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedantic
dreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time when
they were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done for
ourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most truly
with the lifeblood of their race, a metaphysic at once Christian and
scientific, every attempt to improve on which has hitherto been found a
failure; and to battle victoriously with that strange brood of theoretic
monsters begotten by effete Greek philosophy upon Egyptian symbolism,
Chaldee astrology, Parsee dualism, Brahminic spiritualism-graceful and
gorgeous phantoms, whereof somewhat more will be said in the coming
chapters.

I have, in my sketch of Hypatia and her fate, closely followed authentic
history, especially Socrates’ account of the closing scene, as given
in Book vii. Para 15, of his _Ecclesiastical History_. I am inclined,
however, for various historical reasons, to date her death two years
earlier than he does. The tradition that she was the wife of Isidore,
the philosopher, I reject with Gibbon, as a palpable anachronism of at
least fifty years (Isidore’s master, Proclus, not having been born till
the year before Hypatia’s death), contradicted, moreover, by the very
author of it, Photius, who says distinctly, after comparing Hypatia and
Isidore, that Isidore married a certain ‘Domna.’ No hint, moreover, of
her having been married appears in any contemporary authors; and the
name of Isidore nowhere occurs among those of the many mutual friends
to whom Synesius sends messages in his letters to Hypatia, in which,
if anywhere, we should find mention of a husband, had one existed. To
Synesius’s most charming letters, as well as to those of Isidore, the
good Abbot of Pelusium, I beg leave to refer those readers who wish for
further information about the private life of the fifth century.

I cannot hope that these pages will be altogether free from anachronisms
and errors. I can only say that I have laboured honestly and
industriously to discover the truth, even in its minutest details,
and to sketch the age, its manners and its literature, as I found
them-altogether artificial, slipshod, effete, resembling far more the
times of Louis Quinze than those of Sophocles and Plato. And so I
send forth this little sketch, ready to give my hearty thanks to any
reviewer, who, by exposing my mistakes, shall teach me and the public
somewhat more about the last struggle between the Young Church and the
Old World.



CHAPTER I: THE LAURA


In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some three
hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on
the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.
Behind him the desert sand-waste stretched, lifeless, interminable,
reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of
blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled, in yellow rivulets,
from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets
of yellow smoke, before the fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the
face of the cliffs which walled in the opposite side of the narrow
glen below, were cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks
and half-cut pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries
before; the sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their
heads were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence,
desolation-the grave of a dead nation, in a dying land. And there he
sat musing above it all, full of life and youth and health and beauty--a
young Apollo of the desert. His only clothing was a ragged sheep-skin,
bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from
childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek and
chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and sinewy
sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing eyes and
beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which had no sphere
of action in such a place. What did his glorious young humanity alone
among the tombs?

So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow, as
if to sweep away some gathering dream, and sighing, rose and wandered
along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and cranny, in search
of fuel for the monastery from whence he came.

Simple as was the material which he sought, consisting chiefly of the
low arid desert shrubs, with now and then a fragment of wood from some
deserted quarry or ruin, it was becoming scarcer and scarcer round Abbot
Pambo’s Laura at Scetis; and long before Philammon had collected his
daily quantity, he had strayed farther from his home than he had ever
been before.

Suddenly, at a turn of the glen, he came upon a sight new to him....a
temple carved in the sandstone cliff; and in front a smooth platform,
strewn with beams and mouldering tools, and here and there a skull
bleaching among the sand, perhaps of some workman slaughtered at his
labour in one of the thousand wars of old. The abbot, his spiritual
father--indeed, the only father whom he knew, for his earliest
recollections were of the Laura and the old man’s cell-had strictly
forbidden him to enter, even to approach any of those relics of ancient
idolatry: but a broad terrace-road led down to the platform from the
table-land above; the plentiful supply of fuel was too tempting to be
passed by.... He would go down, gather a few sticks, and then return, to
tell the abbot of the treasure which he had found, and consult him as to
the propriety of revisiting it.

So down he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring
iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue,
still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that rainless
air. But he was young, and youth is curious; and the devil, at least in
the fifth century, busy with young brains. Now Philammon believed most
utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed to be delivered
from him; so he crossed himself, and ejaculated, honestly enough,
‘Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity!’.... and looked
nevertheless....

And who could have helped looking at those four colossal kings, who sat
there grim and motionless, their huge hands laid upon their knees in
everlasting self-assured repose, seeming to bear up the mountain on
their stately heads? A sense of awe, weakness, all but fear, came over
him. He dare not stoop to take up the wood at his feet, their great
stern eyes watched him so steadily.

Round their knees and round their thrones were mystic characters
engraved, symbol after symbol, line below line--the ancient wisdom of
the Egyptians, wherein Moses the man of God was learned of old--why
should not he know it too? What awful secrets might not be hidden there
about the great world, past, present, and future, of which he knew only
so small a speck? Those kings who sat there, they had known it all;
their sharp lips seem parting, ready to speak to him.... Oh that they
would speak for once!.... and yet that grim sneering smile, that seemed
to look down on him from the heights of their power and wisdom, with
calm contempt.... him, the poor youth, picking up the leaving and rags
of their past majesty .... He dared look at them no more.

So he looked past them into the temple halls; into a lustrous abyss of
cool green shade, deepening on and inward, pillar after pillar, vista
after vista, into deepest night. And dimly through the gloom he could
descry, on every wall and column, gorgeous arabesques, long lines of
pictured story; triumphs and labours; rows of captives in foreign and
fantastic dresses, leading strange animals, bearing the tributes of
unknown lands; rows of ladies at feasts, their heads crowned with
garlands, the fragrant lotus-flower in every hand, while slaves brought
wine and perfumes, and children sat upon their knees, and husbands by
their side; and dancing girls, in transparent robes and golden girdles,
tossed their tawny limbs wildly among the throng.... What was the
meaning of it all? Why had it all been? Why had it gone on thus, the
great world, century after century, millennium after millennium, eating
and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and knowing nothing
better.... how could they know anything better? Their forefathers had
lost the light ages and ages before they were born.... And Christ had
not come for ages and ages after they were dead.... How could they
know?.... And yet they were all in hell.... every one of them. Every one
of these ladies who sat there, with her bushy locks, and garlands, and
jewelled collars, and lotus-flowers, and gauzy dress, displaying all her
slender limbs-who, perhaps, when she was alive, smiled so sweetly, and
went so gaily, and had children, and friends, and never once thought of
what was going to happen to her--what must happen to her.... She was in
hell.... Burning for ever, and ever, and ever, there below his feet. He
stared down on the rocky floors. If he could but see through them....
and the eye of faith could see through them.... he should behold her
writhing and twisting among the flickering flame, scorched, glowing....
in everlasting agony, such as the thought of enduring for a moment made
him shudder. He had burnt his hands once, when a palm-leaf but caught
fire.... He recollected what that was like.... She was enduring ten
thousand times more than that for ever. He should hear her shrieking
in vain for a drop of water to cool her tongue.... He had never heard a
human being shriek but once.... a boy bathing on the opposite Nile bank,
whom a crocodile had dragged down.... and that scream, faint and distant
as it came across the mighty tide, had rung intolerable in his ears
for days.... and to think of all which echoed through those vaults of
fire-for ever! Was the thought bearable!--was it possible! Millions
upon millions burning forever for Adam’s fall .... Could God be just in
that?....

It was the temptation of a fiend! He had entered the unhallowed
precincts, where devils still lingered about their ancient shrines; he
had let his eyes devour the abominations of the heathen, and given place
to the devil. He would flee home to confess it all to his father. He
would punish him as he deserved, pray for him, forgive him. And yet
could he tell him all? Could he, dare he confess to him the whole
truth--the insatiable craving to know the mysteries of learning--to see
the great roaring world of men, which had been growing up in him slowly,
month after month, till now it had assumed this fearful shape? He
could stay no longer in the desert. This world which sent all souls to
hell--was it as bad as monks declared it was? It must be, else how could
such be the fruit of it? But it was too awful a thought to be taken on
trust. No; he must go and see.

Filled with such fearful questionings, half-inarticulate and vague, like
the thoughts of a child, the untutored youth went wandering on, till
he reached the edge of the cliff below which lay his home. It lay
pleasantly enough, that lonely Laura, or lane of rude Cyclopean cells,
under the perpetual shadow of the southern wall of crags, amid its grove
of ancient date-trees. A branching cavern in the cliff supplied the
purposes of a chapel, a storehouse, and a hospital; while on the sunny
slope across the glen lay the common gardens of the brotherhood, green
with millet, maize, and beans, among which a tiny streamlet, husbanded
and guided with the most thrifty care, wandered down from the cliff
foot, and spread perpetual verdure over the little plot which voluntary
and fraternal labour had painfully redeemed from the inroads of the
all-devouring sand. For that garden, like everything else in the Laura,
except each brother’s seven feet of stone sleeping-hut, was the common
property, and therefore the common care and joy of all. For the common
good, as well as for his own, each man had toiled up the glen with his
palm-leaf basket of black mud from the river Nile, over whose broad
sheet of silver the glen’s mouth yawned abrupt. For the common good,
each man had swept the ledges clear of sand, and sown in the scanty
artificial soil, the harvest of which all were to share alike. To
buy clothes, books, and chapel furniture for the common necessities,
education, and worship, each man sat, day after day, week after week,
his mind full of high and heavenly thoughts, weaving the leaves of their
little palm-copse into baskets, which an aged monk exchanged for goods
with the more prosperous and frequented monasteries of the opposite
bank. Thither Philammon rowed the old man over, week by week, in a light
canoe of papyrus, and fished, as he sat waiting for him, for the common
meal. A simple, happy, gentle life was that of the Laura, all portioned
out by rules and methods, which were held hardly less sacred than those
of the Scriptures, on which they were supposed (and not so wrongly
either) to have been framed. Each man had food and raiment, shelter on
earth, friends and counsellors, living trust in the continual care of
Almighty God; and, blazing before his eyes, by day and night, the hope
of everlasting glory beyond all poets’ dreams.... And what more would
man have had in those days? Thither they had fled out of cities,
compared with which Paris is earnest and Gomorrha chaste,--out of a
rotten, infernal, dying world of tyrants and slaves, hypocrites and
wantons,--to ponder undisturbed on duty and on judgment, on death and
eternity, heaven and hell; to find a common creed, a common interest,
a common hope, common duties, pleasures, and sorrows.... True, they had
many of them fled from the post where God had placed them, when they
fled from man into the Thebaid waste.... What sort of post and what
sort of an age they were, from which those old monks fled, we shall see,
perhaps, before this tale is told out.

‘Thou art late, son,’ said the abbot, steadfastly working away at his
palm-basket, as Philammon approached.

‘Fuel is scarce, and I was forced to go far.’

‘A monk should not answer till he is questioned. I did not ask the
reason. Where didst thou find that wood?’

‘Before the temple, far up the glen.’

‘The temple! What didst thou see there?’

No answer. Pambo looked up with his keen black eye.

‘Thou hast entered it, and lusted after its abominations.’

‘I--I did not enter; but I looked--’

‘And what didst thou see? Women?’

Philammon was silent.

‘Have I not bidden you never to look on the face of women? Are they not
the firstfruits of the devil, the authors of all evil, the subtlest of
all Satan’s snares? Are they not accursed for ever, for the deceit of
their first mother, by whom sin entered into the world? A woman first
opened the gates of hell; and, until this day, they are the portresses
thereof. Unhappy boy! What hast thou done?’

‘They were but painted on the walls.’

‘Ah!’ said the abbot, as if suddenly relieved from a heavy burden. ‘But
how knewest thou them to be women, when thou hast never yet, unless thou
liest--which I believe not of thee--seen the face of a daughter of Eve?’

‘Perhaps--perhaps,’ said Philammon, as if suddenly relieved by a new
suggestion--‘perhaps they were only devils. They must have been, I
think, for they were so very beautiful.’

‘Ah! how knowest thou that devils are beautiful?’

‘I was launching the boat, a week ago, with Father Aufugus; and on the
bank,....not very near,....there were two creatures....with long hair,
and striped all over the lower half of their bodies with black, and
red, and yellow....and they were gathering flowers on the shore. Father
Aufugus turned away; but I.... I could not help thinking them the most
beautiful things that I had ever seen....so I asked him why he turned
away; and he said that those were the same sort of devils which tempted
the blessed St. Anthony. Then I recollected having heard it read aloud,
how Satan tempted Anthony in the shape of a beautiful woman.... And
so.... and so.... those figures on the wall were very like.... and I
thought they might be....’

And the poor boy, who considered that he was making confession of a
deadly and shameful sin, blushed scarlet, and stammered, and at last
stopped.

‘And thou thoughtest them beautiful? Oh utter corruption of the
flesh!--oh subtilty of Satan! The Lord forgive thee, as I do, my poor
child; henceforth thou goest not beyond the garden walls.’

‘Not beyond the walls! Impossible! I cannot! If thou wert not my father,
I would say, I will not!--I must have liberty!--I must see for myself--I
must judge for myself, what this world is of which you all talk so
bitterly. I long for no pomps and vanities. I will promise you this
moment, if you will, never to re-enter a heathen temple--to hide my
face in the dust whenever I approach a woman. But I must--I must see
the world; I must see the great mother-church in Alexandria, and the
patriarch, and his clergy. If they can serve God in the city, why not
I? I could do more for God there than here .... Not that I despise this
work--not that I am ungrateful to you--oh, never, never that!--but I
pant for the battle. Let me go! I am not discontented with you, but with
myself. I know that obedience is noble; but danger is nobler still.
If you have seen the world, why should not I? If you have fled from it
because you found it too evil to live in, why should not I, and return
to you here of my own will, never to leave you? And yet Cyril and his
clergy have not fled from it....’

Desperately and breathlessly did Philammon drive this speech out of his
inmost heart; and then waited, expecting the good abbot to strike him
on the spot. If he had, the young man would have submitted patiently;
so would any man, however venerable, in that monastery. Why not? Duly,
after long companionship, thought, and prayer, they had elected Pambo
for their abbot--Abba--father--the wisest, eldest-hearted and headed of
them--if he was that, it was time that he should be obeyed. And obeyed
he was, with a loyal, reasonable love, and yet with an implicit,
soldier-like obedience, which many a king and conqueror might envy. Were
they cowards and slaves? The Roman legionaries should be good judges on
that point. They used to say that no armed barbarian, Goth or Vandal,
Moor or Spaniard, was so terrible as the unarmed monk of the Thebaid.

Twice the old man lifted his staff to strike; twice he laid it down
again; and then, slowly rising, left Philammon kneeling there, and moved
away deliberately, and with eyes fixed on the ground, to the house of
the brother Aufugus.

Every one in the Laura honoured Aufugus. There was a mystery about him
which heightened the charm of his surpassing sanctity, his childlike
sweetness and humility. It was whispered--when the monks seldom and
cautiously did whisper together in their lonely walks--that he had been
once a great man; that he had come from a great city--perhaps from Rome
itself. And the simple monks were proud to think that they had among
them a man who had seen Rome. At least, Abbot Pambo respected him. He
was never beaten; never even reproved--perhaps he never required it; but
still it was the meed of all; and was not the abbot a little partial?
Yet, certainly, when Theophilus sent up a messenger from Alexandria,
rousing every Laura with the news of the sack of Rome by Alaric, did
not Pambo take him first to the cell of Aufugus, and sit with him there
three whole hours in secret consultation, before he told the awful story
to the rest of the brotherhood? And did not Aufugus himself give letters
to the messenger, written with his own hand, containing, as was said,
deep secrets of worldly policy, known only to himself? So, when the
little lane of holy men, each peering stealthily over his plaiting
work from the doorway of his sandstone cell, saw the abbot, after his
unwonted passion, leave the culprit kneeling, and take his way toward
the sage’s dwelling, they judged that something strange and delicate had
befallen the common weal, and each wished, without envy, that he were as
wise as the man whose counsel was to solve the difficulty.

For an hour or more the abbot remained there, talking earnestly and
low; and then a solemn sound as of the two old men praying with sobs and
tears; and every brother bowed his head, and whispered a hope that He
whom they served might guide them for the good of the Laura, and of His
Church, and of the great heathen world beyond; and still Philammon knelt
motionless, awaiting his sentence; his heart filled-who can tell how?
‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not
with its joy.’ So thought he as he knelt; and so think I, too, knowing
that in the pettiest character there are unfathomable depths, which the
poet, all-seeing though he may pretend to be, can never analyse, but
must only dimly guess at, and still more dimly sketch them by the
actions which they beget.

At last Pambo returned, deliberate, still, and slow, as he had gone, and
seating himself within his cell, spoke--

‘And the youngest said, Father, give me the portion of goods that
falleth to my share.... And he took his journey into a far country, and
there wasted his substance with riotous living. Thou shalt go, my son.
But first come after me, and speak with Aufugus.’

Philammon, like everyone else, loved Aufugus; and when the abbot
retired and left the two alone together, he felt no dread or shame about
unburdening his whole heart to him. Long and passionately he spoke, in
answer to the gentle questions of the old man, who, without the rigidity
or pedantic solemnity of the monk, interrupted the youth, and let
himself be interrupted in return, gracefully, genially, almost
playfully. And yet there was a melancholy about his tone as he answered
to the youth’s appeal--

‘Tertullian, Origen, Clement, Cyprian--all these moved in the world;
all these and many more beside, whose names we honour, whose prayers
we invoke, were learned in the wisdom of the heathen, and fought and
laboured, unspotted, in the world; and why not I? Cyril the patriarch
himself, was he not called from the caves of Nitria to sit on the throne
of Alexandria?’

Slowly the old man lifted his band, and putting back the thick locks of
the kneeling youth, gazed, with soft pitying eyes, long and earnestly
into his face.

‘And thou wouldst see the world, poor fool? And thou wouldst see the
world?’

‘I would convert the world!’

‘Thou must know it first. And shall I tell thee what that world is like,
which seems to thee so easy to convert? Here I sit, the poor unknown old
monk, until I die, fasting and praying, if perhaps God will have mercy
on my soul: but little thou knowest how I have seen it. Little thou
knowest, or thou wouldst be well content to rest here till the end. I
was Arsenius.... Ah! vain old man that I am! Thou hast never heard
that name, at which once queens would whisper and grow pale. Vanitas
vanitatum! omnia vanitas! And yet he, at whose frown half the world
trembles, has trembled himself at mine. I was the tutor of Arcadius.’

‘The Emperor of Byzantium?’

‘Even so, my son, even so. There I saw the world which thou wouldst see.
And what saw I? Even what thou wilt see. Eunuchs the tyrants of their
own sovereigns. Bishops kissing the feet of parricides and harlots.
Saints tearing saints in pieces for a word, while sinners cheer them on
to the unnatural fight. Liars thanked for lying, hypocrites taking pride
in their hypocrisy. The many sold and butchered for the malice, the
caprice, the vanity of the few. The plunderers of the poor plundered in
their turn by worse devourers than themselves. Every attempt at reform
the parent of worse scandals; every mercy begetting fresh cruelties;
every persecutor silenced, only to enable others to persecute him in
their turn: every devil who is exorcised, returning with seven others
worsethan himself; falsehood and selfishness, spite and lust, confusion
seven times confounded, Satan casting out Satan everywhere--from the
emperor who wantons on his throne, to the slave who blasphemes beneath
his fetters.’

‘If Satan cast out Satan, his kingdom shall not stand.’

‘In the world to come. But in this world it shall stand and conquer,
even worse and worse, until the end. These are the last days spoken of
by the prophets,--the beginning of woes such as never have been on
the earth before--“On earth distress of nations with perplexity, men’s
hearts failing them for fear, and for the dread of those things which
are coming on the earth.” I have seen it long. Year after year I have
watched them coming nearer and ever nearer in their course like the
whirling sand-storms of the desert, which sweep past the caravan, and
past again, and yet overwhelm it after all--that black flood of the
northern barbarians. I foretold it; I prayed against it; but, like
Cassandra’s of old, my prophecy and my prayers were alike unheard.
My pupil spurned my warnings. The lusts of youth, the intrigues of
courtiers, were stronger than the warning voice of God; then I ceased
to hope; I ceased to pray for the glorious city, for I knew that her
sentence was gone forth; I saw her in the spirit, even as St. John saw
her in the Revelations; her, and her sins, and her ruin. And I fled
secretly at night, and buried myself here in the desert, to await the
end of the world. Night and day I pray the Lord to accomplish His elect,
and to hasten His kingdom. Morning by morning I look up trembling, and
yet in hope, for the sign of the Son of man in heaven, when the sun
shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, and the stars
shall fall from heaven, and the skies pass away like a scroll, and the
fountains of the nether fire burst up around our feet, and the end of
all shall come. And thou wouldst go into the world from which I fled?’

‘If the harvest be at hand, the Lord needs labourers. If the times be
awful, I should be doing awful things in them. Send me, and let that
day find me, where I long to be, in the forefront of the battle of the
Lord.’

‘The Lord’s voice be obeyed! Thou shalt go. Here are letters to Cyril
the patriarch. He will love thee for my sake: and for thine own sake,
too, I trust. Thou goest of our free will as well as thine own. The
abbot and I have watched thee long, knowing that the Lord bad need of
such as thee elsewhere. We did but prove thee, to see by thy readiness
to obey, whether thou wert fit to rule. Go, and God be with thee. Covet
no man’s gold or silver. Neither eat flesh nor drink wine, but live as
thou hast lived--a Nazarite of the Lord. Fear not the face of man; but
look not on the face of woman. In an evil hour came they into the world,
the mothers of all mischiefs which I have seen under the sun. Come; the
abbot waits for us at the gate.’

With tears of surprise, joy, sorrow, almost of dread, Philammon hung
back.

‘Nay--come. Why shouldst thou break thy brethren’s hearts and ours by
many leave-takings! Bring from the storehouse a week’s provision of
dried dates and millet. The papyrus boat lies at the ferry; thou shalt
descend in it. The Lord will replace it for us when we need it. Speak
with no man on the river except the monks of God. When thou hast
gone five days’ journey downward, ask for the mouth of the canal
of Alexandria. Once in the city, any monk will guide thee to the
archbishop. Send us news of thy welfare by some holy mouth. Come.’

Silently they paced together down the glen to the lonely beach of the
great stream. Pambo was there already, his white hair glittering in the
rising moon, as with slow and feeble arms he launched the light canoe.
Philammon flung himself at the old men’s feet, and besought, with many
tears, their forgiveness and their blessing.’We have nothing to forgive.
Follow thou thine inward call. If it be of the flesh, it will avenge
itself; if it be of the Spirit, who are we that we should fight against
God? Farewell.’ A few minutes more, and the youth and his canoe were
lessening down the rapid stream in the golden summer twilight. Again a
minute, and the swift southern night had fallen, and all was dark but
the cold glare of the moon on the river, and on the rock-faces, and on
the two old men, as they knelt upon the beach, and with their heads upon
each other’s shoulders, like two children, sobbed and prayed together
for the lost darling of their age.



CHAPTER II: THE DYING WORLD


In the upper story of a house in the Museum Street of Alexandria, built
and fitted up on the old Athenian model, was a small room. It had been
chosen by its occupant, not merely on account of its quiet; for though
it was tolerably out of hearing of the female slaves who worked, and
chattered, and quarrelled under the cloisters of the women’s court on
the south side, yet it was exposed to the rattle of carriages and the
voices of passengers in the fashionable street below, and to strange
bursts of roaring, squealing, trumpeting from the Menagerie, a short way
off, on the opposite side of the street. The attraction of the situation
lay, perhaps, in the view which it commanded over the wall of the Museum
gardens, of flower-beds, shrubberies, fountains, statues, walks, and
alcoves, which had echoed for nearly seven hundred years to the wisdom
of the Alexandrian sages and poets. School after school, they had all
walked, and taught, and sung there, beneath the spreading planes and
chestnuts, figs and palm-trees. The place seemed fragrant with all
the riches of Greek thought and song, since the days when Ptolemy
Philadelphus walked there with Euclid and Theocritus, Callimachus and
Lycophron.

On the left of the garden stretched the lofty eastern front of
the Museum itself, with its picture galleries, halls of statuary,
dining-halls, and lecture-rooms; one huge wing containing that famous
library, founded by the father of Philadelphus, which hold in the time
of Seneca, even after the destruction of a great part of it in Caesar’s
siege, four hundred thousand manuscripts. There it towered up, the
wonder of the world, its white roof bright against the rainless blue;
and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of noble buildings, a
broad glimpse of the bright blue sea.

The room was fitted up in the purest Greek style, not without an
affectation of archaism, in the severe forms and subdued half-tints of
the frescoes which ornamented the walls with scenes from the old myths
of Athene. Yet the general effect, even under the blazing sun which
poured in through the mosquito nets of the courtyard windows, was one
of exquisite coolness, and cleanliness, and repose. The room had neither
carpet nor fireplace; and the only movables in it were a sofa-bed, a
table, and an arm-chair, all of such delicate and graceful forms as may
be seen on ancient vases of a far earlier period than that whereof we
write. But, most probably, had any of us entered that room that morning,
we should not have been able to spare a look either for the furniture,
or the general effect, or the Museum gardens, or the sparkling
Mediterranean beyond; but we should have agreed that the room was
quite rich enough for human eyes, for the sake of one treasure which it
possessed, and, beside which, nothing was worth a moment’s glance. For
in the light arm-chair, reading a manuscript which lay on the table, sat
a woman, of some five-and-twenty years, evidently the tutelary goddess
of that little shrine, dressed in perfect keeping with the archaism of
the chamber, in simple old snow-white Ionic robe, falling to the feet
and reaching to the throat, and of that peculiarly severe and graceful
fashion in which the upper part of the dress falls downward again from
the neck to the waist in a sort of cape, entirely hiding the outline of
the bust, while it leaves the arms and the point of the shoulders bare.
Her dress was entirely without ornament, except the two narrow purple
stripes down the front, which marked her rank as a Roman citizen, the
gold embroidered shoes upon her feet, and the gold net, which looped
back, from her forehead to her neck, hair the colour and gloss of which
were hardly distinguishable from that of the metal itself, such as
Athene herself might heaven vied for tint, and mass, and ripple. Her
features, arms, and hands were of the severest and grandest type of old
Greek beauty, at once showing everywhere the high development of the
bones, and covering them with that firm, round, ripe outline, and waxy
morbidezza of skin, which the old Greeks owed to their continual use
not only of the bath and muscular exercise, but also of daily unguents.
There might have seemed to us too much sadness in that clear gray eye;
too much self-conscious restraint in those sharp curved lips; too much
affectation in the studied severity of her posture as she read, copied,
as it seemed, from some old vase or bas-relief. But the glorious grace
and beauty of every line of face and figure would have excused, even
hidden those defects, and we should have only recognised the marked
resemblance to the ideal portraits of Athene which adorned every panel
of the walls.

She has lifted her eyes off her manuscript; she is looking out with
kindling countenance over the gardens of the Museum; her ripe curling
Greek lips, such as we never see now, even among her own wives and
sisters, open. She is talking to herself. Listen!

‘Yes. The statues there are broken. The libraries are plundered. The
alcoves are silent. The oracles are dumb. And yet--who says that the old
faith of heroes and sages is dead? The beautiful can never die. If the
gods have deserted their oracles, they have not deserted the souls who
aspire to them. If they have ceased to guide nations, they have not
ceased to speak to their own elect. If they have cast off the vulgar
herd, they have not cast off Hypatia. ...............

‘Ay. To believe in the old creeds, while every one else is dropping away
from them.... To believe in spite of disappointments.... To hope against
hope.... To show oneself superior to the herd, by seeing boundless
depths of living glory in myths which have become dark and dead
to them.... To struggle to the last against the new and vulgar
superstitions of a rotting age, for the faith of my forefathers, for
the old gods, the old heroes, the old sages who gauged the mysteries of
heaven and earth--and perhaps to conquer--at least to have my reward!
To be welcomed into the celestial ranks of the heroic--to rise to the
immortal gods, to the ineffable powers, onward, upward ever, through
ages and through eternities, till I find my home at last, and vanish in
the glory of the Nameless and the Absolute One!....

And her whole face flashed out into wild glory, and then sank again
suddenly into a shudder of something like fear and disgust, as she saw,
watching her from under the wall of the gardens opposite, a crooked,
withered Jewish crone, dressed out in the most gorgeous and fantastic
style of barbaric finery.

‘Why does that old hag haunt me? I see her everywhere--till the last
month at least--and here she is again! I will ask the prefect to find
out who she is, and get rid of her, before she fascinates me with that
evil eye. Thank the gods, there she moves away! Foolish!--foolish of me,
a philosopher. I, to believe, against the authority of Porphyry himself,
too, in evil eyes and magic! But there is my father, pacing up and down
in the library.’

As she spoke, the old man entered from the next room. He was a Greek,
also, but of a more common, and, perhaps, lower type; dark and fiery,
thin and graceful; his delicate figure and cheeks, wasted by meditation,
harmonised well with the staid and simple philosophic cloak which he
wore as a sign of his profession. He paced impatiently up and down the
chamber, while his keen, glittering eyes and restless gestures betokened
intense inward thought.... ‘I have it.... No; again it escapes--it
contradicts itself. Miserable man that I am! If there is faith in
Pythagoras, the symbol should be an expanding series of the powers of
three; and yet that accursed binary factor will introduce itself. Did not
you work the sum out once, Hypatia?’

‘Sit down, my dear father, and eat. You have tasted no food yet this
day.’

‘What do I care for food! The inexpressible must be expressed, the work
must be done if it cost me the squaring of the circle. How can he, whose
sphere lies above the stars, stoop every moment to earth?

‘Ay,’ she answered, half bitterly, ‘and would that we could live without
food, and imitate perfectly the immortal gods. But while we are in this
prison-house of matter, we must wear our chain; even wear it gracefully,
if we have the good taste; and make the base necessities of this body
of shame symbolic of the divine food of the reason. There is fruit, with
lentils and rice, waiting for you in the next room; and bread, unless
you despise it too much.’

‘The food of slaves!’ he answered. ‘Well, I will eat, and be ashamed of
eating. Stay, did I tell you? Six new pupils in the mathematical school
this morning. It grows! It spreads! We shall conquer yet!’

She sighed. ‘How do you know that they have not come to you, as Critias
and Alcibiades did to Socrates, to learn a merely political and mundane
virtue? Strange! that men should be content to grovel, and be men, when
they might rise to the rank of gods! Ah, my father! That is my bitterest
grief! to see those who have been pretending in the morning lecture-room
to worship every word of mine as an oracle, lounging in the afternoon
round Pelagia’s litter; and then at night--for I know that they do
it--the dice, and the wine, and worse. That Pallas herself should be
conquered every day by Venus Pandemos! That Pelagia should have more
power than I! Not that such a creature as that disturbs me: no created
thing, I hope, can move my equanimity; but if I could stoop to hate--I
should hate her--hate her.’

And her voice took a tone which made it somewhat uncertain whether, in
spite of all the lofty impassibility which she felt bound to possess,
she did not hate Pelagia with a most human and mundane hatred.

But at that moment the conversation was cut short by the hasty entrance
of a slave girl, who, with fluttering voice, announced--

‘His excellency, madam, the prefect! His chariot has been at the gate
for these five minutes, and he is now coming upstairs.’

‘Foolish child!’ answered Hypatia, with some affectation of
indifference. ‘And why should that disturb me? Let him enter.’

The door opened, and in came, preceded by the scent of half a dozen
different perfumes, a florid, delicate-featured man, gorgeously dressed
out in senatorial costume, his fingers and neck covered with jewels.

‘The representative of the Caesars honours himself by offering at the
shrine of Athene Polias, and rejoices to see in her priestess as lovely
a likeness as ever of the goddess whom she serves.... Don’t betray me,
but I really cannot help talking sheer paganism whenever I find myself
within the influence of your eyes.’

‘Truth is mighty,’ said Hypatia, as she rose to greet him with a smile
and a reverence.

‘Ah, so they say--Your excellent father has vanished. He is really too
modest--honest, though--about his incapacity for state secrets. After
all, you know, it was your Minervaship which I came to consult. How
has this turbulent Alexandrian rascaldom been behaving itself in my
absence?’

‘The herd has been eating, and drinking, and marrying, as usual, I
believe,’ answered Hypatia, in a languid tone.

‘And multiplying, I don’t doubt. Well, there will be less loss to the
empire if I have to crucify a dozen or two, as I positively will, the
next riot. It is really a great comfort to a statesman that the masses
are so well aware that they deserve hanging, and therefore so careful to
prevent any danger of public justice depopulating the province. But how
go on the schools?’

Hypatia shook her head sadly.

‘Ah, boys will be boys.... I plead guilty myself. Video meliora
proboque, deteriora sequor. You must not be hard on us.... Whether we
obey you or not in private life, we do in public; and if we enthrone you
queen of Alexandria, you must allow your courtiers and bodyguards a
few court licences. Now don’t sigh or I shall be inconsolable. At all
events, your worst rival has betaken herself to the wilderness, and gone
to look for the city of the gods above the cataracts.’

‘Whom do you mean?’ asked Hypatia, in a tone most unphilosophically
eager.

‘Pelagia, of course. I met that prettiest and naughtiest of humanities
half-way between here and Thebes, transformed into a perfect Andromache
of chaste affection.’

‘And to whom, pray?’

‘To a certain Gothic giant. What men those barbarians do breed! I was
afraid of being crushed under the elephant’s foot at every step I took
with him!’

‘What!’ asked Hypatia, ‘did your excellency condescend to converse with
such savages?’

‘To tell you the truth, he had some forty stout countrymen of his with
him, who might have been troublesome to a perplexed prefect; not to
mention that it is always as well to keep on good terms with these
Goths. Really, after the sack of Rome, and Athens cleaned out like a
beehive by wasps, things begin to look serious. And as for the great
brute himself, he has rank enough in his way,--boasts of his descent
from some cannibal god or other,--really hardly deigned to speak to a
paltry Roman governor, till his faithful and adoring bride interceded
for me. Still, the fellow understood good living, and we celebrated our
new treaty of friendship with noble libations--but I must not talk about
that to you. However, I got rid of them; quoted all the geographical
lies I had ever heard, and a great many more; quickened their appetite
for their fool’s errand notably, and started them off again. So now the
star of Venus is set, and that of Pallas in the ascendant. Wherefore
tell me--what am I to do with Saint Firebrand?’

‘Cyril?’

‘Cyril.’

‘Justice.’

‘Ah, Fairest Wisdom, don’t mention that horrid word out of the
lecture-room. In theory it is all very well; but in poor imperfect
earthly practice, a governor must be content with doing very much what
comes to hand. In abstract justice, now, I ought to nail up Cyril,
deacons, district visitors, and all, in a row, on the sandfill out
side. That is simple enough; but, like a great many simple and excellent
things, impossible.’

‘You fear the people?’

‘Well, my dear lady, and has not the villainous demagogue got the whole
mob on his side? Am I to have the Constantinople riots re-enacted here?
I really cannot face it; I have not nerve for it; perhaps I am too lazy.
Be it so.’

Hypatia sighed. ‘Ah, that your excellency but saw the great duel which
depends on you alone! Do not fancy that the battle is merely between
Paganism and Christianity--’

‘Why, if it were, you know, I, as a Christian, under a Christian and
sainted emperor, not to mention his august sister--’

‘We understand,’ interrupted she, with an impatient wave of her
beautiful hand. ‘Not even between them; not even between philosophy and
barbarism. The struggle is simply one between the aristocracy and the
mob,--between wealth, refinement, art, learning, all that makes a nation
great, and the savage herd of child-breeders below, the many ignoble,
who were meant to labour for the noble few. Shall the Roman empire
command or obey her own slaves? is the question which you and Cyril have
to battle out; and the fight must be internecine.’

‘I should not wonder if it became so, really,’ answered the prefect,
with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘I expect every time I ride, to have my
brains knocked out by some mad monk.’

‘Why not? In an age when, as has been well and often said, emperors and
consulars crawl to the tombs of a tent-maker and a fisherman, and kiss
the mouldy bones of the vilest slaves? Why not, among a people whose
God is the crucified son of a carpenter? Why should learning, authority,
antiquity, birth, rank, the system of empire which has been growing up,
fed by the accumulated wisdom of ages,--why, I say, should any of
these things protect your life a moment from the fury of any beggar who
believes that the Son of God died for him as much as for you, and that
he is your equal if not your superior in the sight of his low-born and
illiterate deity!’ [Footnote: These are the arguments and the language
which were commonly employed by Porphyry, Julian, and the other
opponents of Christianity.]

‘My most eloquent philosopher, this may be--and perhaps is--all very
true. I quite agree that there are very great practical inconveniences
of this kind in the new--I mean the Catholic faith; but the world is
full of inconveniences. The wise man does not quarrel with his creed for
being disagreeable, any more than he does with his finger for aching: he
cannot help it, and must make the best of a bad matter. Only tell me how
to keep the peace.’

‘And let philosophy be destroyed?’

‘That it never will be, as long as Hypatia lives to illuminate the
earth; and, as far as I am concerned, I promise you a clear stage and--a
great deal of favour; as is proved by my visiting you publicly at this
moment, before I have given audience to one of the four hundred bores,
great and small, who are waiting in the tribunal to torment me. Do help
me and advise me. What am I to do?’

‘I have told you.’

‘Ah, yes, as to general principles. But out of the lecture-room I prefer
a practical expedient for instance, Cyril writes to me here--plague on
him! he would not let me even have a week’s hunting in peace-that there
is a plot on the part of the Jews to murder all the Christians. Here is
the precious document--do look at it, in pity. For aught I know or care,
the plot may be an exactly opposite one, and the Christians intend to
murder all the Jews. But I must take some notice of the letter.’

‘I do not see that, your excellency.’

‘Why, if anything did happen, after all, conceive the missives which
would be sent flying off to Constantinople against me!’

‘Let them go. If you are secure in the consciousness of innocence, what
matter?’

‘Consciousness of innocence? I shall lose my prefecture!’

‘Your danger would just be as great if you took notice of it. Whatever
happened, you would be accused of favouring the Jews.’

‘And really there might be some truth in the accusation. How the
finances of the provinces would go on without their kind assistance,
I dare not think. If those Christians would but lend me their money,
instead of building alms-houses and hospitals with it, they might burn
the Jews’ quarter to-morrow, for aught I care. But now....’

‘But now, you must absolutely take no notice of this letter. The very
tone of it forbids you, for your own honour, and the honour of
the empire. Are you to treat with a man who talks of the masses at
Alexandria as “the flock whom the King of kings has committed to his
rule and care”? Does your excellency, or this proud bishop, govern
Alexandria?’

‘Really, my dear lady, I have given up inquiring.’

‘But he has not. He comes to you as a person possessing an absolute
authority over two-thirds of the population, which he does not scruple
to hint to you is derived from a higher source than your own. The
consequence is clear. If it be from a higher source than yours, of
course it ought to control yours’; and you will confess that it ought
to control it--you will acknowledge the root and ground of every
extravagant claim which he makes, if you deign to reply.’

‘But I must say something, or I shall be pelted in the streets. You
philosophers, however raised above your own bodies you may be, must
really not forget that we poor worldlings have bones to be broken.’

‘Then tell him, and by word of mouth merely, that as the information
which he sends you comes from his private knowledge and concerns not
him as bishop, but you as magistrate, you can only take it into
consideration when he addresses you as a private person, laying a
regular information at your tribunal.’

‘Charming! queen of diplomatists as well as philosophers! I go to obey
you. Ah! why were you not Pulcheria? No, for then Alexandria had been
dark, and Orestes missed the supreme happiness of kissing a hand which
Pallas, when she made you, must have borrowed from the workshop of
Aphrodite.’

‘Recollect that you are a Christian,’ answered Hypatia, half smiling.

So the prefect departed; and passing through the outer hall, which was
already crowded with Hypatia’s aristocratic pupils and visitors, bowed
his way out past them and regained his chariot, chuckling over the
rebuff which he intended to administer to Cyril, and comforting himself
with the only text of Scripture of the inspiration of which he was
thoroughly convinced--‘Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’

At the door was a crowd of chariots, slaves with their masters’
parasols, and the rabble of onlooking boys and market-folk, as usual in
Alexandria then, as in all great cities since, who were staring at the
prefect, and having their heads rapped by his guards, and wondering what
sort of glorious personage Hypatia might be, and what sort of glorious
house she must live in, to be fit company for the great governor of
Alexandria. Not that there was not many a sulky and lowering face
among the mob, for the great majority of them were Christians, and
very seditious and turbulent politicians, as Alexandrians, ‘men of
Macedonia,’ were bound to be; and there was many a grumble among them,
all but audible, at the prefect’s going in state to the heathen woman’s
house--heathen sorceress, some pious old woman called her--before he
heard any poor soul’s petition in the tribunal, or even said his prayers
in church.

Just as he was stepping into his curricle a tall young man, as
gorgeously bedizened as himself, lounged down the steps after him, and
beckoned lazily to the black boy who carried his parasol.

‘Ah, Raphael Aben-Ezra! my excellent friend, what propitious
deity--ahem! martyr--brings you to Alexandria just as I want you? Get up
by my side, and let us have a chat on our way to the tribunal.’

The man addressed came slowly forward with an ostentatiously low
salutation, which could not hide, and indeed was not intended to
hide, the contemptuous and lazy expression of his face; and asked in a
drawling tone--

‘And for what kind purpose does the representative of the Caesars bestow
such an honour on the humblest of his, etc. etc.--your penetration will
supply the rest.’

‘Don’t be frightened; I am not going to borrow money of you,’ answered
Orestes, laughingly, as the Jew got into the curricle.

‘I am glad to hear it. Really one usurer in a family is enough. My
father made the gold, and if I spend it, I consider that I do all that
is required of a philosopher.’

‘A charming team of white Nisaeans, is not this? And only one gray foot
among all the four.’

‘Yes.... horses are a bore, I begin to find, like everything else.
Always falling sick, or running away, or breaking one’s peace of mind in
some way or other. Besides, I have been pestered out of my life there
in Cyrene, by commissions for dogs and horses and bows from that old
Episcopal Nimrod, Synesius.’

‘What, is the worthy man as lively as ever?’

‘Lively? He nearly drove me into a nervous fever in three days. Up at
four in the morning, always in the most disgustingly good health and
spirits, farming, coursing, shooting, riding over hedge and ditch
after rascally black robbers; preaching, intriguing, borrowing money;
baptizing and excommunicating; bullying that bully, Andronicus;
comforting old women, and giving pretty girls dowries; scribbling one
half-hour on philosophy, and the next on farriery; sitting up all night
writing hymns and drinking strong liquors; off again on horseback at
four the next morning; and talking by the hour all the while about
philosophic abstraction from the mundane tempest. Heaven defend me
from all two-legged whirlwinds! By the bye, there was a fair daughter of
my nation came back to Alexandria in the same ship with me, with a cargo
that may suit your highness.’

‘There are a great many fair daughters of your nation who might suit me,
without any cargo at all.’

‘Ah, they have had good practice, the little fools, ever since the days
of Jeroboam the son of Nebat. But I mean old Miriam--you know. She has
been lending Synesius money to fight the black fellows with; and really
it was high time. They had burnt every homestead for miles through the
province. But the daring old girl must do a little business for herself;
so she went off, in the teeth of the barbarians, right away to the
Atlas, bought all their lady prisoners, and some of their own sons and
daughters, too, of them, for beads and old iron; and has come back with
as pretty a cargo of Lybian beauties as a prefect of good taste could
wish to have the first choice of. You may thank me for that privilege.’

‘After, of course, you had suited yourself, my cunning Raphael?’

‘Not I. Women are bores, as Solomon found out long ago. Did I never tell
you? I began, as he did, with the most select harem in Alexandria. But
they quarrelled so, that one day I went out, and sold them all but one,
who was a Jewess--so there were objections on the part of the Rabbis.
Then I tried one, as Solomon did; but my “garden shut up,” and my
“sealed fountain” wanted me to be always in love with her, so I went to
the lawyers, allowed her a comfortable maintenance, and now I am as free
as a monk, and shall be happy to give your excellency the benefit of any
good taste or experience which I may possess.’

‘Thanks, worthy Jew. We are not yet as exalted as yourself, and will
send for the old Erictho this very afternoon. Now listen a moment to
base, earthly, and political business. Cyril has written to me, to say
that you Jews have plotted to murder all the Christians.’

‘Well--why not? I most heartily wish it were true, and think, on the
whole, that it very probably is so.’

‘By the immortal--saints, man! you are not serious?’

‘The four archangels forbid! It is no concern of mine. All I say is,
that my people are great fools, like the rest of the world; and have,
for aught I know or care, some such intention. They won’t succeed, of
course; and that is all you have to care for. But if you think it worth
the trouble--which I do not--I shall have to go to the synagogue on
business in a week or so, and then I would ask some of the Rabbis.’

‘Laziest of men!--and I must answer Cyril this very day.’

‘An additional reason for asking no questions of our people. Now you can
honestly say that you know nothing about the matter.’

‘Well, after all, ignorance is a stronghold for poor statesmen. So you
need not hurry yourself.’

‘I assure your excellency I will not.’

‘Ten days hence, or so, you know.’

‘Exactly, after it is all over.’

‘And can’t be helped. What a comfort it is, now and then, that Can’t be
helped!’

‘It is the root and marrow of all philosophy. Your practical man, poor
wretch, will try to help this and that, and torment his soul with ways
and means, and preventives and forestallings; your philosopher quietly
says--It can’t be helped. If it ought to be, it will be--if it is, it
ought to be. We did not make the world, and we are not responsible for
it.--There is the sum and substance of all true wisdom, and the epitome
of all that has been said and written thereon from Philo the Jew to
Hypatia the Gentile. By the way, here’s Cyril coming down the steps of
the Caesareum. A very handsome fellow, after all, though lie is looking
as sulky as a bear.’

‘With his cubs at his heels. What a scoundrelly visage that tall
fellow-deacon, or reader, or whatever he is by his dress--has!’

‘There they are--whispering together. Heaven give them pleasant thoughts
and pleasanter faces!’

‘Amen!’ quoth Orestes, with a sneer: and he would have said Amen in
good earnest, had he been able to take the liberty--which we shall--and
listen to Cyril’s answer to Peter, the tall reader.

‘From Hypatia’s, you say? Why, he only returned to the city this
morning.’

‘I saw his four-in-hand standing at her door, as I came down the Museum
Street hither, half an hour ago.’

‘And twenty carriages besides, I don’t doubt?’

‘The street was blocked up with them. There! Look round the corner
now.--Chariots, litters, slaves, and fops.--When shall we see such a
concourse as that where it ought to be?’

Cyril made no answer; and Peter went on--‘Where it ought to be, my
father--in front of your door at the Serapeium?’

‘The world, the flesh, and the devil know their own, Peter: and as long
as they have their own to go to, we cannot expect them to come to us.’

‘But what if their own were taken out of the way?’

‘They might come to us for want of better amusement.... devil and all.
Well--if I could get a fair hold of the two first, I would take the
third into the bargain, and see what could be done with him. But
never, while these lecture-rooms last--these Egyptian chambers of
imagery--these theatres of Satan, where the devil transforms himself
into an angel of light, and apes Christian virtue, and bedizens his
ministers like ministers of righteousness, as long as that lecture-room
stands and the great and the powerful flock to it, to learn excuses for
their own tyrannies and atheisms, so long will the kingdom of God be
trampled under foot in Alexandria; so long will the princes of this
world, with their gladiators, and parasites, and money-lenders, be
masters here, and not the bishops and priests of the living God.’

It was now Peter’s turn to be silent; and as the two, with their little
knot of district-visitors behind them, walk moodily along the great
esplanade which overlooked the harbour, and then vanish suddenly up some
dingy alley into the crowded misery of the sailors’ quarter, we will
leave them to go about their errand of mercy, and, like fashionable
people, keep to the grand parade, and listen again to our two
fashionable friends in the carved and gilded curricle with four white
blood-horses.

‘A fine sparkling breeze outside the Pharos, Raphael--fair for the
wheat-ships too.’

‘Are they gone yet?

‘Yes--why? I sent the first fleet off three days ago; and the rest are
clearing outwards to-day.’

‘Oh!--ah--so!--Then you have not heard from Heraclian?’

‘Heraclian? What the-blessed saints has the Count of Africa to do with
my wheat-ships?’

‘Oh, nothing. It’s no business of mine. Only he is going to rebel ....
But here we are at your door.’

‘To what?’ asked Orestes, in a horrified tone.

‘To rebel, and attack Rome.’

‘Good gods--God, I mean. A fresh bore! Come in, and tell a poor
miserable slave of a governor--speak low, for Heaven’s sake!--I hope
these rascally grooms haven’t overheard you.’

‘Easy to throw them into the canal, if they have,’ quoth Raphael, as he
walked coolly through hall and corridor after the perturbed governor.

Poor Orestes never stopped till he reached a little chamber of the inner
court, beckoned the Jew in after him, locked the door, threw himself
into an arm-chair, put his hands on his knees, and sat, bending forward,
staring into Raphael’s face with a ludicrous terror and perplexity.

‘Tell me all about it. Tell me this instant.’

‘I have told you all I know,’ quoth Raphael, quietly seating himself on
a sofa, and playing with a jewelled dagger. ‘I thought, of course, that
you were in the secret, or I should have said nothing. It’s no business
of mine, you know.’

Orestes, like most weak and luxurious men, Romans especially, had a
wild-beast vein in him--and it burst forth.

‘Hell and the furies! You insolent provincial slave--you will carry
these liberties of yours too far! Do you know who I am, you accursed
Jew? Tell me the whole truth, or, by the head of the emperor, I’ll twist
it out of you with red-hot pincers!’

Raphael’s countenance assumed a dogged expression, which showed that
the old Jewish blood still heat true, under all its affected shell of
Neo-Platonist nonchalance; and there was a quiet unpleasant earnest in
his smile, as he answered--

‘Then, my dear governor, you will be the first man on earth who ever yet
forced a Jew to say or do what he did not choose.’

‘We’ll see!’ yelled Orestes. ‘Here, slaves!’ And he clapped his hands
loudly.

‘Calm yourself, your excellency,’ quoth Raphael, rising. ‘The door
is locked; the mosquito net is across the window; and this dagger
is poisoned. If anything happens to me, you will offend all the Jew
money-lenders, and die in about three days in a great deal of pain,
having missed our assignation with old Miriam, lost your pleasantest
companion, and left your own finances and those of the prefecture in a
considerable state of embarrassment. How much better to sit down, hear
all I have to say philosophically, like a true pupil of Hypatia, and not
expect a man to tell you what he really does not know.’

Orestes, after looking vainly round the room for a place to escape, had
quietly subsided into his chair again; and by the time that the slaves
knocked at the door he had so far recovered his philosophy as to ask,
not for the torturers, but for a page and wine.

‘Oh, you Jews!’ quoth he, trying to laugh off matters. ‘The same
incarnate fiends that Titus found you!’

‘The very same, my dear prefect. Now for this matter, which is really
important-at least to Gentiles. Heraclian will certainly rebel. Synesius
let out as much to me. He has fitted out an armament for Ostia, stopped
his own wheat-ships, and is going to write to you to stop yours, and to
starve out the Eternal City, Goths, senate, emperor, and all. Whether
you will comply with his reasonable little request depends of course on
yourself.’

‘And that again very much on his plans.’

‘Of course. You cannot be expected to--we will euphemise-unless it be
made worth your while.’

Orestes sat buried in deep thought.

‘Of course not,’ said he at last, half unconsciously. And then, in
sudden dread of having committed himself, he looked up fiercely at the
Jew.

‘And how do I know that this is not some infernal trap of yours? Tell me
how you found out all this, or by Hercules (he had quite forgotten his
Christianity by this time)--by Hercules and the Twelve Gods, I’ll--’

‘Don’t use expressions unworthy of a philosopher. My source of
information was very simple and very good. He has been negotiating a
loan from the Rabbis at Carthage. They were either frightened, or loyal,
or both, and hung back. He knew--as all wise governors know when they
allow themselves time--that it is no use to bully a Jew; slid applied to
me. I never lend money--it is unphilosophical: but I introduced him to
old Miriam, who dare do business with the devil himself; and by that
move, whether he has the money or not, I cannot tell: but this I can
tell, that we have his secret--and so have you now; and if you want more
information, the old woman, who enjoys an intrigue as much as she does
Falernian, will get it you.’

‘Well, you are a true friend, after all.’

‘Of course I am. Now, is not this method of getting at the truth much
easier and pleasanter than setting a couple of dirty negroes to pinch
and pull me, and so making it a point of honour with me to tell you
nothing but lies? Here comes Ganymede with the wine, just in time to
calm your nerves, and fill you with the spirit of divination.... To the
goddess of good counsels, my lord. What wine this is!’

‘True Syrian--fire and honey; fourteen years old next vintage, my
Raphael. Out, Hypocorisma! See that he is not listening. The impudent
rascal! I was humbugged into giving two thousand gold pieces for him
two years ago, he was so pretty--they said he was only just rising
thirteen--and he has been the plague of my life ever since, and is
beginning to want the barber already. Now, what is the count dreaming
of?’

‘His wages for killing Stilicho.’

‘What, is it not enough to be Count of Africa?’

‘I suppose he sets off against that his services during the last three
years.’

‘Well, he saved Africa.’

‘And thereby Egypt also. And you too, as well as the emperor, may be
considered as owing him somewhat.’

‘My good friend, my debts are far too numerous for me to think of paying
any of them. But what wages does he want?’

‘The purple.’

Orestes started, and then fell into thought. Raphael sat watching him a
while.

‘Now, most noble lord, may I depart? I have said all I have to say; and
unless I get home to luncheon at once, I shall hardly have time to find
old Miriam for you, and get through our little affair with her before
sunset.’

‘Stay. What force has he?’

‘Forty thousand already, they say. And those Donatist ruffians are with
him to a man, if he can but scrape together wherewith to change their
bludgeons into good steel.’

‘Well, go.... So. A hundred thousand might do it,’ said he, meditating,
as Raphael bowed himself out. ‘He won’t get them. I don’t know,
though; the man has the head of a Julius. Well--that fool Attalus talked
of joining Egypt to the Western Empire.... Not such a bad thought either.
Anything is better than being governed by an idiot child and three
canting nuns. I expect to be excommunicated every day for some offence
against Pulcheria’s prudery.... Heraclian emperor at Rome.... and I
lord and master on this side the sea. The Donatists pitted again fairly
against the orthodox, to cut each other’s throats in peace.... no more
of Cyril’s spying and tale-bearing to Constantinople.... Not such a
baddish of fare.... But then-it would take so much trouble!’

With which words, Orestes went into his third warm bath for that day.



CHAPTER III: THE GOTHS


For two days the young monk held on, paddling and floating rapidly down
the Nile-stream, leaving city after city to right and left with longing
eyes, and looking back to one villa after another, till the reaches of
the banks hid them from his sight, with many a yearning to know what
sort of places those gay buildings and gardens would look like on a
nearer view, and what sort of life the thousands led who crowded the
busy quays, and walked and drove, in an endless stream, along the great
highroads which ran along either bank. He carefully avoided every
boat that passed him, from the gilded barge of the wealthy landlord or
merchant, to the tiny raft buoyed up with empty jars, which was floating
down to be sold at some market in the Delta. Here and there he met and
hailed a crew of monks, drawing their nets in a quiet bay, or passing
along the great watery highway from monastery to monastery: but all the
news he received from them was, that the canal of Alexandria was still
several days’ journey below him. It seemed endless, that monotonous
vista of the two high clay banks, with their sluices and water-wheels,
their knots of palms and date-trees; endless seemed that wearisome
succession of bars of sand and banks of mud, every one like the one
before it, every one dotted with the same line of logs and stones strewn
along the water’s edge, which turned out as he approached them to be
basking crocodiles and sleeping pelicans. His eye, wearied with the
continual confinement and want of distance, longed for the boundless
expanse of the desert, for the jagged outlines of those far-off hills,
which he had watched from boyhood rising mysteriously at morn out of
the eastern sky, and melting mysteriously into it again at even, beyond
which dwelt a whole world of wonders, elephants and dragons, satyrs and
anthropophagi,--ay, and the phoenix itself. Tired and melancholy, his
mind returned inward to prey on itself, and the last words of Arsenius
rose again and again to his thoughts. ‘Was his call of the spirit or of
the flesh?’ How should he test that problem? He wished to seethe world
that might be carnal. True; but, he wished to convert the world.... was
not that spiritual? Was he not going on a noble errand?.... thirsting
for toil, for saintship, for martyrdom itself, if it would but come and
cut the Gordian knot of all temptations, and save him-for he dimly
felt that it would save him--a whole sea of trouble in getting safe and
triumphant out of that world into which he had not yet entered .... and
his heart shrank back from the untried homeless wilderness before
him. But no! the die was cast, and he must down and onward, whether in
obedience to the spirit or the flesh. Oh, for one hour of the quiet of
that dear Laura and the old familiar faces!

At last, a sudden turn of the bank brought him in sight of a
gaudily-painted barge, oil board of which armed men, in uncouth and
foreign dresses, were chasing with barbaric shouts some large object in
the water. In the bows stood a man of gigantic stature, brandishing a
harpoon in his right hand, and in his left holding the line of a second,
the head of which was fixed in the huge purple sides of a hippopotamus,
who foamed and wallowed a few yards down the stream. An old grizzled
warrior at the stern, with a rudder in either hand, kept the boat’s
head continually towards the monster, in spite of its sudden and frantic
wheelings; and when it dashed madly across the stream, some twenty oars
flashed through the water in pursuit. All was activity and excitement;
and it was no wonder if Philammon’s curiosity had tempted him to drift
down almost abreast of the barge ere he descried, peeping from under a
decorated awning in the afterpart, some dozen pairs of languishing
black eyes, turned alternately to the game and to himself. The
serpents!--chattering and smiling, with pretty little shrieks and
shaking of glossy curls and gold necklaces, and fluttering of muslin
dresses, within a dozen yards of him! Blushing scarlet, he knew not
why, he seized his paddle, and tried to back out of the snare.... but
somehow, his very efforts to escape those sparkling eyes diverted his
attention from everything else: the hippopotamus had caught sight of
him, and furious with pain, rushed straight at the unoffending canoe;
the harpoon line became entangled round his body, and in a moment he
and his frail bark were overturned, and the monster, with his huge white
tusks gaping wide, close on him as he struggled in the stream.

Luckily Philammon, contrary to the wont of monks, was a bather, and swam
like a water-fowl: fear he had never known: death from childhood had
been to him, as to the other inmates of the Laura, a contemplation too
perpetual to have any paralysing terror in it, even then, when life
seemed just about to open on him anew. But the monk was a man, and a
young one, and had no intention of dying tamely or unavenged. In an
instant he had freed himself from the line; drawn the short knife which
was his only weapon; and diving suddenly, avoided the monster’s rush,
and attacked him from behind with stabs, which, though not deep, still
dyed the waters with gore at every stroke. The barbarians shouted with
delight. The hippopotamus turned furiously against his new assailant,
crushing, alas! the empty canoe to fragments with a single snap of his
enormous jaws; but the turn was fatal to him; the barge was close upon
him, and as he presented his broad side to the blow, the sinewy arm of
the giant drove a harpoon through his heart, and with one convulsive
shudder the huge blue mass turned over on its side and floated dead.

Poor Philammon! He alone was silent, amid the yells of triumph;
sorrowfully he swam round and round his little paper wreck.... it would
not have floated a mouse. Wistfully be eyed the distant banks, half
minded to strike out for them and escape,.... and thought of the
crocodiles,.... and paddled round again,.... and thought of the
basilisk eyes;.... he might escape the crocodiles, but who could escape
women?.... and he struck out valiantly for shore.... when he was brought
to a sudden stop by finding the stem of the barge close on him, a noose
thrown over him by some friendly barbarian, and himself hauled on
board, amid the laughter, praise, astonishment, and grumbling of the
good-natured crew, who had expected him, as a matter of course, to avail
himself at once of their help, and could not conceive the cause of his
reluctance.

Philammon gazed with wonder on his strange hosts, their pale
complexions, globular heads and faces, high cheek-bones, tall and sturdy
figures; their red beards, and yellow hair knotted fantastically above
the head; their awkward dresses, half Roman or Egyptian, and half
of foreign fur, soiled and stained in many a storm and fight, but
tastelessly bedizened with classic jewels, brooches, and Roman coins,
strung like necklaces. Only the steersman, who had come forward to
wonder at the hippopotamus, and to help in dragging the unwieldy brute
on board, seemed to keep genuine and unornamented the costume of his
race, the white linen leggings, strapped with thongs of deerskin, the
quilted leather cuirass, the bears’-fur cloak, the only ornaments of
which were the fangs and claws of the beast itself, and a fringe of
grizzled tufts, which looked but too like human hair. The language which
they spoke was utterly unintelligible to Philammon, though it need not
be so to us.

‘A well-grown lad and a brave one, Wulf the son of Ovida,’ said the
giant to the old hero of the bearskin cloak; ‘and understands wearing
skins, in this furnace-mouth of a climate, rather better than you do.’

‘I keep to the dress of my forefathers, Amalric the Amal. What did to
sack Rome in, may do to find Asgard in.’

The giant, who was decked out with helmet, cuirass, and senatorial
boots, in a sort of mongrel mixture of the Roman military and civil
dress, his neck wreathed with a dozen gold chains, and every finger
sparkling with jewels, turned away with an impatient sneer.

‘Asgard--Asgard! If you are in such a hurry to get to Asgard up this
ditch in the sand, you had better ask the fellow how far it is thither.’

Wulf took him quietly at his word, and addressed a question to the young
monk, which he could only answer by a shake of the head.

‘Ask him in Greek, man.’

‘Greek is a slave’s tongue. Make a slave talk to him in it, not me.’

‘Here--some of you girls! Pelagia! you understand this fellow’s talk.
Ask him how far it is to Asgard.’

‘You must ask me more civilly, my rough hero,’ replied a soft voice from
underneath the awning. ‘Beauty must be sued, and not commanded.’

‘Come, then, my olive-tree, my gazelle, my lotus-flower, my--what was
the last nonsense you taught me?--and ask this wild man of the sands how
far it is from these accursed endless rabbit-burrows to Asgard.’

The awning was raised, and lying luxuriously on a soft mattress,
fanned with peacock’s feathers, and glittering with rubies and topazes,
appeared such a vision as Philammon had never seen before.

A woman of some two-and-twenty summers, formed in the most voluptuous
mould of Grecian beauty, whose complexion showed every violet vein
through its veil of luscious brown. Her little bare feet, as they
dimpled the cushions, were more perfect than Aphrodite’s, softer than a
swan’s bosom. Every swell of her bust and arms showed through the thin
gauze robe, while her lower limbs were wrapped in a shawl of orange
silk, embroidered with wreaths of shells and roses. Her dark hair lay
carefully spread out upon the pillow, in a thousand ringlets entwined
with gold and jewels; her languishing eyes blazed like diamonds from
a cavern, under eyelids darkened and deepened with black antimony; her
lips pouted of themselves, by habit or by nature, into a perpetual kiss;
slowly she raised one little lazy hand; slowly the ripe lips opened; and
in most pure and melodious Attic, she lisped her huge lover’s question
to the monk, and repeated it before the boy could shake off the spell,
and answer....

‘Asgard? What is Asgard?’

The beauty looked at the giant for further instructions.

‘The City of the immortal Gods,’ interposed the old warrior, hastily and
sternly, to the lady.

‘The city of God is in heaven,’ said Philammon to the interpreter,
turning his head away from those gleaming, luscious, searching glances.

His answer was received with a general laugh by all except the leader,
who shrugged his shoulders.

‘It may as well be up in the skies as up the Nile. We shall be just
as likely, I believe, to reach it by flying, as by rowing up this big
ditch. Ask him where the river comes from, Pelagia.’

Pelagia obeyed.... and thereon followed a confusion worse confounded,
composed of all the impossible wonders of that mythic fairyland with
which Philammon had gorged himself from boyhood in his walks with the
old monks, and of the equally trustworthy traditions which the Goths had
picked up at Alexandria. There was nothing which that river did not do.
It rose in the Caucasus. Where was the Caucasus? He did not know. In
Paradise--in Indian Aethiopia--in Aethiopian India. Where were they? He
did not know. Nobody knew. It ran for a hundred and fifty days’ journey
through deserts where nothing but flying serpents and satyrs lived, and
the very lions’ manes were burnt off by the heat....

‘Good sporting there, at all events, among these dragons,’ quoth Smid
the son of Troll, armourer to the party.

‘As good as Thor’s when he caught Snake Midgard with the bullock’s
head,’ said Wulf.

It turned to the east for a hundred days’ journey more, all round Arabia
and India, among forests full of elephants and dog-headed women.

‘Better and better, Smid!’ growled Wulf, approvingly.

‘Fresh beef cheap there, Prince Wulf, eh?’ quoth Smid; ‘I must look over
the arrow-heads.’

--To the mountains of the Hyperboreans, where there was eternal night,
and the air was full of feathers.... That is, one-third of it came from
thence, and another third came from the Southern ocean, over the Moon
mountains, where no one had ever been, and the remaining third from the
country where the phoenix lived, and nobody knew where that was. And
then there were the cataracts, and the inundations-and-and-and above the
cataracts, nothing but sand-hills and ruins, as full of devils as they
could hold.... and as for Asgard, no one had ever heard of it.... till
every face grew longer and longer, as Pelagia went on interpreting and
misinterpreting; and at last the giant smote his hand upon his knee, and
swore a great oath that Asgard might rot till the twilight of the gods
before he went a step farther up the Nile.

‘Curse the monk!’ growled Wulf. ‘How should such a poor beast know
anything about the matter?’

‘Why should not he know as well as that ape of a Roman governor?’ asked
Smid.

‘Oh, the monks know everything,’ said Pelagia. ‘They go hundreds and
thousands of miles up the river, and cross the deserts among fiends and
monsters, where any one else would be eaten up, or go mad at once.’

‘Ah, the dear holy men! It’s all by the sign of the blessed cross!’
exclaimed all the girls together, devoutly crossing themselves, while
two or three of the most enthusiastic were half-minded to go forward and
kneel to Philammon for his blessing; but hesitated, their Gothic lovers
being heathenishly stupid and prudish on such points.

‘Why should he not know as well as the prefect? Well said, Smid! I
believe that prefect’s quill-driver was humbugging us when he said
Asgard was only ten days’ sail up.’

‘Why?’ asked Wulf.

‘I never give any reasons. What’s the use of being an Amal, and a son
of Odin, if one has always to be giving reasons like a rascally Roman
lawyer? I say the governor looked like a liar; and I say this monk looks
like an honest fellow; and I choose to believe him, and there is an end
of it.’

‘Don’t look so cross at me, Prince Wulf; I’m sure it’s not my fault; I
could only say what the monk told me,’ whispered poor Pelagia.

‘Who looks cross at you, my queen?’ roared the Amal. ‘Let me have him
out here, and by Thor’s hammer, I’ll--’

‘Who spoke to you, you stupid darling?’ answered Pelagia, who lived in
hourly fear of thunderstorms. ‘Who is going to be cross with any one,
except I with you, for mishearing and misunderstanding, and meddling,
as you are always doing? I shall do as I threatened, and run away with
Prince Wulf, if you are not good. Don’t you see that the whole crew are
expecting you to make them an oration?’

Whereupon the Amal rose.

‘See you here, Wulf the son of Ovida, and warriors all! If we want
wealth, we shan’t find it among the sand-hills. If we want women, we
shall find nothing prettier than these among dragons and devils. Don’t
look angry, Wulf. You have no mind to marry one of those dog-headed
girls the monk talked of, have you? Well, then, we have money and women;
and if we want sport, it’s better sport killing men than killing beasts;
so we had better go where we shall find most of that game, which we
certainly shall not up this road. As for fame and all that, though I’ve
had enough, there’s plenty to be got anywhere along the shores of that
Mediterranean. Let’s burn and plunder Alexandria: forty of us Goths
might kill down all these donkey-riders in two days, and hang up that
lying prefect who sent us hereon this fool’s errand. Don’t answer, Wulf.
I knew he was humbugging us all along, but you were so open-mouthed to
all he said, that I was bound to let my elders choose for me. Let’s
go back; send over for any of the tribes; send to Spain for those
Vandals--they have had enough of Adolf by now, curse him!--I’ll warrant
them; get together an army, and take Constantinople. I’ll be Augustus,
and Pelagia, Augusta; you and Smid here, the two Caesars; and we’ll make
the monk the chief of the eunuchs, eh?--anything you like for a quiet
life; but up this accursed kennel of hot water I go no farther. Ask your
girls, my heroes, and I’ll ask mine. Women are all prophetesses, every
one of them.’

‘When they are not harlots,’ growled Wulf to himself.

‘I will go to the world’s end with you, my king!’ sighed Pelagia; ‘but
Alexandria is certainly pleasanter than this.’

Old Wulf sprang up fiercely enough.

‘Hear me, Amalric the Amal, son of Odin, and heroes all! When my fathers
swore to be Odin’s men, and gave up the kingdom to the holy Annals, the
sons of the Aesir, what was the bond between your fathers and mine? Was
it not that we should move and move, southward and southward ever, till
we came back to Asgard, the city where Odin dwells for ever, and gave
into his hands the kingdom of all the earth? And did we not keep our
oath? Have we not held to the Amals? Did we not leave Adolf, because we
would not follow a Balth, while there was an Amal to lead us? Have we
not been true men to you, son of the Aesir?’

‘No man ever saw Wulf, the son of Ovida, fail friend or foe.’

‘Then why does his friend fail him? Why does his friend fail himself? If
the bison-bull lie down and wallow, what will the herd do for a leader?
If the king-wolf lose the scent, how will the pack hold it? If the
Yngling forgets the song of Asgard, who will sing it to the heroes?’

‘Sing it yourself, if you choose. Pelagia sings quite well enough for
me.’

In an instant the cunning beauty caught at the hint, and poured forth a
soft, low, sleepy song:--

‘Loose the sail, rest the oar, float away down, Fleeting and gliding by
tower and town; Life is so short at best! snatch, while thou canst, thy
rest, Sleeping by me!’

‘Can you answer that, Wulf?’ shouted a dozen voices.

‘Hear the song of Asgard, warriors of the Goths! Did not Alaric the king
love it well? Did I not sing it before him in the palace of the Caesars,
till he swore, for all the Christian that he was, to go southward in
search of the holy city? And when he went to Valhalla, and the ships
were wrecked off Sicily, and Adolf the Balth turned back like a lazy
hound, and married the daughter of the Romans, whom Odin hates, and went
northward again to Gaul, did not I sing you all the song of Asgard in
Messina there, till you swore to follow the Amal through fire and water
until we found the hall of Odin, and received the mead-cup from his own
hand? Hear it again, warriors of the Goths!’

‘Not that song!’ roared the Amal, stopping his ears with both his hands.
‘Will you drive us blood-mad again, just as we are settling down into
our sober senses, and finding out what our lives were given us for?’

‘Hear the song of Asgard! On to Asgard, wolves of the Goths!’ shouted
another; and a babel of voices arose.

‘Haven’t we been fighting and marching these seven years?’

‘Haven’t we drunk blood enough to satisfy Odin ten times over? If he
wants us lot him come himself and lead us!’

‘Let us get our winds again before we start afresh!’

‘Wulf the Prince is like his name, and never tires; he has a
winter-wolf’s legs under him; that is no reason why we should have.’

‘Haven’t you heard what the monk says?-we can never get ever those
cataracts.’

‘We’ll stop his old wives’ tales for him, and then settle for
ourselves,’ said Smid; and springing from the thwart where he had been
sitting, he caught up a bill with one hand, and seized Philammon’s
throat with the other.... in a moment more, it would have been all over
with him....

For the first time in his life Philammon felt a hostile gripe upon him,
and a new sensation rushed through every nerve, as he grappled with the
warrior, clutched with his left hand the up-lifted wrist, and with his
right the girdle, and commenced, without any definite aim, a fierce
struggle, which, strange to say, as it went on, grew absolutely
pleasant.

The women shrieked to their lovers to part the combatants, but in vain.

‘Not for worlds! A very fair match and a very fair fight! Take your long
legs back, Itho, or they will be over you! That’s right, my Smid, don’t
use the knife! They will be overboard in a moment! By all the Valkyrs,
they are down, and Smid undermost!’

There was no doubt of it; and in another moment Philammon would have
wrenched the bill out of his opponent’s hand, when, to the utter
astonishment of the onlookers, he suddenly loosed his hold, shook
himself free by one powerful wrench, and quietly retreated to his seat,
conscience-stricken at the fearful thirst for blood which had suddenly
boiled up within him as he felt his enemy under him.

The onlookers were struck dumb with astonishment; they had taken for
granted that he would, as a matter of course, have used his right of
splitting his vanquished opponent’s skull--an event which they would
of course have deeply deplored, but with which, as men of honour, they
could not on any account interfere, but merely console themselves for
the loss of their comrade by flaying his conqueror alive, ‘carving him
into the blood-eagle,’ or any other delicate ceremony which might serve
as a vent for their sorrow and a comfort to the soul of the deceased.

Smid rose, with a bill in his hand, and looked round him-perhaps to
see what was expected of him. He half lifted his weapon to strike ....
Philammon, seated, looked him calmly in the face.... The old warrior’s
eye caught the bank, which was now receding rapidly past them; and when
he saw that they were really floating downwards again, without an
effort to stem the stream, he put away his bill, and sat himself down
deliberately in his place, astonishing the onlookers quite as much as
Philammon had done.

‘Five minutes’ good fighting, and no one killed! This is a shame!’ quoth
another. ‘Blood we must see, and it had better be yours, master monk,
than your betters’,’--and therewith he rushed on poor Philammon.

He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had
been awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not
frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous cruelty
of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon over on his
back, deliberated by what death he should die.

Philammon quietly submitted--if submission have anything to do with that
state of mind in which sheer astonishment and novelty have broken up all
the custom of man’s nature, till the strangest deeds and sufferings are
taken as matters of course. His sudden escape from the Laura, the new
world of thought and action into which he had been plunged, the new
companions with whom he had fallen in, had driven him utterly from his
moorings, and now anything and everything might happen to him. He who
had promised never to look upon woman found himself, by circumstances
over which he had no control, amid a boatful of the most objectionable
species of that most objectionable genus--and the utterly worst having
happened, everything else which happened must be better than the worst.
For the rest, he had gone forth to see the world--and this was one of
the ways of it. So he made up his mind to see it, and be filled with the
fruit of his own devices.

And he would have been certainly filled with the same in five minutes
more, in some shape too ugly to be mentioned: but, as even sinful women
have hearts in them, Pelagia shrieked out--

‘Amalric! Amalric! do not let them! I cannot bear it!’

‘The warriors are free men, my darling, and know what is proper. And
what can the life of such a brute be to you?’

Before he could stop her, Pelagia had sprung from her cushions, and
thrown herself into the midst of the laughing ring of wild beasts.

‘Spare him! spare him for my sake!’ shrieked she.

‘Oh, my pretty lady! you mustn’t interrupt warriors’ sport!’

In an instant she had torn off her shawl, and thrown it over Philammon;
and as she stood, with all the outlines of her beautiful limbs revealed
through the thin robe of spangled gauze--

‘Let the man who dares, touch him beneath that shawl!--though it be a
saffron one!’

The Goths drew back. For Pelagia herself they had as little respect as
the rest of the world had. But for a moment she was not the Messalina of
Alexandria, but a woman; and true to the old woman-worshipping instinct,
they looked one and all at her flashing eyes, full of noble pity and
indignation, as well as of mere woman’s terror--and drew back, and
whispered together.

Whether the good spirit or the evil one would conquer, seemed for a
moment doubtful, when Pelagia felt a heavy hand on her shoulder, and
turning, saw Wulf the son of Ovida.

‘Go back, pretty woman! Men, I claim the boy. Smid, give him to me. He
is your man. You could have killed him if you had chosen, and did not;
and no one else shall.’

‘Give him us, Prince Wulf! We have not seen blood for many a day!’

‘You might have seen rivers of it, if you had had the hearts to go
onward. The boy is mine, and a brave boy. He has upset a warrior fairly
this day, and spared him; and we will make a warrior of him in return.’

And he lifted up the prostrate monk.

‘You are my man now. Do you like fighting?’

Philammon, not understanding the language in which he was addressed,
could only shake his head--though if he had known what its import was,
he could hardly in honesty have said, No.

‘He shakes his head! He does not like it! He is craven! Let us have
him!’

‘I had killed kings when you were shooting frogs,’ cried Smid. ‘Listen
to me, my sons! A coward grips sharply at first, and loosens his hand
after a while, because his blood is soon hot and soon cold. A brave
man’s grip grows the firmer the longer he holds, because the spirit of
Odin comes upon him. I watched the boy’s hands on my threat; and he will
make a man; and I will make him one. However, we may as well make him
useful at once; so give him an oar.’

‘Well,’ answered his new protector, ‘he can as well row us as he rowed
by us; and if we are to go back to a cow’s death and the pool of Hela,
the quicker we go the better.’

And as the men settled themselves again to their oars, one was put into
Philammon’s hand, which he managed with such strength and skill that his
late tormentors, who, in spite of an occasional inclination to robbery
and murder, were thoroughly good-natured, honest fellows, clapped him
on the back, and praised him as heartily as they had just now heartily
intended to torture him to death, and then went forward, as many of them
as were not rowing, to examine the strange beast which they had just
slaughtered, pawing him over from tusks to tail, putting their heads
into his mouth, trying their knives on his hide, comparing him to all
beasts, like and unlike, which they had ever seen, and laughing and
shoving each other about with the fun and childish wonder of a party
of schoolboys; till Smid, who was the wit of the party, settled the
comparative anatomy of the subject for them--‘Valhalla! I’ve found out
what he’s most like!--One of those big blue plums, which gave us all the
stomach-ache when we were encamped in the orchards above Ravenna!’



CHAPTER IV: MIRIAM


One morning in the same week, Hypatia’s favourite maid entered her
chamber with a somewhat terrified face.

‘The old Jewess, madam--the hag who has been watching so often lately
under the wall opposite. She frightened us all out of our senses last
evening by peeping in. We all said she had the evil eye, if any one ever
had--’

‘Well, what of her?’

‘She is below, madam, and will speak with you. Not that I care for her;
I have my amulet on. I hope you have?’

‘Silly girl! Those who have been initiated as I have in the mysteries
of the gods, can defy spirits and command them. Do you suppose that the
favourite of Pallas Athene will condescend to charms and magic? Send her
up.’

The girl retreated, with a look half of awe, half of doubt, at the lofty
pretensions of her mistress, and returned with old Miriam, keeping,
however, prudently behind her, in order to test as little as possible
the power of her own amulet by avoiding the basilisk eye which had
terrified her.

Miriam came in, and advancing to the proud beauty, who remained seated,
made an obeisance down to the very floor, without, however, taking her
eyes for an instant off Hypatia’s face.

Her countenance was haggard and bony, with broad sharp-cut lips, stamped
with a strangely mingled expression of strength and sensuality. Put the
feature about her which instantly fixed Hypatia’s attention, and from
which she could not in spite of herself withdraw it, was the dry,
glittering, coal-black eye which glared out from underneath the gray
fringe of her swarthy brows, between black locks covered with gold
coins. Hypatia could look at nothing but those eyes; and she reddened,
and grew all but unphilosophically angry, as she saw that the old woman
intended her to look at them, and feel the strange power which she
evidently wished them to exercise.

After a moment’s silence, Miriam drew a letter from her bosom, and with
a second low obeisance presented it.

‘From whom is this?’

‘Perhaps the letter itself will tell the beautiful lady, the fortunate
lady, the discerning lady,’ answered she, in a fawning, wheedling tone.
‘How should a poor old Jewess know great folks’ secrets?’

‘Great folks?--’

Hypatia looked at the seal which fixed a silk cord round the letter. It
was Orestes’; and so was the handwriting.... Strange that he should have
chosen such a messenger! What message could it be which required such
secrecy?

She clapped her hands for the maid. ‘Let this woman wait in the
ante-room.’ Miriam glided out backwards, bowing as she went. As Hypatia
looked up over the letter to see whether she was alone, she caught
a last glance of that eye still fixed upon her, and an expression in
Miriam’s face which made her, she knew not why, shudder and turn chill.

‘Foolish that I am! What can that witch be to me? But now for the
letter.’

‘To the most noble and most beautiful, the mistress of philosophy,
beloved of Athene, her pupil and slave sends greeting.’....

‘My slave! and no name mentioned!’

‘There are those who consider that the favourite hen of Honorius, which
bears the name of the Imperial City, would thrive better under a new
feeder; and the Count of Africa has been despatched by himself and by
the immortal gods to superintend for the present the poultry-yard of the
Caesars--at least during the absence of Adolf and Placidia. There are
those also who consider that in his absence the Numidian lion might be
prevailed on to become the yoke-fellow of the Egyptian crocodile; and
a farm which, ploughed by such a pair, should extend from the upper
cataract to the Pillars of Hercules, might have charms even for a
philosopher. But while the ploughman is without a nymph, Arcadia
is imperfect. What were Dionusos without his Ariadne, Ares without
Aphrodite, Zeus without Hera? Even Artemis has her Endymion; Athens
alone remains unwedded; but only because Hephaestus was too rough a
wooer. Such is not he who now offers to the representative of Athene the
opportunity of sharing that which may be with the help of her wisdom,
which without her is impossible. [Greek expression omitted] Shall Eros,
invincible for ages, be balked at last of the noblest game against which
he ever drew his bow?’....

If Hypatia’s colour had faded a moment before under the withering glance
of the old Jewess, it rose again swiftly enough, as she read line after
line of this strange epistle; till at last, crushing it together in her
hand, she rose and hurried into the adjoining library, where Theon sat
over his books.

‘Father, do you know anything of this? Look what Orestes has dared to
send me by the hands of some base Jewish witch!’--And she spread the
letter before him, and stood impatient, her whole figure dilated with
pride and anger, as the old man read it slowly and carefully, and then
looked up, apparently not ill pleased with the contents.

‘What, father?’ asked she, half reproachfully. ‘Do not you, too, feel
the insult which has been put upon your daughter?’

‘My dear child,’ with a puzzled look, ‘do you not see that he offers
you--’

‘I know what he offers me, father. The Empire of Africa.... I am to
descend from the mountain heights of science, from the contemplation
of the unchangeable and ineffable glories, into the foul fields and
farmyards of earthly practical life, and become a drudge among political
chicanery, and the petty ambitions, and sins, and falsehoods of
the earthly herd.... And the price which he offers me--me, the
stainless--me, the virgin--me, the un-tamed,--is-his hand! Pallas
Athene! dost thou not blush with thy child?’

‘But, my child--my child,--an empire--’

‘Would the empire of the world restore my lost self-respect-my just
pride? Would it save my cheek from blushes every time I recollected that
I bore the hateful and degrading name of wife?--The property, the puppet
of a man--submitting to his pleasure--bearing his children--wearing
myself out with all the nauseous cares of wifehood--no longer able to
glory in myself, pure and self-sustained, but forced by day and night
to recollect that my very beauty is no longer the sacrament of Athene’s
love for me, but the plaything of a man;--and such a man as that!
Luxurious, frivolous, heartless--courting my society, as he has done for
years, only to pick up and turn to his own base earthly uses the scraps
which fall from the festal table of the gods! I have encouraged him too
much--vain fool that I have been! No, I wrong myself! It was only--I
thought--I thought that by his being seen at our doors, the cause of
the immortal gods would gain honour and strength in the eyes of the
multitude.... I have tried to feed the altars of heaven with earthly
fuel.... And this is my just reward! I will write to him this
moment,--return by the fitting messenger which he has sent, insult for
insult!’

‘In the name of Heaven, my daughter!--for your father’s sake!--for my
sake! Hypatia!--my pride, my joy, my only hope!--have pity on my gray
hairs!’

And the poor old man flung himself at her feet, and clasped her knees
imploringly.

Tenderly she lifted him up, and wound her long arms round him, and laid
his head on her white shoulder, and her tears fell fast upon his gray
hair; but her lip was firm and determined.

‘Think of my pride--my glory in your glory; think of me.... Not for
myself! You know I never cared for myself!’ sobbed out the old man. ‘But
to die seeing you empress!’

‘Unless I died first in childbed, father, as many a woman dies who
is weak enough to become a slave, and submit to tortures only fit for
slaves.’

‘But--but--said the old man, racking his bewildered brains for some
argument far enough removed from nature and common sense to have an
effect on the beautiful fanatic--‘but the cause of the gods! What you
might do for it!.... Remember Julian!’

Hypatia’s arms dropped suddenly. Yes; it was true! The thought flashed
across her mind with mingled delight and terror.... Visions of her
childhood rose swift and thick--temples--sacrifices--priesthoods--
colleges--museums! What might she not do? What might she not make
Africa? Give her ten years of power, and the hated name of Christian
might be forgotten, and Athene Polias, colossal in ivory and gold,
watching in calm triumph over the harbours of a heathen Alexandria....
But the price!

And she hid her face in her hands, and bursting into bitter tears,
walked slowly away into her own chamber, her whole body convulsed with
the internal struggle.

The old man looked after her, anxiously and perplexed, and then
followed, hesitating. She was sitting at the table, her face buried
in her hands. He did not dare to disturb her. In addition to all the
affection, the wisdom, the glorious beauty, on which his whole heart fed
day by day, he believed her to be the possessor of those supernatural
powers and favours to which she so boldly laid claim. And he stood
watching her in the doorway, praying in his heart to all gods and
demons, principalities and powers, from Athene down to his daughter’s
guardian spirit, to move a determination which he was too weak to
gainsay, and yet too rational to approve.

At last the struggle was over, and she looked up, clear, calm, and
glorious again.

‘It shall be. For the sake of the immortal gods--for the sake of art,
and science, and learning, and philosophy.... It shall be. If the gods
demand a victim, here am I. If a second time in the history of the ages
the Grecian fleet cannot sail forth, conquering and civilising, without
the sacrifice of a virgin, I give my throat to the knife. Father, call
me no more Hypatia: call me Iphigenia!’

‘And me Agamemnon?’ asked the old man, attempting a faint jest through
his tears of joy. ‘I daresay you think me a very cruel father; but--’

‘Spare me, father--I have spared you.’

And she began to write her answer.

‘I have accepted his offer--conditionally, that is. And on whether he
have courage or not to fulfil that condition depends--Do not ask me what
it is. While Cyril is leader of the Christian mob, it may be safer for
you, my father, that you should be able to deny all knowledge of my
answer. Be content. I have said this--that if he will do as I would have
him do, I will do as you would have me do.’

‘Have you not been too rash? Have you not demanded of him something
which, for the sake of public opinion, he dare not grant openly, and yet
which he may allow you to do for yourself when once--’

‘I have. If I am to be a victim, the sacrificing priest shall at least
be a man, and not a coward and a time-server. If he believes this
Christian faith, let him defend it against me; for either it or I shall
perish. If he does not--as he does not--let him give up living in a lie,
and taking on his lips blasphemies against the immortals, from which his
heart and reason revolt!’

And she clapped her hands again for the maid-servant, gave her the
letter silently, shut the doors of her chamber, and tried to resume her
Commentary on Plotinus. Alas! what were all the wire-drawn dreams of
metaphysics to her in that real and human struggle of the heart? What
availed it to define the process by which individual souls emanated
from the universal one, while her own soul had, singly and on its own
responsibility, to decide so terrible an act of will? or to write fine
words with pen and ink about the immutability of the supreme Reason,
while her own reason was left there to struggle for its life amid a
roaring shoreless waste of doubts and darkness? Oh, how grand,
and clear, and logical it had all looked half an hour ago! And how
irrefragably she had been deducing from it all, syllogism after
syllogism, the non-existence of evil!--how it was but a lower form of
good, one of the countless products of the one great all-pervading mind
which could not err or change, only so strange and recondite in its form
as to excite antipathy in all minds but that of the philosopher, who
learnt to see the stem which connected the apparently bitter fruit
with the perfect root from whence it sprang. Could she see the stem
there?--the connection between the pure and supreme Reason, and the
hideous caresses of the debauched and cowardly Orestes? was not that
evil pure, unadulterate with any vein of good, past, present,
or future?...

True;--she might keep her spirit pure amid it all; she might sacrifice
the base body, and ennoble the soul by the self-sacrifice .... And yet,
would not that increase the horror, the agony, the evil of it-to her,
at least, most real evil, not to be explained away-and yet the gods
required it? Were they just, merciful in that? Was it like them, to
torture her, their last unshaken votary? Did they require it? Was it
not required of them by some higher power, of whom they were only the
emanations, the tools, the puppets?--and required of that higher power
by some still higher one--some nameless, absolute destiny of which
Orestes and she, and all heaven and earth, were but the victims, dragged
along in an inevitable vortex, helpless, hopeless, toward that for which
each was meant?--And she was meant for this! The thought was unbearable;
it turned her giddy. No! she would not! She would rebel! Like
Prometheus, she would dare destiny, and brave its worst! And she sprang
up to recall the letter.... Miriam was gone; and she threw herself on
the floor, and wept bitterly.

And her peace of mind would certainly not have been improved, could she
have seen old Miriam hurry home with her letter to a dingy house in the
Jews’ quarter, where it was un-sealed, read, and sealed up again with
such marvellous skill, that no eye could have detected the change; and
finally, still less would she have been comforted could she have heard
the conversation which was going on in a summer-room of Orestes’ palace,
between that illustrious statesman and Raphael Aben-Ezra, who were lying
on two divans opposite each other, whiling away, by a throw or two of
dice, the anxious moments which delayed her answer.

‘Trays again! The devil is in you, Raphael!’

‘I always thought he was,’ answered Raphael, sweeping up the gold
pieces....

‘When will that old witch be back?’

‘When she has read through your letter and Hypatia’s answer.’

‘Read them?’

‘Of course. You don’t fancy she is going to be fool enough to carry a
message without knowing what it is? Don’t be angry; she won’t tell.
She would give one of those two grave-lights there, which she calls her
eyes, to see the thing prosper.’

‘Why?’

‘Your excellency will know when the letter comes. Here she is; I hear
steps in the cloister. Now, one bet before they enter. I give you two to
one she asks you to turn pagan.’

‘What in? Negro-boys?’

‘Anything you like.’

‘Taken. Come in, slaves?’

And Hypocorisma entered, pouting.

‘That Jewish fury is outside with a letter, and has the impudence to say
she won’t let me bring it in!’

‘Bring her in then. Quick!’

‘I wonder what I am here for, if people have secrets that I am not to
know,’ grumbled the spoilt youth.

‘Do you want a blue ribbon round those white sides of yours, you
monkey?’ answered Orestes. ‘Because, if you do, the hippopotamus hide
hangs ready outside.’

‘Let us make him kneel down here for a couple of hours, and use him as a
dice-board,’ said Raphael, ‘as you used to do to the girls in Armenia.’

‘Ah, you recollect that?--and how the barbarian papas used to grumble,
till I had to crucify one or two, eh? That was something like life! I
love those out-of-the-way stations, where nobody asks questions: but
here one might as well live among the monks in Nitria. Here comes
Canidia! Ah, the answer? Hand it here, my queen of go-betweens!’

Orestes read it--and his countenance fell.

‘I have won?’

‘Out of the room, slaves! and no listening!’

‘I have won then?’

Orestes tossed the letter across to him, and Raphael read--

‘The immortal gods accept no divided worship; and he who would command
the counsels of their prophetess must remember that they will vouchsafe
to her no illumination till their lost honours be restored. If he who
aspires to be the lord of Africa dare trample on the hateful cross, and
restore the Caesareum to those for whose worship it was built--if he
dare proclaim aloud with his lips, and in his deeds, that contempt
for novel and barbarous superstitions, which his taste and reason have
already taught him, then he would prove himself one with whom it were a
glory to labour, to dare, to die in a great cause. But till then--’

And so the letter ended.

‘What am I to do?’

‘Take her at her word.’

‘Good heavens! I shall be excommunicated! And--and--what is to become of
my soul?’

‘What will become of it in any case, my most excellent lord?’ answered
Raphael blandly.

‘You mean--I know what you cursed Jews think will happen to every one
but yourselves. But what would the world say? I an apostate! And in the
face of Cyril and the populace! I daren’t, I tell you!’

‘No one asked your excellency to apostatise.’

‘Why, what? What did you say just now?’

‘I asked you to promise. It will not be the first time that promises
before marriage have not exactly coincided with performance afterwards.’

‘I daren’t--that is, I won’t promise. I believe, now, this is some trap
of your Jewish intrigue, just to make me commit myself against those
Christians, whom you hate.’

‘I assure you, I despise all mankind far too profoundly to hate them.
How disinterested my advice was when I proposed this match to you, you
never will know; indeed, it would be boastful in me to tell you. But
really you must make a little sacrifice to win this foolish girl. With
all the depth and daring of her intellect to help you, you might be a
match for Romans, Byzantines, and Goths at once. And as for beauty--why,
there is one dimple inside that wrist, just at the setting on of the
sweet little hand, worth all the other flesh and blood in Alexandria.’

‘By Jove! you admire her so much, I suspect you must be in love with her
yourself. Why don’t you marry her? I’ll make you my prime minister,
and then we shall have the use of her wits without the trouble of her
fancies. By the twelve Gods! If you marry her and help me, I’ll make you
what you like!’

Raphael rose and bowed to the earth.

‘Your serene high-mightiness overwhelms me. But I assure you, that never
having as yet cared for any one’s interest but my own, I could not be
expected, at my time of life, to devote myself to that of another, even
though it were to yours.’

‘Candid!’

‘Exactly so; and moreover, whosoever I may marry, will be practically,
as well as theoretically, my private and peculiar property.... You
comprehend.’

‘Candid again.’

‘Exactly so; and waiving the third argument, that she probably might not
choose to marry me, I beg to remark that it would not be proper to allow
the world to say, that I, the subject, had a wiser and fairer wife than
you, the ruler; especially a wife who bad already refused that ruler’s
complimentary offer.’

‘By Jove! and she has refused me in good earnest! I’ll make her repent
it! I was a fool to ask her at all! What’s the use of having guards, if
one can’t compel what one wants? If fair means can’t do it, foul shall!
I’ll send for her this moment!’

‘Most illustrious majesty--it will not succeed. You do not know that
woman’s determination. Scourges and red-hot pincers will not shake her,
alive; and dead, she will be of no use whatsoever to you, while she will
be of great use to Cyril.’

‘How?’

‘He will be most happy to make the whole story a handle against you,
give out that she died a virgin-martyr, in defence of the most holy
catholic and apostolic faith, get miracles worked at her tomb, and pull
your palace about your ears on the strength thereof.’

‘Cyril will hear of it anyhow: that’s another dilemma into which you
have brought me, you intriguing rascal! Why, this girl will be boasting
all over Alexandria that I have offered her marriage, and that she has
done herself the honour to refuse me!’

‘She will be much too wise to do anything of the kind; she has sense
enough to know that if she did so, you would inform a Christian populace
what conditions she offered you, and, with all her contempt for the
burden of the flesh, she has no mind to be lightened of that pretty load
by being torn in pieces by Christian monks; a very probable ending for
her in any case, as she herself, in her melancholy moods, confesses!’

‘What will you have me do then?’

‘Simply nothing. Let the prophetic spirit go out of her, as it will, in
a day or two, and then--I know nothing of human nature, if she does
not bate a little of her own price. Depend on it, for all her
ineffabilities, and impassibilities, and all the rest of the
seventh-heaven moonshine at which we play here in Alexandria, a throne
is far too pretty a bait for even Hypatia the pythoness to refuse.
Leave well alone is a good rule, but leave ill alone is a better. So
now another bet before we part, and this time three to one. Do nothing
either way, and she sends to you of her own accord before a month is
out. In Caucasian mules? Done? Be it so.’

‘Well, you are the most charming counsellor for a poor perplexed devil
of a prefect! If I had but a private fortune like you, I could just take
the money, and let the work do itself.’

‘Which is the true method of successful government. Your slave bids you
farewell. Do not forget our bet. You dine with me to-morrow?’

And Raphael bowed himself out.

As he left the prefect’s door, he saw Miriam on the opposite side of the
street, evidently watching for him. As soon as she saw him, she held on
her own side, without appearing to notice him, till he turned a corner,
and then crossing, caught him eagerly by the arm.

‘Does the fool dare!’

‘Who dare what?’

‘You know what I mean. Do you suppose old Miriam carries letters without
taking care to know what is inside them? Will he apostatise? Tell me. I
am secret as the grave!’

‘The fool has found an old worm-eaten rag of conscience somewhere in the
corner of his heart, and dare not.’

‘Curse the coward! And such a plot as I had laid! I would have swept
every Christian dog out of Africa within the year. What is the man
afraid of?’

‘Hell-fire.’

‘Why, he will go there in any case, the accursed Gentile!’

‘So I hinted to him, as delicately as I could; but, like the rest of the
world, he had a sort of partiality for getting thither by his own road.’

‘Coward! And whom shall I get now? Oh, if that Pelagia had as much
cunning in her whole body as Hypatia has in her little finger, I’d seat
her and her Goth upon the throne of the Caesars. But--’

‘But she has five senses, and just enough wit to use them, eh?’

‘Don’t laugh at her for that, the darling! I do delight in her, after
all. It warms even my old blood to see how thoroughly she knows her
business, and how she enjoys it, like a true daughter of Eve.’

‘She has been your most successful pupil, certainly, mother. You may
well be proud of her.’

The old hag chuckled to herself a while; and then suddenly turning to
Raphael--‘See here! I have a present for you;’ and she pulled out a
magnificent ring.

‘Why, mother, you are always giving me presents. It was but a month ago
you sent me this poisoned dagger.’

‘Why not, eh?--why not? Why should not Jew give to Jew? Take the old
woman’s ring!’

‘What a glorious opal!’

‘Ah, that is an opal, indeed! And the unspeakable name upon it; just
like Solomon’s own. Take it, I say! Whosoever wears that never need fear
fire, steel, poison, or woman’s eye.’

‘Your own included, eh?’

‘Take it, I say!’ and Miriam caught his hand, and forced the ring on his
finger. ‘There! Now you’re safe. And now call me mother again. I like
it. I don’t know why, but I like it. And--Raphael Aben-Ezra--don’t laugh
at me, and call me witch and hag, as you often do. I don’t care about
it from any one else; I’m accustomed to it. But when you do it, I always
long to stab you. That’s why I gave you the dagger. I used to wear it;
and I was afraid I might be tempted to use it some day, when the thought
came across me how handsome you’d look, and how quiet, when you were
dead, and your soul up there so happy in Abraham’s bosom, watching all
the Gentiles frying and roasting for ever down below. Don’t laugh at me,
I say; and don’t thwart me! I may make you the emperor’s prime minister
some day. I can if I choose.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ said Raphael, laughing.

‘Don’t laugh. I cast your nativity last night, and I know you have no
cause to laugh. A great danger hangs over you, and a deep temptation.
And if you weather this storm, you may be chamberlain, prime minister,
emperor, if you will. And you shall be--by the four archangels, you
shall!’

And the old woman vanished down a by-lane, leaving Raphael utterly
bewildered.

‘Moses and the prophets! Does the old lady intend to marry me? What can
there be in this very lazy and selfish personage who bears my name, to
excite so romantic an affection? Well, Raphael Aben-Ezra, thou hast one
more friend in the world beside Bran the mastiff; and therefore one more
trouble--seeing that friends always expect a due return of affection
and good offices and what not. I wonder whether the old lady has been
getting into a scrape kidnapping, and wants my patronage to help her
out of it.... Three-quarters of a mile of roasting sun between me and
home!.... I must hire a gig, or a litter, or some-thing, off the next
stand .... with a driver who has been eating onions.... and of course
there is not a stand for the next half-mile. Oh, divine aether! as
Prometheus has it, and ye swift-winged breezes (I wish there were any
here), when will it all be over? Three-and-thirty years have I endured
already of this Babel of knaves and fools; and with this abominable good
health of mine, which won’t even help me with gout or indigestion, I am
likely to have three-and-thirty years more of it....I know nothing, and
I care for nothing, and I expect nothing; and I actually can’t take the
trouble to prick a hole in myself, and let the very small amount of
wits out, to see something really worth seeing, and try its strength at
something really worth doing--if, after all, the other side the grave
does not turn out to be just as stupid as this one.... When will it be
all over, and I in Abraham’s bosom--or any one else’s, provided it be
not a woman’s?’



CHAPTER V: A DAY IN ALEXANDRIA


In the meanwhile, Philammon, with his hosts, the Goths, had been
slipping down the stream. Passing, one after another, world-old cities
now dwindled to decaying towns, and numberless canal-mouths, now fast
falling into ruin with the fields to which they ensured fertility,
under the pressure of Roman extortion and misrule, they had entered
one evening the mouth of the great canal of Alexandria, slid easily all
night across the star-bespangled shadows of Lake Mareotis, and found
themselves, when the next morning dawned, among the countless masts and
noisy quays of the greatest seaport in the world. The motley crowd of
foreigners, the hubbub of all dialects from the Crimea to Cadiz, the
vast piles of merchandise, and heaps of wheat, lying unsheltered in that
rainless air, the huge bulk of the corn-ships lading for Rome, whose
tall sides rose story over story, like floating palaces, above the
buildings of some inner dock--these sights, and a hundred more, made the
young monk think that the world did not look at first sight a thing to
be despised. In front of heaps of fruit, fresh from the market-boats,
black groups of glossy negro slaves were basking and laughing on the
quay, looking anxiously and coquettishly round in hopes of a purchaser;
they evidently did not think the change from desert toil to city
luxuries a change for the worse. Philammon turned away his eyes from
beholding vanity; but only to meet fresh vanity wheresoever they fell.
He felt crushed by the multitude of new objects, stunned by the din
around; and scarcely recollected himself enough to seize the first
opportunity of escaping from his dangerous companions.

‘Holloa!’ roared Smid the armourer, as he scrambled on to the steps of
the slip; ‘you are not going to run away without bidding us good-bye?’

‘Stop with me, boy!’ said old Wulf. ‘I saved you; and you are my man.’

Philammon turned and hesitated.

‘I am a monk, and God’s man.’

‘You can be that anywhere. I will make you a warrior.’

‘The weapons of my warfare are not of flesh and blood, but prayer and
fasting,’ answered poor Philammon, who felt already that he should have
ten times more need of the said weapons in Alexandria than ever he had
had in the desert.... ‘Let me go! I am not made for your life! I thank
you, bless you! I will pray for you, sir! but let me go!’

‘Curse the craven hound!’ roared half a dozen voices. ‘Why did you not
let us have our will with him, Prince Wulf? You might have expected such
gratitude from a monk.’

‘He owes me my share of the sport,’ quoth Smid. ‘And here it is!’ And
a hatchet, thrown with practised aim, whistled right for Philammon’s
head--he had just time to swerve, and the weapon struck and snapped
against the granite wall behind.

‘Well saved!’ said Wulf coolly, while the sailors and market-women above
yelled murder, and the custom-house officers, and other constables
and catchpolls of the harbour, rushed to the place--and retired again
quietly at the thunder of the Amal from the boat’s stern--

‘Never mind, my good follows! we’re only Goths; and on a visit to the
prefect, too.’

‘Only Goths, my donkey-riding friends!’ echoed Smid, and at that ominous
name the whole posse comitatus tried to look unconcerned, and found
suddenly that their presence was absolutely required in an opposite
direction.

‘Let him go,’ said Wulf, as he stalked up the steps. ‘Let the boy go.
I never set my heart on any man yet,’ he growled to himself in an under
voice, ‘but what he disappointed me--and I must not expect more from
this fellow. Come, men, ashore, and get drunk!’

Philammon, of course, now that he had leave to go, longed to stay--at
all events, he must go back and thank his hosts. He turned unwillingly
to do so, as hastily as he could, and found Pelagia and her gigantic
lover just entering a palanquin. With downcast eyes he approached the
beautiful basilisk, and stammered out some commonplace; and she, full of
smiles, turned to him at once.

‘Tell us more about yourself before we part. You speak such beautiful
Greek--true Athenian. It is quite delightful to hear one’s own accent
again. Were you ever at Athens?’

‘When I was a child; I recollect--that is, I think--’

‘What?’ asked Pelagia eagerly.

‘A great house in Athens--and a great battle there--and coming to Egypt
in a ship.’

‘Heavens!’ said Pelagia, and paused.... ‘How strange! Girls, who said he
was like me?’

‘I’m sure we meant no harm, if we did say it in a joke,’ pouted one of
the attendants.

‘Like me!--you must come and see us. I have something to say to you ....
You must!’

Philammon misinterpreted the intense interest of her tone, and if he did
not shrink back, gave some involuntary gesture of reluctance. Pelagia
laughed aloud.

‘Don’t be vain enough to suspect, foolish boy, but come! Do you think
that I have nothing to talk about but nonsense? Come and see me. It
may be better for you. I live in--’ and she named a fashionable street,
which Philammon, though he inwardly vowed not to accept the invitation,
somehow could not help remembering.

‘Do leave the wild man, and come,’ growled the Amal from within the
palanquin. ‘You are not going to turn nun, I hope?’

‘Not while the first man I ever met in the world stays in it,’ answered
Pelagia, as she skipped into the palanquin, taking care to show the most
lovely white heel and ankle, and, like the Parthian, send a random
arrow as she retreated. But the dart was lost on Philammon, who had been
already hustled away by the bevy of laughing attendants, amid baskets,
dressing-cases, and bird-cages, and was fain to make his escape into the
Babel round, and inquire his way to the patriarch’s house.

‘Patriarch’s house?’ answered the man whom he first addressed, a little
lean, swarthy fellow, with merry black eyes, who, with a basket of fruit
at his feet, was sunning himself on a baulk of timber, meditatively
chewing the papyrus-cane, and examining the strangers with a look of
absurd sagacity. ‘I know it; without a doubt I know it; all Alexandria
has good reason to know it. Are you a monk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then ask your way of the monks; you won’t go far without finding one.’

‘But I do not even know the right direction; what is your grudge against
monks, my good man?’

‘Look here, my youth; you seem too ingenuous for a monk. Don’t flatter
yourself that it will last. If you can wear the sheepskin, and haunt
the churches here for a month, without learning to lie, and slander, and
clap, and hoot, and perhaps play your part in a sedition--and--murder
satyric drama--why, you are a better man than I take you for. I, sir, am
a Greek and a philosopher; though the whirlpool of matter may have,
and indeed has, involved my ethereal spark in the body of a porter.
Therefore, youth,’ continued the little man, starting up upon his baulk
like an excited monkey, and stretching out one oratorio paw, ‘I bear a
treble hatred to the monkish tribe. First, as a man and a husband;....
for as for the smiles of beauty, or otherwise,--such as I have, I have;
and the monks, if they had their wicked will, would leave neither men
nor women in the world. Sir, they would exterminate the human race in a
single generation, by a voluntary suicide! Secondly, as a porter; for
if all men turned monks, nobody would be idle, and the profession of
portering would be annihilated. Thirdly, sir, as a philosopher; for as
the false coin is odious to the true, so is the irrational and animal
asceticism of the monk, to the logical and methodic self-restraint of
one who, like your humblest of philosophers, aspires to a life according
to the pure reason.’

‘And pray,’ asked Philammon, half laughing, ‘who has been your tutor in
philosophy?’

‘The fountain of classic wisdom, Hypatia herself. As the ancient
sage--the name is unimportant to a monk--pumped water nightly that he
might study by day, so I, the guardian of cloaks and parasols, at the
sacred doors of her lecture-room, imbibe celestial knowledge. From my
youth I felt in me a soul above the matter-entangled herd. She revealed
to me the glorious fact, that I am a spark of Divinity itself. A fallen
star, I am, sir!’ continued he, pensively, stroking his lean stomach--‘a
fallen star!--fallen, if the dignity of philosophy will allow of
the simile, among the hogs of the lower world--indeed, even into the
hog-bucket itself. Well, after all, I will show you the way to the
Archbishop’s. There is a philosophic pleasure in opening one’s treasures
to the modest young. Perhaps you will assist me by carrying this basket
of fruit?’ And the little man jumped up, put his basket on Philammon’s
head, and trotted off up a neighbouring street.

Philammon followed, half contemptuous, half wondering at what this
philosophy might be, which could feed the self-conceit of anything so
abject as his ragged little apish guide; but the novel roar and whirl of
the street, the perpetual stream of busy faces, the line of curricles,
palanquins, laden asses, camels, elephants, which met and passed him,
and squeezed him up steps and into doorways, as they threaded their
way through the great Moon-gate into the ample street beyond, drove
everything from his mind but wondering curiosity, and a vague, helpless
dread of that great living wilderness, more terrible than any dead
wilderness of sand which he had left behind. Already he longed for the
repose, the silence of the Laura--for faces which knew him and smiled
upon him; but it was too late to turn back ow. His guide held on for
more than a mile up the great main street, crossed in the centre of the
city, at right angles, by one equally magnificent, at each end of which,
miles away, appeared, dim and distant over the heads of the living
stream of passengers, the yellow sand-hills of the desert; while at the
end of the vista in front of them gleamed the blue harbour, through a
network of countless masts.

At last they reached the quay at the opposite end of the street; and
there burst on Philammon’s astonished eyes a vast semicircle of blue
sea, ringed with palaces and towers....He stopped involuntarily; and
his little guide stopped also, and looked askance at the young monk, to
watch the effect which that grand panorama should produce on him.

‘There!--Behold our works! Us Greeks!--us benighted heathens! Look at it
and feel yourself what you are, a very small, conceited, ignorant young
person, who fancies that your new religion gives you a right to despise
every one else. Did Christians make all this? Did Christians build that
Pharos there on the left horn--wonder of the world? Did Christians
raise that mile-long mole which runs towards the land, with its two
drawbridges, connecting the two ports? Did Christians build this
esplanade, or this gate of the Sun above our heads? Or that Caesareum
on our right here? Look at those obelisks before it!’ And he pointed
upwards to those two world-famous ones, one of which still lies on its
ancient site, as Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Look up! look up, I say, and feel
small--very small indeed! Did Christians raise them, or engrave them
from base to point with the wisdom of the ancients? Did Christians build
that Museum next to it, or design its statues and its frescoes--now,
alas! re-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee? Did they pile
up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange? or fill
that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing marble? Did
they build that Timonium on the point, where Antony, worsted at Actium,
forgot his shame in Cleopatra’s arms? Did they quarry out that island of
Antirrhodus into a nest of docks, or cover those waters with the sails
of every nation under heaven? Speak! Thou son of bats and moles--thou
six feet of sand--thou mummy out of the cliff caverns! Can monks do
works like these?’

‘Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,’
answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could. He was,
indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything. The overwhelming
vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole scene; the range
of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap
before or since, the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and
Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness
of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand
elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they
deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal
repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple
of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails which crowded out into
the sea beyond, like white doves taking their flight into boundless
space?--all dazzled, overpowered, saddened him.... This was the
world.... Was it not beautiful?.... Must not the men who made all this
have been--if not great.... yet.... he knew not what? Surely they had
great souls and noble thoughts in them! Surely there was something
godlike in being able to create such things! Not for themselves alone,
too; but for a nation--for generations yet unborn.... And there was the
sea.... and beyond it, nations of men innumerable .... His imagination
was dizzy with thinking of them. Were they all doomed--lost?.... Had God
no love for them?

At last, recovering himself, he recollected his errand, and again asked
his way to the archbishop’s house.

‘This way, O youthful nonentity!’ answered the little man, leading the
way round the great front of the Caesareum, at the foot of the obelisks.

Philammon’s eye fell on some new masonry in the pediment, ornamented
with Christian symbols.

‘How? Is this a church?’

‘It is the Caesareum. It has become temporarily a church. The immortal
gods have, for the time being, condescended to waive their rights; but
it is the Caesareum, nevertheless. This way; down this street to the
right. There,’ said he, pointing to a doorway in the side of the Museum,
‘is the last haunt of the Muses--the lecture-room of Hypatia, the school
of my unworthiness. And here,’ stopping at the door of a splendid house
on the opposite side of the street, ‘is the residence of that blest
favourite of Athene--Neith, as the barbarians of Egypt would denominate
the goddess--we men of Macedonia retain the time-honoured Grecian
nomenclature.... You may put down your basket.’ And he knocked at
the door, and delivering the fruit to a black porter, made a polite
obeisance to Philammon, and seemed on the point of taking his departure.

‘But where is the archbishop’s house?’

‘Close to the Serapeium. You cannot miss the place: four hundred columns
of marble, now ruined by Christian persecutors, stand on an eminence--’

‘But how far off?’

‘About three miles; near the gate of the Moon.’

‘Why, was not that the gate by which we entered the city on the other
side?’

‘Exactly so; you will know your way back, having already traversed it.’

Philammon checked a decidedly carnal inclination to seize the little
fellow by the throat, and knock his head against the wall, and contented
himself by saying--

‘Then do you actually mean to say, you heathen villain, that you have
taken me six or seven miles out of my road?’

‘Good words young man. If you do me harm, I call for help; we are close
to the Jews’ quarter, and there are some thousands there who will swarm
out like wasps on the chance of beating a monk to death. Yet that which
I have done, I have done with a good purpose. First, politically, or
according to practical wisdom--in order that you, not I, might carry
the basket. Next, philosophically, or according to the intuitions of the
pure reason--in order that you might, by beholding the magnificence of
that great civilisation which your fellows wish to destroy, learn
that you are an ass, and a tortoise, and a nonentity, and so beholding
yourself to be nothing, may be moved to become something.’

And he moved off.

Philammon seized him by the collar of his ragged tunic, and held him in
a gripe from which the little man, though he twisted like an eel could
not escape.

‘Peaceably, if you will; if not, by main force. You shall go back with
me, and show me every step of the way. It is a just penalty.’

‘The philosopher conquers circumstances by submitting to them. I go
peaceably. Indeed, the base necessities of the hog-bucket side of
existence compel me of themselves back to the Moon-gate, for another
early fruit job.’

So they went back together.

Now why Philammon’s thoughts should have been running on the next new
specimen of womankind to whom he had been introduced, though only in
name, let psychologists tell, but certainly, after he had walked some
half-mile in silence, he suddenly woke up, as out of many meditations,
and asked--

‘But who is this Hypatia, of whom you talk so much?’

‘Who is Hypatia, rustic? The queen of Alexandria! In wit, Athene; Hera
in majesty; in beauty, Aphrodite!’

‘And who are they?’ asked Philammon.

The porter stopped, surveyed him slowly from foot to head with an
expression of boundless pity and contempt, and was in the act of walking
off in the ecstasy of his disdain, when he was brought to suddenly by
Philammon’s strong arm.

‘Ah!--I recollect. There is a compact.... Who is Athene? The goddess,
giver of wisdom. Hera, spouse of Zeus, queen of the Celestials.
Aphrodite, mother of love.... You are not expected to understand.’

Philammon did understand, however, so much as this, that Hypatia was a
very unique and wonderful person in the mind of his little guide; and
therefore asked the only further question by which he could as yet test
any Alexandrian phenomenon--

‘And is she a friend of the patriarch?’

The porter opened his eyes very wide, put his middle finger in a
careful and complicated fashion between his fore and third fingers, and
extending it playfully towards Philammon, performed therewith certain
mysterious signals, the effect whereof being totally lost on him, the
little man stopped, took another look at Philammon’s stately figure, and
answered--

‘Of the human race in general, my young friend. The philosopher must
rise above the individual, to the contemplation of the universal....
Aha!-Here is something worth seeing, and the gates are open.’ And he
stopped at the portal of a vast building.

‘Is this the patriarch’s house?’

‘The patriarch’s tastes are more plebeian. He lives, they say, in two
dirty little rooms--knowing what is fit for him. The patriarch’s house?
Its antipodes, my young friend--that is, if such beings have a cosmic
existence, on which point Hypatia has her doubts. This is the temple of
art and beauty; the Delphic tripod of poetic inspiration; the solace of
the earthworn drudge; in a word, the theatre; which your patriarch, if
he could, would convert to-morrow into a--but the philosopher must not
revile. Ah! I see the prefect’s apparitors at the gate. He is making the
polity, as we call it here; the dispositions; settling, in short,
the bill of fare for the day, in compliance with the public palate. A
facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week--admired by
some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his
movements--his recoil, especially--are wanting in the true antique
severity--might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the
weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step in and hear.’

But before Philammon could refuse, an uproar arose within, a rush
outward of the mob, and inward of the prefect’s apparitors.

‘It is false!’ shouted many voices. ‘A Jewish calumny! The man is
innocent!’

‘There is no more sedition in him than there is in me,’ roared a fat
butcher, who looked as ready to fell a man as an ox. ‘He was always the
first and the last to clap the holy patriarch at sermon.’

‘Dear tender soul,’ whimpered a woman; ‘and I said to him only this
morning, why don’t you flog my boys, Master Hierax? how can you expect
them to learn if they are not flogged? And he said, he never could abide
the sight of a rod, it made his back tingle so.’

‘Which was plainly a prophecy!’

‘And proves him innocent; for how could he prophesy if he was not one of
the holy ones?’

‘Monks, to the rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured in the
theatre!’ thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair streaming about
his chest and shoulders.

‘Nitria! Nitria! For God and the mother of God, monks of Nitria! Down
with the Jewish slanderers! Down with heathen tyrants!’--And the mob,
reinforced as if by magic by hundreds from without, swept down the huge
vaulted passage, carrying Philammon and the porter with them.

‘My friends,’ quoth the little man, trying to look philosophically calm,
though he was fairly off his legs, and hanging between heaven and earth
on the elbows of the bystanders, ‘whence this tumult?’

‘The Jews got up a cry that Hierax wanted to raise a riot. Curse them
and their sabbath, they are always rioting on Saturdays about this
dancer of theirs, instead of working like honest Christians!’

‘And rioting on Sunday instead. Ahem! sectarian differences, which the
philosopher--

The rest of the sentence disappeared with the speaker, as a sudden
opening of the mob let him drop, and buried him under innumerable legs.

Philammon, furious at the notion of persecution, maddened by the cries
around him, found himself bursting fiercely through the crowd, till he
reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all
farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting
within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed
and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips of his tormentors.

In vain Philammon and the monks around him knocked and beat at
the gates; they were only answered by laughter and taunts from the
apparitors within, curses on the turbulent mob of Alexandria, with its
patriarch, clergy, saints, and churches, and promises to each and all
outside, that their turn would come next; while the piteous screams grew
fainter and more faint, and at last, with a convulsive shudder, motion
and suffering ceased for ever in the poor mangled body.

‘They have killed him! Martyred him! Back to the archbishop! To the
patriarch’s house: he will avenge us!’ And as the horrible news, and
the watchword which followed it, passed outwards through the crowd, they
wheeled round as one man, and poured through street after street towards
Cyril’s house; while Philammon, beside himself with horror, rage, and
pity, hurried onward with them.

A tumultuous hour, or more, was passed in the street before he could
gain entrance; and then he was swept, along with the mob in which he had
been fast wedged, through a dark low passage, and landed breathless in
a quadrangle of mean and new buildings, overhung by the four hundred
stately columns of the ruined Serapeium. The grass was already
growing on the ruined capitals and architraves.... Little did even its
destroyers dream then, that the day would come when one only of that
four hundred would be left, as ‘Pompey’s Pillar,’ to show what the men
of old could think and do.

Philammon at last escaped from the crowd, and putting the letter which
he had carried in his bosom into the hands of one of the priests who
was mixing with the mob, was beckoned by him into a corridor, and up a
flight of stairs, and into a large, low, mean room, and there, by virtue
of the world-wide freemasonry which Christianity had, for the first
time on earth, established, found himself in five minutes awaiting the
summons of the most powerful man south of the Mediterranean.

A curtain hung across the door of the inner chamber, through which
Philammon could hear plainly the steps of some one walking up and down
hurriedly and fiercely.

‘They will drive me to it!’ at last burst out a deep sonorous voice.
‘They will drive me to it.... Their blood be on their own head! It
is not enough for them to blaspheme God and His church, to have the
monopoly of all the cheating, fortune-telling, usury, sorcery, and
coining of the city, but they must deliver my clergy into the hands of
the tyrant?’

‘It was so even in the apostles’ time,’ suggested a softer but far more
unpleasant voice.

‘Then it shall be so no longer! God has given me the power to stop
them; and God do so to me, and more also, if I do not use that power.
To-morrow I sweep out this Augean stable of villainy, and leave not a
Jew to blaspheme and cheat in Alexandria.’

‘I am afraid such a judgment, however righteous, might offend his
excellency.’

‘His excellency! His tyranny! Why does Orestes truckle to these
circumcised, but because they lend money to him and to his creatures? He
would keep up a den of fiends in Alexandria if they would do as much for
him! And then to play them off against me and mine, to bring religion
into contempt by setting the mob together by the ears, and to end with
outrages like this! Seditious! Have they not cause enough? The sooner
I remove one of their temptations the better: let the other tempter
beware, lest his judgment be at hand!’

‘The prefect, your holiness?’ asked the other voice slily.

‘Who spoke of the prefect? Whosoever is a tyrant, and a murderer, and an
oppressor of the poor, and a favourer of the philosophy which despises
and enslaves the poor, should not he perish, though he be seven times a
prefect?’

At this juncture Philammon, thinking perhaps that he had already heard
too much, notified his presence by some slight noise, at which the
secretary, as he seemed to be, hastily lifted the curtain, and somewhat
sharply demanded his business. The names of Pambo and Arsenius, however,
seemed to pacify him at once; and the trembling youth was ushered into
the presence of him who in reality, though not in name, sat on the
throne of the Pharaohs.

Not, indeed, in their outward pomp; the furniture of the chamber was
but a grade above that of the artisan’s; the dress of the great man was
coarse and simple; if personal vanity peeped out anywhere, it was in
the careful arrangement of the bushy beard, and of the few curling locks
which the tonsure had spared. But the height and majesty of his figure,
the stern and massive beauty of his features, the flashing eye, curling
lip, and projecting brow--all marked him as one born to command. As the
youth entered, Cyril stopped short in his walk, and looking him through
and through, with a glance which burnt upon his cheeks like fire, and
made him all but wish the kindly earth would open and hide him, took the
letters, read them, and then began--

‘Philammon. A Greek. You are said to have learned to obey. If so you
have also learned to rule. Your father-abbot has transferred you to my
tutelage. You are now to obey me.’

‘And I will.’

‘Well said. Go to that window, then, and leap into the court.’

Philammon walked to it, and opened it. The pavement was fully twenty
feet below; but his business was to obey, and not take measurements.
There was a flower in the vase upon the sill. He quietly removed it,
and in an instant more would have leapt for life or death, when Cyril’s
voice thundered ‘Stop!’

‘The lad will pass, my Peter. I shall not be afraid now for the secrets
which he may have overheard.’

Peter smiled assent, looking all the while as if he thought it a great
pity that the young man had not been allowed to put talebearing out of
his own power by breaking his neck.

‘You wish to see the world. Perhaps you have seen something of it
to-day.’

‘I saw the murder--’

‘Then you saw what you came hither to see; what the world is, and what
justice and mercy it can deal out. You would not dislike to see God’s
reprisals to man’s tyranny?.... Or to be a fellow-worker with God
therein, if I judge rightly by your looks?’

‘I would avenge that man.’

‘Ah! my poor simple schoolmaster! And his fate is the portent of
portents to you now! Stay awhile, till you have gone with Ezekiel into
the inner chambers of the devil’s temple, and you will see worse
things than these--women weeping for Thammuz; bemoaning the decay of an
idolatry which they themselves disbelieve--That, too, is on the list of
Hercules’ labour, Peter mine.’

At this moment a deacon entered.... ‘Your holiness, the rabbis of the
accursed nation are below, at your summons. We brought them in through
the back gate, for fear of--’

‘Right, right. An accident to them might have ruined us. I shall not
forget you. Bring them up. Peter, take this youth, introduce him to the
parabolani.... Who will be the best man for him to work under?’

‘The brother Theopompus is especially sober and gentle.’

Cyril shook his head laughingly.... ‘Go into the next room, my son ....
No, Peter, put him under some fiery saint, some true Boanerges, who will
talk him down, and work him to death, and show him the best and worst
of everything. Cleitophon will be the man. Now then, let me see my
engagements; five minutes for these Jews--Orestes did not choose to
frighten them: let us see whether Cyril cannot; then an hour to look
over the hospital accounts; an hour for the schools; a half-hour for the
reserved cases of distress; and another half-hour for myself; and then
divine service. See that the boy is there. Do bring in every one in
their turn, Peter mine. So much time goes in hunting for this man and
that man.... and life is too short for all that. Where are these Jews?’
and Cyril plunged into the latter half of his day’s work with that
untiring energy, self-sacrifice, and method, which commanded for him,
in spite of all suspicions of his violence, ambition, and intrigue,
the loving awe and implicit obedience of several hundred thousand human
beings.

So Philammon went out with the parabolani, a sort of organised guild
of district visitors.... And in their company he saw that afternoon
the dark side of that world, whereof the harbour-panorama had been the
bright one. In squalid misery, filth, profligacy, ignorance,
ferocity, discontent, neglected in body, house, and soul, by the civil
authorities, proving their existence only in aimless and sanguinary
riots, there they starved and rotted, heap on heap, the masses of the
old Greek population, close to the great food-exporting harbour of the
world. Among these, fiercely perhaps, and fanatically, but still among
them and for them, laboured those district visitors night and day. And
so Philammon toiled away with them, carrying food and clothing, helping
sick to the hospital, and dead to the burial; cleaning out the infected
houses--for the fever was all but perennial in those quarters--and
comforting the dying with the good news of forgiveness from above; till
the larger number had to return to evening service. He, however, was
kept by his superior, watching at a sick-bedside, and it was late at
night before he got home, and was reported to Peter the Reader as having
acquitted himself like ‘a man of God,’ as, indeed, without the least
thought of doing anything noble or self-sacrificing, he had truly done,
being a monk. And so he threw himself on a truckle-bed, in one of the
many cells which opened off a long corridor, and fell fast asleep in a
minute.

He was just weltering about in a dreary dream-jumble of Goths dancing
with district visitors, Pelagia as an angel, with peacock’s wings;
Hypatia with horns and cloven feet, riding three hippopotami at
once round the theatre; Cyril standing at an open window, cursing
frightfully, and pelting him with flower-pots; and a similar self-sown
after-crop of his day’s impressions; when he was awakened by the tramp
of hurried feet in the street outside, and shouts, which gradually, as
he became conscious, shaped themselves into cries of ‘Alexander’s Church
is on fire! Help, good Christians! Fire! Help!’

Whereat he sat up in his truckle-bed, tried to recollect where he was,
and having with some trouble succeeded, threw on his sheepskin, and
jumped up to ask the news from the deacons and monks who were hurrying
along the corridor outside.... ‘Yes, Alexander’s church was on fire;’
and down the stairs they poured, across the courtyard, and out into the
street, Peter’s tall figure serving as a standard and a rallying point.

As they rushed out through the gateway, Philammon, dazzled by the sudden
transition from the darkness within to the blaze of moon and starlight
which flooded the street, and walls, and shining roofs, hung back a
moment. That hesitation probably saved his life; for in an instant he
saw a dark figure spring out of the shadow, a long knife flashed across
his eyes, and a priest next to him sank upon the pavement with a groan,
while the assassin dashed off down the street, hotly pursued by monks
and parabolani.

Philammon, who ran like a desert ostrich, had soon outstripped all but
Peter, when several more dark figures sprang out of doorways and corners
and joined, or seem to join, the pursuit. Suddenly, however, after
running a hundred yards, they drew up opposite the mouth of a side
street; the assassin stopped also. Peter, suspecting something wrong,
slackened his pace, and caught Philammon’s arm.

‘Do you see those fellows in the shadow?’

But, before Philammon could answer, some thirty or forty men, their
daggers gleaming in the moonlight, moved out into the middle of the
street, and received the fugitives into their ranks. What was the
meaning of it? Here was a pleasant taste of the ways of the most
Christian and civilised city of the Empire!

‘Well,’ thought Philammon, ‘I have come out to see the world, and I
seem, at this rate, to be likely to see enough of it.’

Peter turned at once, and fled as quickly as he had pursued; while
Philammon, considering discretion the better part of valour, followed,
and they rejoined their party breathless.

‘There is an armed mob at the end of the street.’

‘Assassins!’ ‘Jews!’ ‘A conspiracy!’ Up rose a Babel of doubtful voices.
The foe appeared in sight, advancing stealthily, and the whole party
took to flight, led once more by Peter, who seemed determined to make
free use, in behalf of his own safety, of the long legs which nature had
given him.

Philammon followed, sulkily and unwillingly, at a foot’s pace; but he
had not gone a dozen yards when a pitiable voice at his feet called to
him--

‘Help! mercy! Do not leave me here to be murdered! I am a Christian;
indeed I am a Christian!’

Philammon stooped, and lifted from the ground a comely negro-woman,
weeping, and shivering in a few tattered remnants of clothing.

‘I ran out when they said the church was on fire,’ sobbed the poor
creature, ‘and the Jews beat and wounded me. They tore my shawl and
tunic off me before I could get away from them; and then our own people
ran over me and trod me down. And now my husband will beat me, if I ever
get home. Quick! up this side street, or we shall be murdered!’

The armed men, whosoever they were, were close on them. There was no
time to be lost; and Philammon, assuring her that he would not desert
her, hurried her up the side street which she pointed out. But the
pursuers had caught sight of them, and while the mass held on up the
main sight, three or four turned aside and gave chase. The poor negress
could only limp along, and Philammon, unarmed, looked back, and saw the
bright steel points gleaming in the moonlight, and made up his mind to
die as a monk should. Nevertheless, youth is hopeful. One chance for
life. He thrust the negress into a dark doorway, where her colour hid
her well enough, and had just time to ensconce himself behind a pillar,
when the foremost pursuer reached him. He held his breath in fearful
suspense. Should he be seen? He would not die without a struggle at
least. No! the fellow ran on, panting. But in a minute more, another
came up, saw him suddenly, and sprang aside startled. That start saved
Philammon. Quick as a cat, he leapt upon him, felled him to the earth
with a single blow, tore the dagger from his hand, and sprang to his
feet again just in time to strike his new weapon full into the third
pursuer’s face. The man put his hand to his head, and recoiled against
a fellow-ruffian, who was close on his heels. Philammon, flushed with
victory, took advantage of the confusion, and before the worthy pair
could recover, dealt them half a dozen blows which, luckily for them,
came from an unpractised hand, or the young monk might have had more
than one life to answer for. As it was, they turned and limped off,
cursing in an unknown tongue; and Philammon found himself triumphant
and alone, with the trembling negress and the prostrate ruffian, who,
stunned by the blow and the fall, lay groaning on the pavement.

It was all over in a minute.... The negress was kneeling under the
gateway, pouring out her simple thanks to Heaven for this unexpected
deliverance; and Philammon was about to kneel too, when a thought struck
him; and coolly despoiling the Jew of his shawl and sash, he handed them
over to the poor negress, considering them fairly enough as his own by
right of conquest; but, lo and behold! as she was overwhelming him with
thanks, a fresh mob poured into the street from the upper end, and
were close on them before they were aware .... A flush of terror and
despair,.... and then a burst of joy, as, by mingled moonlight and
torchlight, Philammon descried priestly robes, and in the forefront of
the battle--there being no apparent danger--Peter the Reader, who
seemed to be anxious to prevent inquiry, by beginning to talk as fast as
possible.

‘Ah, boy! Safe? The saints be praised! We gave you up for dead! Whom
have you here? A prisoner? And we have another. He ran right into our
arms up the street, and the Lord delivered him into our hand. He must
have passed you.’

‘So he did,’ said Philammon, dragging up his captive, ‘and here is his
fellow-scoundrel.’ Whereon the two worthies were speedily tied
together by the elbows; and the party marched on once more in search of
Alexander’s church, and the supposed conflagration.

Philammon looked round for the negress, but she had vanished. He was far
too much ashamed of being known to have been alone with a woman to say
anything about her. Yet he longed to see her again; an interest--even
something like an affection--had already sprung up in his heart toward
the poor simple creature whom he had delivered from death. Instead of
thinking her ungrateful for not staying to tell what he had done
for her, he was thankful to her for having saved his blushes, by
disappearing so opportunely.... And he longed to tell her so--to know
if she was hurt--to--Oh, Philammon! only four days from the Laura, and
a whole regiment of women acquaintances already! True, Providence having
sent into the world about as many women as men, it maybe difficult to
keep out of their way altogether. Perhaps, too, Providence may have
intended them to be of some use to that other sex, with whom it has so
mixed them up. Don’t argue, poor Philammon; Alexander’s church is on
fire!-forward!

And so they hurried on, a confused mass of monks and populace, with
their hapless prisoners in the centre, who, hauled, cuffed, questioned,
and cursed by twenty self-elected inquisitors at once, thought fit,
either from Jewish obstinacy or sheer bewilderment, to give no account
whatsoever of themselves.

As they turned the corner of a street, the folding-doors of a large
gateway rolled open; a long line of glittering figures poured across the
road, dropped their spear-butts on the pavement with a single rattle,
and remained motionless. The front rank of the mob recoiled; and an
awe-struck whisper ran through them.... ‘The Stationaries!’

‘Who are they?’ asked Philammon in a whisper.

‘The soldiers--the Roman soldiers,’ answered a whisperer to him.

Philammon, who was among the leaders, had recoiled too--he hardly knew
why--at that stern apparition. His next instinct was to press forward as
close as he dared.... And these were Roman soldiers!--the conquerors of
the world!--the men whose name had thrilled him from his childhood
with vague awe and admiration, dimly heard of up there in the lonely
Laura.... Roman soldiers! And here he was face to face with them at
last!

His curiosity received a sudden check, however, as he found his arm
seized by an officer, as he took him to be, from the gold ornaments on
his helmet and cuirass, who lifted his vine-stock threateningly over the
young monk’s head, and demanded--

‘What’s all this about? Why are you not quietly in your beds, you
Alexandrian rascals?’

‘Alexander’s church is on fire,’ answered Philammon, thinking the
shortest answer the wisest.

‘So much the better.’

‘And the Jews are murdering the Christians.’

‘Fight it out, then. Turn in, men, it’s only a riot.’

And the steel-clad apparition suddenly flashed round, and vanished,
trampling and jingling, into the dark jaws of the guardhouse-gate, while
the stream, its temporary barrier removed, rushed on wilder than ever.

Philammon hurried on too with them, not without a strange feeling of
disappointment. ‘Only a riot!’ Peter was chuckling to his brothers
over their cleverness in ‘having kept the prisoners in the middle, and
stopped the rascals’ mouths till they were past the guard-house.’ ‘A
fine thing to boast of,’ thought Philammon, ‘in the face of the men who
make and unmake kings and Caesars!’ ‘Only a riot!’ He, and the corps of
district visitors--whom he fancied the most august body on earth--and
Alexander’s church, Christians murdered by Jews, persecution of the
Catholic faith, and all the rest of it, was simply, then, not worth the
notice of those forty men, alone and secure in the sense of power and
discipline, among tens of thousands .... He hated them, those soldiers.
Was it because they were indifferent to the cause of which he was
inclined to think himself a not unimportant member, on the strength of
his late Samsonic defeat of Jewish persecutors? At least, he obeyed the
little porter’s advice, and ‘felt very small indeed.’

And he felt smaller still, being young and alive to ridicule, when,
at some sudden ebb or flow, wave or wavelet of the Babel sea, which
weltered up and down every street, a shrill female voice informed them
from an upper window, that Alexander’s church was not on fire at all;
that she had gone to the top of the house, as they might have gone, if
they had not been fools, etc. etc.; and that it ‘looked as safe and
as ugly as ever’; wherewith a brickbat or two having been sent up in
answer, she shut the blinds, leaving them to halt, inquire, discover
gradually and piecemeal, after the method of mobs, they had been
following the nature of mobs; that no one had seen the church on fire,
or seen any one else who had seen the same, or even seen any light in
the sky in any quarter, or knew who raised the cry; or--or--in short,
Alexander’s church was two miles off; if it was on fire, it was either
burnt down or saved by this time; if not, the night-air was, to say
the least, chilly: and, whether it was or not, there were ambuscades
of Jews--Satan only knew how strong--in every street between them and
it.... Might it not be better to secure their two prisoners, and then
ask for further orders from the archbishop? Wherewith, after the manner
of mobs, they melted off the way they came, by twos and threes, till
those of a contrary opinion began to find themselves left alone, and
having a strong dislike to Jewish daggers, were fain to follow the
stream.

With a panic or two, a cry of ‘The Jews are on us!’ and a general rush
in every direction (in which one or two, seeking shelter from the
awful nothing in neighbouring houses, were handed over to the watch
as burglars, and sent to the quarries accordingly), they reached the
Serapeium, and there found, of course, a counter-mob collected to inform
them that they had been taken in--that Alexander’s church had never
been on fire at all--that the Jews had murdered a thousand Christians
at least, though three dead bodies, including the poor priest who lay
in the house within, were all of the thousand who had yet been seen--and
that the whole Jews’ quarter was marching upon them. At which news
it was considered advisable to retreat into the archbishop’s house as
quickly as possible, barricade the doors, and prepare for a siege--a
work at which Philammon performed prodigies, tearing woodwork from the
rooms, and stones from the parapets, before it struck some of the
more sober-minded that it was as well to wait for some more decided
demonstration of attack, before incurring so heavy a carpenter’s bill of
repairs.

At last the heavy tramp of footsteps was heard coming down the street,
and every window was crowded in an instant with eager heads; while Peter
rushed downstairs to heat the large coppers, having some experience in
the defensive virtues of boiling water. The bright moon glittered on a
long line of helmets and cuirasses. Thank Heaven! it was the soldiery.

‘Are the Jews coming?’ ‘Is the city quiet?’ ‘Why did not you prevent
this villainy?’ ‘A thousand citizens murdered while you have been
snoring!’--and a volley of similar ejaculations, greeted the soldiers as
they passed, and were answered by a cool--‘To your perches, and sleep,
you noisy chickens, or we’ll set the coop on fire about your ears.’

A yell of defiance answered this polite speech, and the soldiery, who
knew perfectly well that the unarmed ecclesiastics within were not to be
trifled with, and had no ambition to die by coping-stones and hot water,
went quietly on their way.

All danger was now past; and the cackling rose jubilant, louder than
ever, and might have continued till daylight, had not a window in
the courtyard been suddenly thrown open, and the awful voice of Cyril
commanded silence.

‘Every man sleep where he can. I shall want you at daybreak. The
superiors of the parabolani are to come up to me with the two prisoners,
and the men who took them.’

In a few minutes Philammon found himself, with some twenty others, in
the great man’s presence: he was sitting at his desk, writing, quietly,
small notes on slips of paper.

‘Here is the youth who helped me to pursue the murderer, and having
outrun me, was attacked by the prisoners,’ said Peter. ‘My hands are
clean from blood, I thank the Lord!’

‘Three set on me with daggers,’ said Philammon, apologetically, ‘and I
was forced to take this one’s dagger away, and beat off the two others
with it.’

Cyril smiled, and shook his head.

‘Thou art a brave boy; but hast thou not read, “If a man smite thee on
one cheek, turn to him the other”?’

‘I could not run away, as Master Peter and the rest did.’

‘So you ran away, eh? my worthy friend?’

‘Is it not written,’ asked Peter, in his blandest tone, “If they
persecute you in one city, flee unto another”?’

Cyril smiled again. ‘And why could not you run away, boy?’

Philammon blushed scarlet, but he dared not lie. ‘There was a--a poor
black woman, wounded and trodden down, and I dare not leave her, for she
told me she was a Christian.’

‘Right, my son, right. I shall remember this. What was her name?’

‘I did not hear it.--Stay, I think she said Judith.’

‘Ah! the wife of the porter who stands at the lecture-room door, which
God confound! A devout woman, full of good works, and sorely ill-treated
by her heathen husband. Peter, thou shalt go to her to-morrow with the
physician, and see if she is in need of anything. Boy, thou hast done
well. Cyril never forgets. Now bring up those Jews. Their Rabbis were
with me two hours ago promising peace: and this is the way they
have kept their promise. So be it. The wicked is snared in his own
wickedness.’

The Jews were brought in, but kept a stubborn silence.

‘Your holiness perceives,’ said some one, ‘that they have each of them
rings of green palm-bark on their right hand.’

‘A very dangerous sign! An evident conspiracy!’ commented Peter.

‘Ah! What does that mean, you rascals? Answer me, as you value your
lives.’

‘You have no business with us: we are Jews, and none of your people,’
said one sulkily. ‘None of my people? You have murdered my people! None
of my people? Every soul in Alexandria is mine, if the kingdom of God
means anything; and you shall find it out. I shall not argue with you,
my good friends, anymore than I did with your Rabbis. Take these fellows
away, Peter, and lock them up in the fuel-cellar, and see that they
are guarded. If any man lets them go, his life shall be for the life of
them.’

And the two worthies were led out.

‘Now, my brothers, here are your orders. You will divide these notes
among yourselves, and distribute them to trusty and godly Catholics in
your districts. Wait one hour, till the city be quiet; and then start,
and raise the church. I must have thirty thousand men by sunrise.’

‘What for, your holiness?’ asked a dozen voices.

‘Read your notes. Whosoever will fight to-morrow under the banner of the
Lord, shall have free plunder of the Jews’ quarter, outrage and murder
only forbidden. As I have said it, God do so to me, and more also, if
there be a Jew left in Alexandria by to-morrow at noon. Go.’

And the staff of orderlies filed out, thanking Heaven that they had
a leader so prompt and valiant, and spent the next hour over the hall
fire, eating millet cakes, drinking bad beer, likening Cyril to Barak,
Gideon, Samson, Jephtha, Judas Maccabeus, and all the worthies of the
Old Testament, and then started on their pacific errand.

Philammon was about to follow them, when Cyril stopped him.

‘Stay, my son; you are young and rash, and do not know the city. Lie
down here and sleep in the anteroom. Three hours hence the sun rises,
and we go forth against the enemies of the Lord.’

Philammon threw himself on the floor in a corner, and slumbered like a
child, till he was awakened in the gray dawn by one of the parabolani.

‘Up, boy! and see what we can do. Cyril goes down greater than Barak the
son of Abinoam, not with ten, but with thirty thousand men at his feet!’

‘Ay, my brothers!’ said Cyril, as he passed proudly out in full
pontificals, with a gorgeous retinue of priests and deacons--‘the
Catholic Church has her organisation, her unity, her common cause, her
watchwords, such as the tyrants of the earth, in their weakness and
their divisions, may envy and tremble at, but cannot imitate. Could
Orestes raise, in three hours, thirty thousand men, who would die for
him?’

‘As we will for you!’ shouted many voices.

‘Say for the kingdom of God.’ And he passed out.

And so ended Philammon’s first day in Alexandria.



CHAPTER VI: THE NEW DIOGENES


About five o’clock the next morning, Raphael Aben-Ezra was lying in bed,
alternately yawning over a manuscript of Philo Judaeus, pulling the ears
of his huge British mastiff, watching the sparkle of the fountain in the
court outside, wondering when that lazy boy would come to tell him that
the bath was warmed, and meditating, half aloud....

‘Alas! poor me! Here I am, back again--just at the point from which I
started!.... How am I to get free from that heathen Siren? Plagues on
her! I shall end by falling in love with her.... I don’t know that I
have not got a barb of the blind boy in me already. I felt absurdly
glad the other day when that fool told me he dare not accept her modest
offer. Ha! ha! A delicious joke it would have been to have seen Orestes
bowing down to stocks and stones, and Hypatia installed in the ruins of
the Serapeium, as High Priestess of the Abomination of Desolation!. And
now.... Well I call all heaven and earth to witness, that I have fought
valiantly. I have faced naughty little Eros like a man, rod in hand.
What could a poor human being do more than try to marry her to some one
else, in hopes of sickening himself of the whole matter? Well, every
moth has its candle, and every man his destiny. But the daring of
the little fool! What huge imaginations she has! She might be another
Zenobia, now, with Orestes as Odenatus, and Raphael Aben-Ezra to play
the part of Longinus, and receive Longinus’s salary of axe or poison.
She don’t care for me; she would sacrifice me, or a thousand of me, the
cold-blooded fanatical archangel that she is, to water with our blood
the foundation of some new temple of cast rags and broken dolls.... Oh,
Raphael Aben-Ezra, what a fool you are!.... You know you are going off
as usual to her lecture, this very morning!’

At this crisis of his confessions the page entered, and announced, not
the bath, but Miriam.

The old woman, who, in virtue of her profession, had the private entry
of all fashionable chambers in Alexandria, came in hurriedly; and
instead of seating herself as usual, for a gossip, remained standing,
and motioned the boy out of the room.

‘Well my sweet mother? Sit: Ah? I see! You rascal, you have brought in
no wine for the lady. Don’t you know her little ways yet?’

‘Eos has got it at the door, of course,’ answered the boy, with a saucy
air of offended virtue.

‘Out with you, imp of Satan!’ cried Miriam. ‘This is no time for
winebibbing. Raphael Aben-Ezra, why are you lying here? Did you not
receive a note last night?’

‘A note? So I did, but I was too sleepy to read it. There it lies. Boy,
bring it here....What’s this? A scrap out of Jeremiah? “Arise, and
flee for thy life, for evil is determined against the whole house
of Israel!”--Does this come from the chief rabbi; I always took the
venerable father for a sober man.... Eh, Miriam?’

‘Fool! instead of laughing at the sacred words of the prophets, get up
and obey them. I sent you the note.’

‘Why can’t I obey them in bed? Here I am, reading hard at the Cabbala,
or Philo--who is stupider still--and what more would you have?’

The old woman, unable to restrain her impatience, literally ran at him,
gnashing her teeth, and, before he was aware, dragged him out of bed
upon the floor, where he stood meekly wondering what would come next.

‘Many thanks, mother, for having saved me the one daily torture of
life--getting out of bed by one’s own exertion.’

‘Raphael Aben-Ezra! are you so besotted with your philosophy and your
heathenry, and your laziness, and your contempt for God and man, that
you will see your nation given up for a prey, and your wealth plundered
by heathen dogs? I tell you, Cyril has sworn that God shall do so to
him, and more also, if there be a Jew left in Alexandria by to-morrow
about this time.’

‘So much the better for the Jews, then, if they are half as tired
of this noisy Pandemonium as I am. But how can I help it? Am I Queen
Esther, to go to Ahasuerus there in the prefect’s palace, and get him to
hold out the golden sceptre to me?’

‘Fool! if you had read that note last night, you might have gone and
saved us, and your name would have been handed down for ever from
generation to generation as a second Mordecai.’

‘My dear mother, Ahasuerus would have been either fast asleep, or far
too drunk to listen to me. Why did you not go yourself?’

‘Do you suppose that I would not have gone if I could? Do you fancy me
a sluggard like yourself? At the risk of my life I have got hither in
time, if there be time to save you.’

‘Well: shall I dress? What can be done now?’

‘Nothing! The streets are blockaded by Cyril’s mob--There! do you hear
the shouts and screams? They are attacking the farther part of the
quarter already.’

‘What! are they murdering them?’ asked Raphael, throwing on his pelisse.
‘Because, if it has really come to a practical joke of that kind, I
shall have the greatest pleasure in employing a counter-irritant. Here,
boy! My sword and dagger! Quick!’

‘No, the hypocrites! No blood is to be shed, they say, if we make no
resistance, and let them pillage. Cyril and his monks are there, to
prevent outrage, and so forth.... The Angel of the Lord scatter them!’

The conversation was interrupted by the rushing in of the whole
household, in an agony of terror; and Raphael, at last thoroughly
roused, went to a window which looked into the street. The thoroughfare
was full of scolding women and screaming children; while men, old and
young, looked on at the plunder of their property with true Jewish
doggedness, too prudent to resist, but too manful to complain--while
furniture came flying out of every window, and from door after door
poured a stream of rascality, carrying off money, jewels, silks, and
all the treasures which Jewish usury had accumulated during many
a generation. But unmoved amid the roaring sea of plunderers and
plundered, stood, scattered up and down, Cyril’s spiritual police,
enforcing, by a word, an obedience which the Roman soldiers could only
have compelled by hard blows of the spear-butt. There was to be no
outrage, and no outrage there was: and more than once some man in
priestly robes hurried through the crowd, leading by the hand, tenderly
enough, a lost child in search of its parents.

Raphael stood watching silently, while Miriam, who had followed him
upstairs, paced the room in an ecstasy of rage, calling vainly to him to
speak or act.

‘Let me alone, mother,’ he said, at last. ‘It will be full ten minutes
more before they pay me a visit, and in the meantime what can one do
better than watch the progress of this, the little Exodus?’

‘Not like that first one! Then we went forth with cymbals and songs to
the Red Sea triumph! Then we borrowed, every woman of her neighbour,
jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment.’

‘And now we pay them back again;.. it is but fair, after all. We ought
to have listened to Jeremiah a thousand years ago, and never gone back
again, like fools, into a country to which we were so deeply in debt.’

‘Accursed land!’ cried Miriam. ‘In an evil hour our forefathers
disobeyed the prophet; and now we reap the harvest of our sins!--Our
sons have forgotten the faith of their forefathers for the philosophy of
the Gentiles, and fill their chambers’ (with a contemptuous look round)
‘with heathen imagery; and our daughters are--Look there!’

As she spoke, a beautiful girl rushed shrieking out of an adjoining
house, followed by some half-drunk ruffian, who was clutching at the
gold chains and trinkets with which she was profusely bedecked, after
the fashion of Jewish women. The rascal had just seized with one hand
her streaming black tresses, and with the other a heavy collar of gold,
which was wound round her throat, when a priest, stepping up, laid a
quiet hand upon his shoulder. The fellow, too maddened to obey, turned,
and struck back the restraining arm...and in an instant was felled to
the earth by a young monk..

‘Touchest thou the Lord’s anointed, sacrilegious wretch?’ cried the man
of the desert, as the fellow dropped on the pavement, with his booty in
his hand.

The monk tore the gold necklace from his grasp, looked at it for a
moment with childish wonder, as a savage might at some incomprehensible
product of civilised industry, and then, spitting on it in contempt,
dashed it on the ground, and trampled it into the mud.

‘Follow the golden wedge of Achan, and the silver of Iscariot, thou root
of all evil!’ And he rushed on, yelling, ‘Down with the circumcision!
Down with the blasphemers!’--while the poor girl vanished among the
crowd.

Raphael watched him with a quaint thoughtful smile, while Miriam
shrieked aloud at the destruction of the precious trumpery.

‘The monk is right, mother. If those Christians go on upon that method,
they must beat us. It has been our ruin from the first, our fancy for
loading ourselves with the thick clay.’

‘What will you do?’ cried Miriam, clutching him by the arm.

‘What will you do?’

‘I am safe. I have a boat waiting for me on the canal at the garden
gate, and in Alexandria I stay; no Christian hound shall make old Miriam
move afoot against her will. My jewels are all buried--my girls are
sold; save what you can, and come with me!’

‘My sweet mother, why so peculiarly solicitous about my welfare, above
that of all the sons of Judah?’

‘Because--because--No, I’ll tell you that another time. But I loved your
mother, and she loved me. Come!’

Raphael relapsed into silence for a few minutes, and watched the tumult
below.

‘How those Christian priests keep their men in order! There is no use
resisting destiny. They are the strong men of the time, after all,
and the little Exodus must needs have its course. Miriam, daughter of
Jonathan--’

‘I am no man’s daughter! I have neither father nor mother, husband
nor--Call me mother again!’

‘Whatsoever I am to call you, there are jewels enough in that closet to
buy half Alexandria. Take them. I am going.’

‘With me!’

‘Out into the wide world, my dear lady. I am bored with riches. That
young savage of a monk understood them better than we Jews do. I shall
just make a virtue of necessity, and turn beggar.’

‘Beggar?’

‘Why not? Don’t argue. These scoundrels will make me one, whether I like
or not; so forth I go. There will be few leavetakings. This brute of a
dog is the only friend I have on earth; and I love her, because she has
the true old, dogged, spiteful, cunning, obstinate Maccabee spirit in
her--of which if we had a spark left in us just now, there would be no
little Exodus; eh, Bran, my beauty?’

‘You can escape with me to the prefect’s, and save the mass of your
wealth.’

‘Exactly what I don’t want to do. I hate that prefect as I hate a dead
camel, or the vulture who eats him. And to tell the truth, I am growing
a great de

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