Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds. Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompassed Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur. Above it the leaning cedars, newly-tipped with verdure, spread their peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over the soil. Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were scarlet and gold in shallows of green. Almond orchards snowed in the valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear cold water. The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with undulating vapors, smoky and illusory.
The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers. Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun.
It was late afternoon and without the cedar hedge of Gethsemane, where the ancient green wall cut off the streaming wind, was a group sitting close together on the earth.
One, much covered in garments barbarously striped, and who bestirred long meager limbs now and then, was an Arab. Next to him a Jewish husbandman from Bethesda squatted awkwardly, the length of his coarse smock troubling him, while his hide sandals had been put off his hard brown feet. His neighbor was a Damascene, and two or three others sat about two who were employed in the center of this racial miscellany.
One of these was a Greek, the ruin of a Greek, not yet thirty and bearing, in spite of the disfigurement of degradation, solitary evidences of blood and grace. Opposite him sat a Roman, in a scarlet tunic.
The two were playing dice, but the end of the game was in sight, for the neat pile of sesterces beside the Roman was growing and the Greek had staked his last on the next throw.
Presently the Greek took the tesseræ and threw them. The Roman glanced at the numbers up and smiled a little. The Greek scowled.
"The old defeat," he muttered. "Fortune perches on the standards of Rome even in a game of dice. Oh, well, we have had our day!"
The Roman stowed away the sesterces in a wallet and hung it again inside his tunic.
"Yes, you have had your day," he replied. "Marathon, Thermopylæ and Platæa—in my philosophy you can afford to lose a game of dice to a wolf-suckled Roman!"
The Greek sat still with his chin upon his breast, and the Roman, getting upon his feet, scrutinized the sluggish group of on-lookers.
His interest was not idle curiosity in the men. Such as they were to be seen cumbering the markets and streets of Jerusalem by day or by night throughout the year. They were types of that which the world calls the rabble—at once a strength and a destruction, a creature or a master, as the inclination of its manipulators is or as the call of the situation may be. Individually, it has a mind; collectively, it has not; at all times it is a thing of great potentialities overworked, and of great needs habitually ignored. That the man in scarlet should scan each one of these, as one appraises another's worth in drachmæ, was a natural proceeding, old as the impulse in the shrewd to prey upon the unwary. Out of this or that one, perhaps he could turn an odd denarius at another game of dice.
But when he looked reflectively at the west, where the broad brow of the hills was outlined against a great radiance, he calculated on the hour of remaining daylight and the distance from that point to another in Bezetha far across Jerusalem, and felt of his wallet.
It was bulky enough for one day's winnings, and entirely too bulky to be lost to some of the criminals or vagrants that would walk the night. With a motion of his hand he saluted the defeated Greek and the gaping group which sat in its place and watched him, and turned down the Mount toward Jerusalem.
To a casual observer it would appear that he was a Roman. He wore the short garments characteristic of the race, was smooth-shaven, and displayed idolatrous images on his belt, and, in disregard of Judean custom, uncovered his head. But his features under analysis were Arabic, modified, not by the solidity of Rome but by the grace of the classic Jew.
He was built on long, narrow lines, spare as a spear stuck in the sand before a dowar, but Judean flesh rounded his angles and reduced the Arabian brownness of complexion. He was strikingly handsome and tall; not imposing but elegant, modeled for symmetry of his type, not for ideality, for refinement, not for strength. His hands were delicate almost to frailty, his feet slender and daintily shod. Never a Roman walked so lightly, never a Jew so jauntily.
His presence was captivating. Naïveté or impudence, carelessness or recklessness, gravity or mockery were ever uncertain in their delineation on his face, and one gazed trying to decide and gazing was undone. Never did he reveal the perspective of a single avenue in his intricate and indirect disposition. He forwent the human respect that is given to the straight-forward man, for the excited interest which the populace pays to the elusive nature.
It was hard to name his years. He was too well-knit to be young, too supple to be old. The only undisputed evidence that he was past middle-age was not in his person but behind the affected mood in his soft black eyes. There was another nature, literally in ambush!
He had reached the gentler slopes of the Mount, when a young man dressed wholly in white approached from the north. The wayfarer walked hesitatingly, his eyes roving over the towered walls of the City of David. There were other wayfarers on Olivet besides the man in white and the man in scarlet. There were rustics and traveling Sadducees, in chairs borne by liveried servants, Pharisees with staff and scrip, marketers, shepherds, soldiers on leave and slaves on errands, men, women and children of every class or calling which might have affairs without the walls of Jerusalem. But each turned his steps in one direction, for the night was not distant and Jerusalem would shelter them all.
The hill was busy, but many took time to observe the one in white. The men he met glanced critically at his fine figure and passed; the women looked up at him from under their wimples, and down again, quickly; some of the children lagged and gazed wistfully at his face as if they wanted his notice. Even the man in scarlet, attracted by the wholesome presence of the comely young man, studied him carelessly. He was a little surprised when the youth stopped before him.
"Wilt thou tell me, brother, how I may reach the Gate of Hanaleel from this spot?" he asked. His manner was anxious and hurried, his eyes troubled.
"Thou, a son of Israel, and a stranger in the city of thy fathers?" the other commented mildly.
"The Essenes are rare visitors to Jerusalem," was the reply.
"Ah!" the other said to himself, "the bleached craven of En-Gadi. Dost thou come from the community on the Dead Sea?" he asked aloud.
"I journey thither," the Essene answered patiently. "I come from Galilee."
The man in scarlet looked a little startled and put his slender hand up to his cheek so that a finger lay along the lips. "Now, may thy haste deaden thy powers of recognition, O white brother," he hoped in his heart, "else thou seest a familiar face in me."
He lifted the other arm and pointed toward the wall of the city.
"Any of these gates will lead thee within," he said.
"Doubtless, but once within any but the one I seek, I am more lost than I am here. Wilt thou direct me?"
The man in scarlet motioned toward a splendid mass of masonry rising many cubits above the wall toward the north. "There," he said. "Go hence over the Bridge of the Red Heifer and follow along the roadway on the other side of Kedron."
As the man in white bowed his thanks, his elbow struck against an obstruction which yielded hastily. The two looked, to see the Greek who had been defeated at dice make off up the hill. The Essene caught at his pilgrim wallet which hung at his side and found it open.
"Ha! a thief!" the man in scarlet cried. "Did he rob thee?"
His quick eyes dropped to the wallet. There were many small round cylinders wrapped in linen within, evidently stacks of coin of various sizes from the little denarius to the large drachma; a handful of loose gold and several rolls of parchment which might have been bills of exchange. The Essene frowned and closed the mouth of the purse.
"A trifle is gone," he said. "He was discovered in time."
"If thou carryest this to the Temple, friend," the older man urged, "get it there to-night, else thou walkest in danger continually."
"I give thee thanks; I shall be watchful; peace to thee,"—and the young man walked swiftly away.
"Wary as the eyes of Juno!" the man in scarlet said to himself. "Essenes never make offering at the Temple; that treasure goes into the common fund of the order. Now, what a shame that the unsated maw of the Essenic treasury should swallow that and hold it uselessly when I need gold so much! Would that I had been born a good thief!"
He sauntered after the young Essene and idly kept him in sight.
"He walks like a legionary and talks like a patrician, but doubtless he hath the spirit of an ass, or he would not have let that knave of a Greek make off with so much as a lepton. I wonder if I should not seek out the thief and win his pilferings from him."
The Essene in the distance, just before he reached the Bridge of the Red Heifer, unslung his wallet and resettled the strap over his shoulder, but the purse did not reappear at his side. He had concealed it within his gown.
"I wish he were not in such uncommon haste; I might persuade him to loan it me. Money-lending is second nature to a Jew. There must be several thousand drachmæ in that wallet—enough to take me to Alexandria. I wonder if he sped so all the way from—Hercle!What an aristocrat!"—noting the Essene draw aside his robes from contact with the unclean mob at the opposite end of the causeway.
"What! do they resent it?" he exclaimed, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up by rapidly assembling numbers.
Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a mass, Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded up clambering, running people. The hurry was directed along the brook outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering hundreds, flung itself toward the north.
The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd.
But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth this demonstration. The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Hanaleel was discharging a struggling mass that instantly expanded in the open into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep. The flying body the man in scarlet believed to encompass the young Essene swept up to the circle and melted into it.
Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers, who had watched him defeat the Greek. Focalizing at the Bridge of the Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and precipitated him into its heart. Rushed toward the road on the opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast, let the mass stream by him.
When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him.
"What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe.
Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back. In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white outer garments. Then the breach closed up.
"A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the rearmost which was perfectly in the dark.
It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circumstance, unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"
Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous, was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery. Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of the jackal in man. Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this demonstration.
The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders. He had suddenly evolved an explanation—the blood of a fellow man. He turned away, not because he had revolted—he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus in Rome—but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned the particulars of the uproar. A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry, as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on the brink of Kedron. He mounted it and sat. Yes; he would wait, also, till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the ring. It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to pass untried.
The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the forward ranks. Movement which had been general throughout the interval increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing.
The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines already purpling with night. Only the glory on the summit of Moriah blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the gold of the sunset.
Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried back through Hanaleel into the city. Hardly had they disappeared before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle. The flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds. Another sort of clamor arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to disperse a crowd.
A solid core of fugitives drove through the gate beside Hanaleel and the Sheep Gate; fragments, detachments and individuals rolled down the banks into Kedron; screaming, tumbling, falling bodies fled north and south by the roadway and wherever there was a gate or a niche or a crevice it received fugitives who appeared no more. Dust arose and obscured everything but the flash of arms and armor which rived through it like lightning in a cloud. The uproar began to subside, and presently the laughter and jests of the soldiers mounted above the protest. Fainter and fainter the cries grew, fewer the sounds of flying feet, and at last, strong, harsh and biting as the clang of a sledge upon metal, the command of the centurion to fall in settled even the shouts of the soldiers.
There was the even, musical ring of whetting armor as the column filed back through Hanaleel, and silence. The man in scarlet, who had sat on his ash-heap and smiled throughout the dispersing of the mob, a royal creature enthroned and entertained by the discomfiture of the mass, suddenly realized that the obscurity, which he had expected to lift, was the shadow of night. He arose and, dusting off his scarlet skirt, moved out into the road.
At that moment, a figure moving nearer the wall passed him, walking swiftly. It was the Essene.
"Ho! a discreet youth! a cautious youth!" the man in scarlet said to himself; "profiting by experience, he waited in safety somewhere until this light-fingered rabble was dispersed. That must be a fat purse, a fat purse! And I am looking for such!"
He quickened his pace to overtake the young man and in his interest forgot the late riot. Suddenly the young Essene stopped as if he had been commanded. The man in scarlet brought up and looked.
Before them was an immense trampled dusty ring. In the falling twilight, he saw several huddled shapes, in attitudes of suffering and sorrow, kneeling together in its center over something which was stretched on the sand.
A strangling gasp attracted the older man's attention once more to the Essene. His figure seemed to shrink, his cheeks fell in. Swiftly about his lips crawled the gray pallor of one physically sick from shock to the senses. His eyes flared wide and the next instant he flew at the mourning cluster about the prostrate shape in the ring. One or two fell back under his hand, and he leaned over and looked.
A cry, heartrending in its agony, broke from his lips. He dropped to his knees and fell forward with his face in the dust. A murmur of compassion arose from the little group around him, and the man in scarlet lifted his shoulders and turned his back on the blighting spectacle of the young man's anguish.
He walked hurriedly out of the falling night on the Mount, through Hanaleel, into the lights and noise of the City of David. Soldiers on the point of closing the great gate paused to let him through.
"Comrade," he said to one, "what did they out yonder?"
"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen," was the reply.
"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen""They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen"
"They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen""They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen"
Somewhat subdued, the man in scarlet walked through the night in the City of David. After his first sensations he was discomfited.
"Now this is what comes of the irregular barbarity in Judean executions," he ruminated. "In Rome this Nazarene would have been despatched in order and his body borne away to the puticuli and no opportunity given for that painful scene outside. Doubtless I should have convinced the young man and borrowed his gold of him, by this time. Certainly, Fortune is a haughty jade when once offended. But I shall be fortunate again; by all the gods, Jewish or Gentile, I will compel her smiles!
"It would be my luck never to see him again; he will probably linger only to see this dead man buried, and go on to En-Gadi, as he said he would. It would hardly be seemly to approach him about his gold, in his unhappiness, or I would waylay him, yet. A pest on the zealots! Why did they not hold off this stoning for a day?"
Moodily occupied by his thoughts, he passed unconscious of the careless people about him. The huge tower of Antonia set on the brink of Mount Moriah frowned blackly over the street and in its shadow the idle life of the night laughed and reveled and sauntered. The woman of the city was there, the Roman soldier in armor, the alien that bowed to Brahm or Bel, the son of the slow Nile, of the Orontes and of the yellow Tiber. It was not the resort of the lowest classes, but of those that were at variance with the spirit of the city, or the times and their philosophies. Light streamed from open doorways, the wail of lyres and the jingle of castanets resounded within and without. Now and then belated carters, driving slow donkeys, would plod through the revelry—a note of relentless duty which would not be forgotten. Again, humbler folk would retreat into wagon-ways or hug the walls to permit the passage of a Sadducee and his retinue, or a decurion and his squad—rank and power asserting their inexorable prerogative.
Presently there approached the click of hoofs upon flagging. A soldier, passing through a broad shaft of light from a booth, stopped short, drew himself up and swung his short sword at present. Up the street, from lip to lip of every arms-bearing man, ran his abrupt call to attention.
A body of legionaries appeared suddenly in the ray of light—brassy shapes in burnished armor, picked for stature and bearing. Not even the plunge into blackness again broke the precision and confidence of that tread before which the world had fled as did now the mule-riders and the pedestrians of Jerusalem.
After them, the beam of light projected two horsemen into sudden view. There was the rattle and ring of saluting soldiers by the way. The radiance showed up a typical Roman in the armor of a general, but in deference to Israelitish prejudice against images, the eagle was removed from his helmet, the bosses of Titan heads from breastplate and harness. This was Vitellius, Proconsul of Syria and the shrewdest general on Cæsar's list. By his side rode Herrenius Capito, Cæsar's debt-collector, a thin-faced Roman in civilian dress, and with the ashes of age sprinkled on his hair.
The man in scarlet took one glance at the gray old countenance frowning under the sudden light of the lamp and slid into the obscurity of an open alley at hand. He did not emerge till the hoof-beats had died away.
"So thou comest in search of me, sweet Capito," he muttered, "and I am penniless. But it is comforting to know that thou hast no more hope of getting the three hundred thousand drachmæ which I owe to Cæsar, than I have of paying it!"
After a little silence, he said further to himself, with added regret:
"Now, had I that young Essene's gold, Capito would not find me in Jerusalem! O Alexandria! I must reach thee, though I turn dolphin and swim!"
He continued on his way to the north wall, where he found exit presently into Bezetha, the unwalled suburb of Jerusalem. Here the houses were comparatively new, less historic, less pretentious than those in the old city. Here were inns in plenty, relaxed order and a general absence of the racial characteristics and the influence of religion. The middle classes of Jerusalem dwelt here.
It was dark, poorly paved, and the man in scarlet laid his hand on his purse under his tunic and walked with circumspection toward a khan. It was no surprise to him to hear the sounds of struggle and outcry. He stopped to catch the direction of the conflict that he might avoid it. It came out of a street so narrow, in a district so squalid, that happiness seemed to have fled the spot. If ever the wealthy entered the place, it was to seek out human beings hungry enough to sell themselves as slaves.
The commotion centered before a hovel, a tragedy in sounds, ghastly because the night made it unembodied. The man in scarlet located it as out of his path and would have continued but for the insistent screams of a woman in the struggle. Harsh shouts attempted to cry her down, but desperation lent her strength and the suburb shuddered with her mad cries.
The man in scarlet lagged, shook his shoulders as if to throw off the influence of the appeal and finally stopped. At that moment several torches of pitch, lighted at once, threw a smoky light over the scene. The passage was obstructed by a group of men uniformly dressed, and several spectators attracted by the commotion. Assured that this was arrest and not violence, the curiosity of the man in scarlet drew him that way. At a nearer view, he saw that the aggressors were Shoterim or Temple lictors, under command of a Pharisee wearing the habiliments of a rabbi. The man in scarlet identified him as the referee in the center of the ring about the stoning. The sudden lighting of the torches convinced him that the attack had its inception in secret.
In the center of the fight was a middle-aged woman clinging desperately about the bodies of a young man and a young woman. It was the efforts of the Shoterim to tear her away and her resistance that had made the arrest violent.
Shouts and revilings told the man in scarlet the meaning of the disturbance. The ferrets of the High Priest, Jonathan, had discovered a house of Nazarenes and were taking them.
"More ill-timed zeal!" he muttered to himself. "Or let me be exact: more bloody politics!"
He had turned to leave when a figure in white, directed from the city, drove past him and through to the center of the crowd, with the irresistible force of a hurled stone. Spectators fell to the right and left before it and the man in scarlet drawing in a breath of amazement turned to see what the light had to disclose.
It was the young Essene, hardly recognizable for the distortion of deadly hate and passion on his face. There were dark stains on his garments and dust on his black hair. Every drop of blood had left his cheeks, but his eyes blazed with a light that was not good to see.
He went straight at the Pharisee. His grasp fell upon Saul's shoulder, drove in and seized upon its sinews. The startled Tarsian turned and the young Essene with bent head gazed grimly down at him. An interested silence fell over both captor and captive. The blaze in the young man's eyes reddened and flickered.
"I have been seeking thee, Saul of Tarsus," he said in a voice of deadly silkiness. "Thou hast been most zealous for the Law in Stephen's case. Look to it that thou fail not in the Law, for I shall profit by thy precept! And even as Stephen fell, so shalt thou fall; even as Stephen came unto death, so shalt thou come! Mark me, and remember!"
The words were menace made audible; it was more than a threat: it was prophecy and doom.
A tingle of admiration ran over the man in scarlet. He who could leave the bier of a murdered friend to visit vengeance on the head of the murderer was no weakling.
"A Roman, by the gods!" he exclaimed to himself. "A noble adversary! a man, by Bacchus!"
A threatening murmur arose from the spectators. But there was no responsive fury kindled in Saul's eyes. Instead he looked at Marsyas with unutterable sorrow on his face. Presently his shoulders lifted with a sigh.
"The city festereth with Nazarenes as a wound with thorns," he said to himself; aloud he called, "Joel."
The Levite materialized out of obscurity and bowed jerkily.
"Bear witness to this young man's behavior. Lictors, take him. We shall hold him for examination as a Nazarene and an apostate."
Marsyas started and his hand dropped. Plainly, he had not expected to be accused of apostasy. But the old mood asserted itself.
"This for thy slander of Stephen in the college," he said with premonitory calm when the Levite approached him, and struck with terrific force. The Levite's body shot backward and dropped heavily on the earth. The rest of the lictors precipitated themselves upon the young man, and, in desperation and in fury, the one man and the numbers fought.
Meanwhile the man in scarlet thought fast. His Roman love of defiance and war had roused in him a most compelling respect for the young Essene, but cupidity put forth swift and convincing argument even beyond the indorsement of admiration. If the Shoterim took the young man in ward, he would be executed and the treasure come into the hands of the state for disposition. In view of the fact that Herrenius Capito had traced the bankrupt to Jerusalem, Jerusalem was no longer tenantable for the bankrupt. He had to have money to escape to Alexandria and the Essene was too profitable a chance to be lost to the murdering hands of fanatics.
Excited and bent only on preventing the arrest, the man sprang into the crowd and forced his way to the Essene's side. But the next instant he also was sent reeling by a blow delivered by Marsyas in his blind resolution not to be taken without difficulty. Before the bankrupt could recover, the united force of spectators and lictors flung itself upon Marsyas.
Steadying himself, the man in scarlet urged his bruised brain to think. Half of his life for a ruse! for nothing but a ruse could save the young man, now.
Then, with a half-suppressed cry of eagerness, the bankrupt took to his heels and ran toward the city as only an Arab trained in Roman gymnasia could run.
The sentry at the gate passed him and he entered on the marble pavements of the streets for the finest exhibition of speed he had shown since he had carried off the laurel in Rome. He knew the city as a hare knows its runways. He cut through private passages, circled watchful constabulary, eluded congestions, and took the quick slopes of Jerusalem's hills as though the deep lungs of a youth supplied him.
When the broad, marble-paved street, which let in some glimpse of the starry sky upon the passer, opened between the rich residences of the Sadducees, the white luster of many burning torches lighted an area on a distant slope at its head. The running man sped on, taking the rise of Mount Zion without slackening, until he rushed upon a sentry obscured under the brooding shadow of a heavy wall.
"Halt!" The challenge of the sentry brought him up.
"Without the password, comrade," he panted. "Call the officer of the guard. And by our common quarrels in Rome do thou haste, for if I see not Vitellius and Herrenius Capito this instant I expire!"
The cry of the sentry passed from post to post until the centurion of the guard emerged from a small gate.
"One cometh without the countersign," the sentry said.
"A visitor for Vitellius and Herrenius Capito," the bankrupt explained.
"The general and his guest have retired," was the blunt reply.
"Hip! but thou art the same glib liar thou always wast, Aulus," the bankrupt laughed. "Take me into the light, and slap me with thy sword if I am frank beyond the privileges of mine acquaintance with thee!"
The gate-keeper, in response to a short word from the dubious Aulus, let down the chains with a rattle and a small side portal swung in, revealing an interior of semi-dusk.
The centurion conducted his visitor within. Torches stuck in sconces high up in the walls lighted a quadrangle of tessellated pavement, terminating distantly in banks of marble stairs of such breadth and stature that their limits were lost in the unilluminated night.
After a quick glance, the centurion started and slapped his helmet in salute to the bankrupt. The other responded with a skill and grace that could not have been assumed for the moment. The dexterity of the camp was written in the movement.
"I am expected of Capito," the bankrupt said, which was true only in a very limited sense.
"I know, and do thou follow. Thou shalt see him. Were he dead and inurned he would arise to thee."
The man in scarlet smiled a little grimly and followed his conductor out of the light up the marble heights of stairs duly set with sentinels, to a porch that even the Royal Colonnade of the Temple could not shame. A huge cresset with a jeweled hood, depending from a groining so high that its light was feeble, showed dimly the giant compound arch of the portal. An orderly, a veritable pygmy within the outline of the dark entrance, appeared and saluted.
"A visitor for the proconsul and his guest," the centurion said, passing the man in scarlet to the orderly.
He was led through a valve groaning on its granite hinges into the vestibule of Herod the Great's palace.
It was a lofty hall, nobly vaulted, lined with costly Indian onyx and florid with pagan friezes, arabesques and frescoes. Yet, though its jeweled lamps were dark and cold, its fountains still, its hangings and its carpets gone, its bloody genius held despotic sway from a shadowy throne, over the note of brute force which the Roman garrison had infused into it.
At the far end was a small carven table at which two Romans sat, a lamp and a crater of wine at their elbows, the tesseræ of a dice-game between them.
Without waiting for the orderly to speak, the man in scarlet stepped forward.
"Greeting, Vitellius. Capito, I salute you," he said. His voice was that of a composed man speaking with equals.
Vitellius turned his head toward the speaker; Capito drew up his lids and his lower jaw relaxed. Slowly then both men got upon their feet.
"By the bats of Hades—" Vitellius began.
"By the nymphs of Delphi!" Capito's aged falsetto broke in. "It is the Herod himself!"
"Herod Agrippa!" Vitellius exclaimed.
"From the faces of you," Agrippa declared, "I might have been the shade of my grandsire. But I have been hunting you. I need help. And as thou hopest to return three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar from my purse, do thou aid me in urging Vitellius to yield it, Capito."
"Help," Capito repeated.
"What manner of help?" Vitellius demanded, fixing Agrippa with a suspicious eye.
"Arrest me an Essene from the hands of Jonathan."
"Jonathan!" the proconsul exclaimed darkly.
"The High Priest, the Nasi, thy sweet and valued friend!" the Agrippa explained with amiable provoke. "He has arrested an Essene on a trifling charge of apostasy and he is my voucher before the Essenic brotherhood for a loan to repay Cæsar. I left him in the hands of the Shoterim, in Bezetha. If he be not speedily rescued, they will stone him without the walls to-morrow and my debt to Cæsar—" he drew up his shoulders and spread out his hands in a gesture highly Jewish.
Capito frowned and Vitellius glowered under his grizzled brow at Agrippa.
"It is one to me," Agrippa continued coolly, as he noted signs of dissent in the contemplation. "I am just as happy and as like to escape Cæsar's displeasure by failing to pay it, as thou wilt be, Capito, if thou failest to collect it."
Capito nervously fingered the tesseræ at his hand.
"Meanwhile," added the Herod, perching himself on the edge of the table, "the youth proceeds to Jonathan's stronghold."
Vitellius looked at Cæsar's debt-collector. "Dost thou see anything more in this than appears on the face of it?" he asked.
Capito scratched his white head. He had learned to look for ulterior motives in every move of this slippery Herod, but he was too little informed in the matter to see more than the surface.
"We—can look into it, first," he opined.
"Jonathan will not await your pleasure," Agrippa put in. "He is hurried now with the responsibility of executing enough blasphemers to save himself popular favor. The Sanhedrim may sit to-morrow, the prisoner come for trial and be executed—even more expeditiously because the Nasi expects thee to interfere, Vitellius."
The proconsul bit through an expletive. Jonathan was a thorn in his side.
"What is it you wish me to do?" he demanded.
"Arrest me this youth. The claim of the proconsul's charge will take precedence over the hieratic."
"But he has not offended—"
"Save the protest; he has; he struck me, a Roman citizen. But draw up the warrant, good Vitellius, and send a centurion after the young man. Thou canst make no error by so doing and thou canst save Capito the favor of his emperor."
Vitellius summoned a clerk and while the warrant for Marsyas' arrest was written, despatched an orderly for an officer. One of the contubernalis to Vitellius, or one of the sons of a noble family serving his apprenticeship in warfare, appeared.
"Take four," Vitellius said grimly, in compliance with Herod's demand, when the young centurion approached, "and go with this man. Arrest by superior claim the High Priest's prisoner, who shall be pointed out. Fetch him and this man back to me!"
The young centurion saluted and Agrippa assented with a nod.
"Thanks," he added nonchalantly. "Come, brother," he said to the young officer, "if we be late it may take the whole machinery of Rome to undo the work of Jonathan."
Agrippa and the Roman legionaries passed out of the Prætorium and turned directly up the slanting street toward the palace of Jonathan, which stood a little above the camp.
The Herod had lost little time and the progress of the arresting party toward the stronghold would not have been rapid with the resistance of Marsyas and the friends of the Nazarenes to retard the movement. After a quick walk of a short distance, the Roman group came upon the Temple's emissaries, entering from an intersecting street.
Saul and Joel walked a little ahead of the broken-spirited prisoners who were centered in a group of armed lictors and a hooting escort of half a hundred vagrants. The flaring torch-light shone down on bowed heads and disordered garments, and showed fugitive glints of manacles and knives.
Among them, unbroken and silent, was Marsyas, heavily shackled. He was marked with blows, but several besides the Levite Joel staggered as they walked, and Agrippa, lifting himself on tiptoe to point out his prisoner to the centurion, eyed the young man with approval.
The officer nodded abruptly and broke through the crowd. The light dropping on his shining armor instantly displayed his authority to halt the group. His command to stop elicited almost precipitate obedience. The hooting vagrants scattered.
The centurion laid his hand on Marsyas' shoulder.
"Thou art a prisoner of the proconsul," he said.
The halt and the dismayed silence caught Saul's attention. He turned back and pushed his way into the center of the circle.
"Unhand him," he said to the centurion. "He is wanted of the Sanhedrim."
The young officer smiled derisively and thrust off the hold of the apprehensive lictors. The four made way through the crowd and the officer passed Marsyas into their hands.
"Make my excuses to the Sanhedrim," the officer said sarcastically. The Pharisee glanced over the Roman's party. Then he stepped without ostentation in the centurion's way—a weak, small figure in fringes and phylactery, living up to his nature as he fronted brassy Rome.
"Show me thy warrant," he said quietly.
The centurion drew forth the parchment and flourished it. Saul took it with a murmured courtesy, and, holding it near a torch, read it carefully. Then he passed it back.
"After the proconsul hath done with this young man," he observed, "the Sanhedrim will claim him. Say this much to the proconsul. We shall wait. Peace!"
He motioned his party to proceed and the crowd moved on, leaving Marsyas in the hands of new captors.
"Back to the Prætorium," the centurion said to Agrippa.
On the way two dark figures emerged from the shadows and halted to let the soldiers pass. Agrippa peered at them intently through the gloom, and raising his arm made a peculiar gesture. Both figures approached immediately.
"Do thou fetch my civilian's dress, Silas, to the gate of the Prætorium to-morrow, early, and my umber toga broidered with silver. And thou, Eutychus, prepare our belongings so thou canst carry them and bring them also that we may proceed at once to En-Gadi. I remain at the Prætorium to-night. Be gone and fail not!"
The two men bowed and disappeared.
When the party reëntered the gates of the camp, Herod's vestibule was dark. The prisoner and Agrippa were led to the barracks and turned into a cubiculum, or sleeping-chamber. One of the four was manacled to Marsyas and the bolts shot upon them.
The soldier immediately stretched himself on the straw and, bidding the others hold their peace, fell asleep promptly.
After a long time, when the sounds from the pallet assured Agrippa that the soldier could not be easily aroused, he arose and came over to the side of the young Essene.
The torch-light for the officer of the guard, flaring on the wall without, shone through the high ventilation niche in the cell and cast a faint illumination over the dusky interior. Under the half-light the face of Marsyas looked fallen and lifeless,—his dark hair in disorder on his forehead, his shadowed eyes and slight black beard making for the increase of pallor by contrast. Agrippa looked at him a moment before the young man had noticed his approach.
"The medicine for thy hurts, young brother," he said to himself, "is only one—the comforting arms of a woman. I have had experience; I know! But if thou art an Essene that comfort is denied thee. Now, I wonder what demon-ridden Jew it was who first thought of an order of celibates!"
He drew closer and the somber eyes of the young man lighted upon him.
"So thou dost not sleep," Agrippa said in Hebrew. Marsyas' face showed a little surprise at the choice of tongue, but he answered in the same language.
"Why am I here?" he asked.
"Better here than there," Agrippa responded under his breath, indicating the direction of Jonathan's stronghold.
"Listen," he continued, "and may Morpheus plug this soldier's ears if he knows our fathers' ancient tongue. Canst see my face, brother?"
Marsyas signed his assent.
"Thou sayest thou art a Galilean," Agrippa pursued. "Look now and see if thou discoverest aught familiar in me."
Marsyas raised himself on an elbow and gazed into the Herod's face. Finally he said slowly:
"I have seen thee in Tiberias—in power—as—as prefect! Thou art Herod Agrippa!"
There was silence; the Essene's eyes filled with question and the Herod gave him time to think.
"I had thee arrested," Agrippa resumed when he believed that Marsyas' ideas had reached the point of asking what the Herod had to do with him. "To-morrow thou wilt be fined for striking me and turned loose—to Jonathan—unless thou art helped to escape."
"I understand," said Marsyas with growing light, but without enthusiasm.
"Thou seest I am virtually a prisoner here. I became so, to save thee from Jonathan."
"For me! Thou becamest a prisoner to save me?" Marsyas repeated, astounded.
"Because I need thee as much as thou needest me," was the frank admission.
"What can I do for thee that thou shouldst need me?" Marsyas asked softly, but still wondering.
"Hast—hast thou ever lacked friends so wholly that thou wast willing to purchase one?" Agrippa asked.
"I am thy grateful servant; yet I am an Essene, poor, persecuted, homeless, hungry and heartbroken. What wilt thou have of me?"
In that was more earnestness than blandishment, more appeal than offering. The young man published his helplessness and asked after the other's use of him. Agrippa was silent; after a pause Marsyas put out his hand and lifting the hem of the pagan tunic pressed it to his lips. The act could not fail to reach to the innermost of the Herod's heart. His head dropped suddenly into his hands, and the young Essene's touch rested lightly on his shoulder.
Finally Agrippa raised his head.
"Dost thou know my history, brother?" he asked.
"From the lips of others, yes; but let me hear thee."
"Thou art a just youth; nothing so outrages a slandered man as to pen his defense within his lips. Hear me, then. To be a Herod once meant to be beloved by the Cæsars. In my early childhood, after the death of my young father, I was taken to Rome by my mother and reared among princes and the sons of consuls. Best of all my friends was Drusus, Cæsar's gallant son, and we studied together, raced and gambled and feasted together, loved and hated—and fought together, and never was there a difference between us except in purse!
"While he lived, I lived as he lived, but when he died his sire drove me out of Rome because I had been the living Drusus' shadow and it stung the father that the shadow should live while the sweet substance perished.
"When Drusus died my living died with him, and when I took ship at Puteoli for Palestine I owed three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar and forty tradesmen barked about my heels.
"I had a ruined castle in Idumea. I forgot that I owned it till I was in actual want of shelter. Thither I went. But I was a young man, hopeless, and young hopelessness is harder than the hopelessness of age. I should have put an end to myself, but Cypros, my princess, prevented me by the gentle force of her love and devotion.
"She could not have balked me more thoroughly had she tied me hand and foot. I railed, but while I railed she wrote and sent a messenger, and in a little time an answer came. It was from my brother-in-law, Herod Antipas, who is tetrarch of Galilee. Cypros had besought him to help us. He wrote courteously, or else his scribe, for it is hard to reconcile that letter with the man I met, and begged me come and be his prefect over Tiberias. I went."
The prince paused and when he went on thereafter it seemed as if his account were expurgated.
"At Tyre before an hundred nobles assembled at a feast he twitted me with my poverty and boasted his charity. I tore off the prefect's badge and flung it in his face. And that same night I took the road to Antioch, my princess with me, a babe on either arm.
"The proconsul of Antioch took us in, but there was treachery against me afoot in his household, and I lost his friendship through it. His was my last refuge under roof of mine own rank. I heard recently that Alexander Lysimachus, Alabarch of Alexandria, was in Jerusalem, presenting a Gate to the Temple, and sending my wife and children to Ptolemais, I hastened hither to get a loan of him. But he had departed some days before I came. So here am I as a player of dice to win me money enough to take me back to Ptolemais. But Herrenius Capito, Cæsar's debt-collector, hath found me out."
He looked down at Marsyas' interested face.
"Let me be truthful," he corrected. "I found him. I could have flown him successfully, but for thy close straits. All that would save thee would be the interference of Rome, and I could command it at sacrifice."
Public version of Agrippa's story had enlarged much on certain phases of his adventures which he had curtailed, and these minutiæ had not been to Herod's credit. Yet, though Marsyas knew of these things, his heart stirred with great pity. His was that large nature which turns to the unfortunate whether or not his misfortune be merited. It seemed to him that the prince's fall had been too hapless for comment. But the word here and there, which suggested the prince's intercession in his behalf, stirred him.
"How shall I make back to thee thy effort in my behalf?" he asked earnestly. "Thou sayest that thou needest me; what can I do?"
"First let me know of thyself."
Marsyas relinquished his thought on Agrippa to turn painfully to his own story.
"I am Marsyas, son of Matthew, of Nazareth. He was a zealot who fought beside Judas of Galilee. I was born after his death, and at my birth my mother died, and being the last of their line, I am, and have been all my life alone. I was taken in mine infancy by the Essenic master of the school in Nazareth and reared to be an Essene. But I developed a certain aptness for learning and in later youth a certain aptness for teaching, and my master by the consent of the order, whose ward I was, designed me for the scholar-class of Essenes, which do not reside in En-Gadi but without in the world. The vows of the order were not laid upon me; they are reserved for the sober and understanding years when my instruction should be completed."
Agrippa frowned. "Art thou not a member of the brotherhood, then?" he asked.
"No, I am a neophyte, a postulant."
The Herod ran his fingers though his hair, and Marsyas went on.
"I had two friends, both older than I. One was Saul of Tarsus; one, Stephen of Galilee. Neither knew the other. Stephen was born an Hellenist, and until the coming of his Prophet, a good Jew. But when Jesus arose in Nazareth, Stephen followed Him, and, after the Nazarene was put away, he remained here in Jerusalem. When I came hither to complete mine instruction in the college, I found the synagogue aroused against him.
"Chief among the zealous in behalf of the Law is Saul of Tarsus. Him I most feared, when the rumors of Stephen's apostasy spread abroad. An evil messenger finally set Saul upon Stephen, and I pleaded with him to spare Stephen, until I could win him back to the faith. But Saul would not hear me.
"I meant to give over mine ambition to become a scholar and take Stephen into the refuge of En-Gadi—"
He stopped for control and continued presently with difficulty.
"But when I returned from Nazareth, whither I had gone to get my patrimony which the Essene master held in ward, his enemies stoned him before mine eyes!"
Stephen's death and not his own peril was the climax of his story and he ceased because his heart began to shrink under its pain.
"And this Saul of Tarsus, whom I heard you threaten over in Bezetha, mistaking your natural grief and hunger for vengeance as signs of apostasy, would stone you also," Agrippa remarked, filling in the rest of the narrative from surmise. Marsyas assented; it hurt him as much to think on Saul as it did to remember that Stephen was dead.
"It was doubtless his intent."
"Implacable enough to be Cæsar! And thou art not a member of the Essenic order—only a neophyte. That is disconcerting. Hast thou any influence with the brethren?"
"None whatever."
Perplexity sat dark on the Herod's brow. Marsyas, with his eyes on the prince's face, observed it.
"Can I not help thee?" he asked anxiously.
"I thought once that thou couldst; but thou sayest that thou hast no power with the Essenes. Now, I do not know."
"What is it thou wouldst have had me do?"
"I have said that I owe three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar. Unless I discharge it, under the Roman law I can be required to become the slave of my creditor. That I might secure intercession in thy behalf, I had to promise Capito and Vitellius that thou couldst help me to repay this sum."
"I!" Marsyas cried, sitting up.
The legionary stirred and Agrippa laid a warning finger on his lip. The two sat silent until the sleeper fell again into total unconsciousness.
"Three hundred thousand drachmæ!" Marsyas repeated. "I, to get that!"
"I knew that the Essenic brotherhood have a common treasury and that they are believed to be rich. I thought that thou couldst persuade them to lend me the sum."
Marsyas shook his head. "They are poor, poor! Their fund is not contributed in great bulk, and the little they own must be expended in hospitality and in maintaining themselves. Their treasury would be enriched by the little I bring."
"O Fortune!" Agrippa groaned aloud. "I am undone and so art thou!"
Marsyas lapsed into thought, while the Herod looked at the solid door that stood between him and liberty. He had set the subject aside as profitless and was a little irritated when Marsyas spoke again.
"What hopes hast thou in Alexandria?"
"The alabarch, Alexander Lysimachus, is my friend. He is rich; I could borrow of him."
"Take thou my gold and go thither," Marsyas offered at once.
"It is not so easy as it sounds, for the sound of it is most generous and kindly. How am I to get out of Capito's clutches, here?"
Marsyas gazed straight at Agrippa with the set eyes of one plunged into deep speculation. Then he leaned toward the prince.
"Will this gold in all truth help thee to borrow more in Alexandria?"
"I know it!"
"And then what?"
"To Rome! To imperial favor! To suzerainty over Judea!"
Marsyas laid hold on the prince's arm.
"Thou art a Herod," he said intensely. "Ambition natively should be the very breath of thy nostrils. Yet swear to me that thou wilt aspire—aye, even desperately as thy grandsire! Swear to me that thou wilt not be content to be less than a king!"
At another time, Agrippa might have found amusement in the young man's earnestness, but the cause was now his own.
"Thou tongue of my desires!" he exclaimed. "I have sworn! Being a Herod, mine oaths are not idle. I have sworn!"
"Then, let us bargain together," Marsyas said rapidly. "I have told thee my story: thou heardest my vow to-night! For my fealty, yield me thy word! As I help thee into power, help me to revenge! Promise!"
"Promise! By the beard of Abraham, I will conquer or kill anything thou markest; yield thee my last crust, and carry thee upon my back, so thou help me to Alexandria!"
"Swear it!"
Agrippa raised his right hand and swore.
The legionary roused and growled at the two to be quiet. Marsyas fell back on the straw and lay still. Agrippa made signs and urged for more discussion, but the Essene, masterful in his silence, refused to speak. Presently the Herod lay down and slept from sheer inability to engage his mind to profit otherwise.
A little after dawn the following morning, the Essene and the Herod were conducted into the vestibule of Herod the Great, for a hearing before Vitellius and Herrenius Capito. But Marsyas' offense against a Roman citizen was held in abeyance; it was Agrippa's debt to Cæsar which engaged the attention of the judges.
Vitellius was in a precarious temper and Capito looked as grim as querulous old age may. Agrippa's nonchalance was only a surface air overlaying doubts and no little trepidation. But Marsyas, white and sternly intent, was the most resolute of the four.
Capito stirred in his chair and prepared to speak, but Vitellius cut in with a point-blank demand on the young Essene.
"Dost thou know this man?" he asked, indicating Agrippa.
"I do, lord," Marsyas answered, turning his somber eyes on the legate.
"He owes three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar; he says that thou canst help him pay it; is it so?"
"It is, lord."
Agrippa's eyes were perfectly steady; it would not do to show amazement now.
"How?" was the next demand flung at the Essene.
"I can place him in the way of certain wealth," was the assured reply.
"How?"
"The noble Roman's pardon, but there are certain things an Essene may not divulge."
Agrippa's well-bred brows lifted. Was this evader and collected schemer the innocent Essene he had met on the slopes of Olivet the previous evening?
"Answer! Dost thou promise to provide the Herod with three hundred thousand drachmæ which shall be paid unto Cæsar's treasury?"
"I promise to place the prince where he will provide himself with three hundred thousand drachmæ. If he pay it not unto Cæsar, the fault shall be his, not mine."
"Will the Essenes do it?"
"It shall be done," Marsyas replied, his composure unshaken by the menace implied in the questioning.
"Capito, what thinkest thou?" Vitellius demanded.
The old collector shuffled his slippered feet, and his antique treble took on an argumentative tone.
"Cæsar wants his money, not a slave; I want the emperor's commendation, not his blame. But let us bind this young Jew to this."
Vitellius motioned to an orderly. "Send hither a notary; and let us take down this Jew's promise. Now, Herod, speak up. There are no rules of an order to bind you. Where shall you get this money?"
"Of two sources," Agrippa declared, unblushing. "From the young man himself and from the Essenes."
"If you had so many moneyers, why have you not paid your debt long ago?"
"I had not the indorsement of this young Essenic doctor to validate my note, O Vitellius," the Herod responded with equanimity.
The two Romans frowned; the clerk finished his transcription.
"Sign!" Vitellius ordered Marsyas threateningly.
Marsyas calmly wrote his name in Greek under the voucher. After him Agrippa signed the document.
"Now, listen," Vitellius began conclusively. "I believe neither of you. But for the fact that Cæsar would be burdened with a useless chattel I should let Capito foreclose upon you, Agrippa. But there is a chance that this rigid youth may be telling the truth; if he is not—" the legate closed his thin lips and let the menace of his hard eyes complete the sentence. Marsyas contemplated him, unmoved, undismayed, no less inflexible and determined.
"The punishment for his offense against you, Agrippa, is remitted. Get you gone. Capito! Follow them!"
Totally undisturbed by this sudden entanglement in a supposedly clear skein, Agrippa waved his hand and smiled.
"Many thanks, Vitellius," he said. "Would I could get my debts paid if only to deserve thy respect once more. But thy hospitality must be a little longer strained. The wolves of Jonathan wait without to lay hands on this young man. He must be passed the gates in disguise. I provided for that last night. Admit my servants, I pray thee."
"Have your way, Herod, and fortune go with you, curse you for a winsome knave," Vitellius growled.
Agrippa laughed, but there was no laughter in his eyes.
The two were led through a second hall instinct with barbaric splendors, to a small apartment where they were presently attended by two servants.
One was a slow, stolid Jew of middle-age, with stubbornness and honesty the chief characteristics of his face. The other would have won more interest from the casual observer. He was young, well-formed, but of uncertain nationality. His head was like a cocoanut set on its smaller end, and covered with thick, stiff, lusterless black hair, cut close and growing in a rounded point on his forehead. One eye was smaller than the other and the lid drooped. The fault might have given him a roguish look but for the ill-natured cut of his mouth. Both wore the brown garments of the serving-class.
When Agrippa and Marsyas stood up from the ministrations of these two, they were fit figures for a procession of patricians on the Palatine Hill. Marsyas' soiled white garments had been put off for a tunic and mantle of fine umber wool, embroidered with silver. A tallith of silk of the same color was bound with a silver cord about his forehead. Agrippa's garments were only a short white tunic of extraordinary fineness belted with woven gold, and a toga of white, edged with purple. But the prince examined Marsyas with an interested eye.
"By Kypris!" he said aloud, "and thou art to entomb thyself in En-Gadi!"
But Marsyas did not understand.
Capito awaited them when they emerged, and announced himself ready to proceed. Procedure was to be an elaborate thing. A squad of soldiery had been detailed as escort, and stood prepared in marching order; the collector's personal array of apparitors was assembled; his baggage sent forth to his pack-horses,—himself, duly arrayed after the fashion of a conventional old Roman afraid of color.
Agrippa placed himself beside the collector with an equanimity that was almost disconcerting. The old man signed his apparitors to proceed and followed with his two virtual prisoners.
Through the envelope of grief and rancor, the grave difficulties of his predicament reached Marsyas. Unless he could be rid of the surveillance of Capito, both he and the Herod were in sore straits. But Agrippa's amiable temper presaged something, and Marsyas merged the new distress with the burden of misery which bowed him.
They passed out of the simpler portions of the royal house into the state wing and emerged in the great audience-chamber.
It would have been impossible for a scion of that bloody house to pass for the first time in years through that royal chamber without comment upon it. Agrippa after crossing the threshold slackened his step and his eyes took on the luster of retrospection.
"I remember it," he said in a preoccupied way, "but only as a dream. I went this way when my father and mother fared hence to Rome!"
Capito lagged also, and Marsyas and the men following slackened their steps, until by the time the center of the vast hall was reached they paused as if by one accord.
The hall was an octagonal, faced half its height, or to the floor of its galleries, in banded agate from the Indies; from that point upward the lining was marble panels and frescoes, alternating. The galleries were supported by a series of interlaced oriental arches, rich with tracery and filigree. With these main features as groundwork, the barbaric fancy of Herod the Great threw off all restraint and reveled in magnitude, richness and display. He did not permit Greece, thearbiter elegantarium, to govern his building or his garnishment. He harkened to the Arab in him and made a bacchanal of color; he remembered his one-time poverty and debased the hauteur of gold to the humility of wood and clay and stone. He imaged Life in all its forms and crowded it into mosaics on his pavement, subjected it in the decoration of his scented wood couches, tables, taborets, weighted it with the cornices of his ceilings, the rails of his balustrades, the basins of his fountains—until he seemed to shake his scepter as despot over all the beast kind. He was a hunter, a warrior and a statesman; the instincts of all three had their representation in this, his high place. He was a voluptuary, a tyrant, and a shedder of blood; his audience-chamber told it of him. Thus, though he had crumbled to ashes forty years before, and the efforts of the world to forget him had almost succeeded, he left a portrait behind him that would endure as long as his palace stood.
The light of the Judean sun came in a harlequinade of twenty colors, but, where it fell and was reproduced, Nature had mastered the kaleidoscope and made it a glory. The immense space, peopled with graven images, yet animated with ghostly swaying of hangings, had its own shifting currents of air, drafts that were streaming winds, cool and scented with the aromatic woods of the furniture. The portals were closed, and there was no sound. Sun, wind and silence ennobled Herod's mistakes.
The four stood longer than they knew. Then Agrippa made a little sound, a sudden in-taking of the breath.
"See!" he whispered, laying a hand on Capito's shoulder and pointing with the other. "That statue!"
Following his indication, their eyes rested on the sculptured figure of a woman, cut from Parian marble. It was a drowsy image, the head fallen upon a hand, the lids drooping, the relaxation of all the muscles giving softness and pliability to the pose. So perfect was the work that the marble promised to be yielding to the touch. Some imitator of Phidias had achieved his masterpiece in this. Indeed, at first glance there was startlement for the four. A warm human flush had mantled the stone, and Marsyas' brows drew together, but he could not obey the old Essenic teaching and drop his eyes.
"A statue?" Capito asked, uncertainly taking his withered chin between thumb and forefinger.
"A statue," Agrippa assured him. "The illumination is from the batement light above. Come nearer!"
He led them to the angle in which the image stood, not more than three paces from the wall.
"It is my grandsire's queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall.
"Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity.
"He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love. They said that the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there, drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this fair marble's knees in such agony of passion and remorse and grief that life would desert him. They would come in time to find him there, stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead! And it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief after he had been borne away."
Capito shivered.
"What punishment!" he exclaimed.
"Punishment! They who curse Herod's memory could not, if they had their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!"
But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue.
"She was beautiful," he said after a silence.
"Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly. The collector's back was turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he answered with rapt eyes.
"Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden. So I saw her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her beauty usually hidden was unveiled."
"Well for thee my grandsire never knew," Agrippa put in, leaning against one of the cestophori which guarded a blank panel in the wall.
"He never knew; but I would have died before I would give over the memory of it. She was slight, willowy, with the eyes of an Attic antelope, yet braver and more commanding than any woman-eye that ever bewitched me. Her mouth—Praxiteles would have turned from Lais' lips to hers."
Agrippa's hand slid down the side of the cestophorus and fumbled a little within the edge of the molding.
"Her hair was loose," the old man went on, "the sole drapery of her bosom—a very cloud of night loomed into filaments—"