"To the Nazarene to whom this cometh:"Deliver the arrow unto the young Jew, Marsyas, who dwells among you, but is not of your number."
The pastor took up the arrow and the papyrus and arose at once.
"Verily, a sending, but it is not for us. Abide here until I deliver it to him that expects it."
He turned toward the ruined wall where Marsyas secluded himself.
The pastor knocked on the dried earth wall without the cave, and the matting was thrust aside. The young Jew stood there.
"I bring thee a message from without," the pastor said at once. "Peace and the love of Christ enter thy heart and uphold thee."
He put the arrow into the young man's hand and saluting him with the sign of the cross, went his way.
"What blind incaution," Marsyas said, after he had stared in astonishment at the things delivered him. "A message! How does he know that he does not bear to me treachery against his people, and his undoing!"
But he sat down and undid the white case.
"That is Agrippa's writing!" he declared after he had read it.
He took up the other. The writing was in Sanskrit.
"O white Brother:" it ran; "this by an arrow from the strong bow of thy lord Prince. Him I compelled. Come forth from among the Nazarenes! Deliver thyself, by nightfall, in the pure name of her whom thou lovest! Come ere that time, if thou canst, but fail not, otherwise, to be in the forefront of Flora's followers! Be prepared to possess her!
"Fail not, by all the gods!"Vasti, by the hand of Khosru, priest to Siva."
Marsyas seized the writing with both hands and sprang up; reread it with straining eyes; walked the two steps permitted him in his cave over and over again; or leaned against the earthen wall to think.
In the pure name of her whom he loved! Lydia? He felt his Essenic self dissolve in a flood of glad confusion, for the moment; instead of self-reproach, he felt more joy than he ever hoped to know in a life devoted to vengeance; instead of guilt, an uplift that separated him for an instant from even his terror for the rapture of contemplating Lydia.
Then the grave alarm that the bayadere's letter aroused possessed him. A rereading filled him with consternation. The unrevealed peril that he was to avert, the intimation that Lydia was endangered, the practically insurmountable obstacles in the way of his escape, shook him strongly in his self-control. He made no plans, for desperate conditions did not admit of formulated action. To pass outposts of half a cohort of brawny guards offered success only by a miracle, and the miraculous is not methodical.
Presently, he burst out of his burrow and tramped through the bright hours of the afternoon, cursing the sun for its deadly haste to get under the rim of the world, and dizzy with the pressure of terror and anxiety.
Near the softening hours of the latter part of the day, while the awakening revel roared louder in the distance, he stopped before the ancient temple. The great hamper stood without the heavy entrance with three little Nazarene children tying ropes to the interstices between the fibers to pull it after them like a wagon. Marsyas looked at the hamper, glanced with intent eyes at the front wall,—a duplicate, except for the entrance, of the rear one,—and then rushed away in search of Ananias, the pastor.
He found the pastor sitting outside the house that had given him refuge, cutting soles for sandals from a hide that lay by his side.
The Nazarene raised a face so kindly and interested that the young man dropped down beside him and blundered through his story, in his haste to lay the plan for escape before the old man.
"At sunset," he hurried on, "or when the night is sufficiently heavy to hide us, I can be let down in the hamper by the rear wall of the old temple—if thou wilt bid some of thy congregation to help me! I pray thee—let not thy belief deny me this help, for the life of my beloved, or mayhap her sweet womanhood, dependeth upon my escape!"
He clasped his hands, and gazed with beseeching eyes into the pastor's face. He did not permit himself to think what he would do if the old man denied him.
"It is manifest," Ananias said, after a pause for thought, "that only Nazarenes are to be confined herein. And thou, being a Jew, art here under false imprisonment. We shall not be glad to have thee suffer with us."
"Yes, yes!" Marsyas cried. "I am falsely accused, and thou wilt avert an injustice—nay, by the holy death of the prophets!" he broke off, "if I could bear you all to refuge after me, I would do it!"
"It is the spirit of Christ in thee, my son; nourish it! Yet be not distressed for our sake; He who holdeth the world in the hollow of His hand is with us."
Marsyas awaited anxiously the old man's further speech, when he lapsed into silence after his confident claim of divine protection.
"Give us the plan, my son, and we will help thee," he said at last.
Marsyas took the old man's hand and lifted it impulsively to his lips.
While yet the Serapeum was crowned with pale light, but the more squalid streets were blackening, Marsyas, led by Ananias, came to the old temple-house, and briefly unfolded his plan to three stalwart young Gentiles, who had turned their backs upon Jove and assumed the grace of Jesus in their hearts. The hamper with which the children had played all day was brought. Three troll-lines, each forty feet in length and borrowed from the fisher Nazarenes who lived along the bay, were securely knotted in three slits about the rim of the basket. Then, waiting only for the rapidly rising dusk, Marsyas, the three young Gentiles and the pastor climbed cautiously to the top of the side-wall of the old structure, and pulled up the hamper after them.
At the angle in the rear, Marsyas, who led the way, stopped. Below it was already night, and he could hear the steps of the sentries in the echoing passage. He had not planned how he should pass them after his descent, but the houses opposite were dark and he did not look for interference, if he took refuge among them.
He stepped into the hamper, and the three young men laid hold on the ropes. The pastor spread his hands in blessing over Marsyas' head, and when the sound of the sentries' footsteps was faintest, the hamper, with little sound and at cautious speed, was let down the steep wall.
It touched the sand with a grinding sound. Marsyas leaped out, jerked one of the ropes in signal and the hamper sprang aloft.
With a muttered blessing on the heads of the apostates, Marsyas leaped across the narrow street, to the shadows of the other houses. Creeping from porch to porch with the sheltering shade of overhanging roofs upon him, he passed guard after guard, until the row finally ended and the open space between him and safety on the bay showed up a line of soldiers guarding the water-front.
The distance was not great, and success thus far had made Marsyas strong. With a prayer to the God of those who help themselves, he burst from the passage into the great open of the docking and sped straight for the bay.
Instantly a howl went up, a pilum launched after him, shot over his shoulder, the rush of twenty mailed feet came in pursuit, swords, spears and axes flew and fell behind him, but panting and unfaltering he rushed straight to the edge of the wharf and dropped out of sight into the bay.
The guards came after him, and hanging over the wharf looked down for him to come up. They saw the circles of water widen and widen, grow stiller and stiller, and finally cease to move, but the head for which they looked did not rise.
Meanwhile Marsyas, native of Galilee and lover of her blue sea, arose between sleeping boats far out into the bay. He caught a chain and clung while he drew breath and rested. Not a vessel was manned; every seaman, officer and passenger had gone ashore to follow Flora.
Presently, he looked about and took his bearings. There through a darkening lane of water, a hundred feet long, he made out the ornate aplustre of Agrippa's ship.
He let himself down into the water again, and, swimming around to port, away from land, climbed by her anchor-chains and got upon deck.
The ship was wholly silent and deserted. None was there to ask why he came so unconventionally aboard.
He went to the cabin prepared for the prince's reception, and with steward keys still fast to his belt let himself in and prepared to return to Alexandria.
Marsyas had assumed pagan dress, bound a scarlet ribbon for a fillet about his head, and flung a scarlet cloak over his tunic, and so, identified with the revelers, he safely entered the city.
Of the first he met on the brilliantly lighted wharves, he inquired, as a stranger, where he should find the night's celebration. The citizens he addressed, intoxicated with revel, smote him with palm-leaves or thyrsi and haled him with them, as their fellow, seeking Flora.
They skirted the Regio Judæorum toward the northwest and swept him along toward the Serapeum. Ever the streets opened up, more brilliantly lighted, more thickly crowded, more boisterously noisy; ever the nucleus of the crowd that had encompassed him increased and thickened and spread, until he was in the heart of a hurrying multitude. Ever they shouted their indefinite anticipations, boasts of their favor with Flora, hopes that the run would be diverting, threats that were half-jocular, half in earnest. And some of them, drunk with anarchy, made hysterical, inarticulate, yelping cries, like dogs on a heated trail. And so, with their silent fellow among them, they went, started into an easy trot, and unhindered, like waters turning over a fall.
The strange, half-mad revelry did not make for reassurance in Marsyas. His unexplained fears swept over him from time to time like a chill, and an unspeakable hatred for the unwieldy host about him, as well as the protest of his caution against the quick pace they had set, moved him to separate himself from them as soon as he might.
Flora was to begin her flight from the Serapeum, but because the grove was most beautiful and the Temple most rich, the aristocrats of the city had repaired thither to separate themselves fromhoi polloi, and had builded for themselves the City of Love.
Marsyas knew that superior advantages were always for the rich man, and he, who had to be in the forefront of Flora's van, had to gather unto himself the most propitious opportunities. So while the riot of plebeians into which he had been absorbed streamed contentedly on to its own lowly place, Marsyas worked his way out of the crowd and approached the City of Love.
The glow of its lights, breaking through low-hanging branches and pillared avenues of tree-trunks, reached Marsyas with its music, its shouts and its tumult, but its inhabitants were shut away behind foliage, that their doings might be screened from the unqualified.
The young man looked here and there for a way to enter, but the cunningly extended grove reached from street to street and blocked his passage. Drawing closer he saw that a cordon of soldiers from the city garrison had been thrown around the grove for protection during revels.
At that moment, some one whispered in his ear.
"Thou art in time, white brother. Continue and fail not!"
He looked to catch a glimpse of Vasti, the bayadere, at his side. She was wrapped from head to heel in a murky red silk, like a fire-illumined tissue of smoke. He exclaimed to himself that this was no old woman, nor yet one young. There was too much lissome grace in the sinuous figure, and too much unearthly wisdom in the dark mysterious face.
An instant and she had disappeared like a spirit.
A little dazed he turned to follow his approved course, but stopped, seeing that many humbler folk who had preceded him were halted and driven away. The benefits of the grove were distinctly for those who came with a following and in chariots. The cars of the rich were constantly passing through the line of guards; the numbers were greatly increasing, and presently became congested. The shouts of the impatient waiting ones, the pawing of the horses and the calls of the slaves running hither and thither, added uproar to the lines which closed in around him, until finally he could go neither forward nor backward.
While he turned this way and that for an avenue of escape, he found that he stood beside a shell of a chariot, with Junia and Justin Classicus seated within. Classicus was not given readily to seeing people afoot, and Marsyas stepped hastily out of view. But the Roman woman had already discovered him. He saw her speak to Classicus, and, while he waited in resentment to be pointed out, Classicus leaped lightly out of the car, and, forcing his way through a crush of slaves, got up beside another, whom Marsyas saw to be Agrippa.
Then Junia leaned down to him.
"Come up; thou art safe," she said. "I will not betray thee. What was it, reason or repentance that freed thee?" Her eyes sparkled and her breath came and went quickly between her parted lips.
"An errand," he answered, "and the soldiers will not let me pass."
"An errand? Flora's errand? Nay, but thou art an Essene. Come up, I say. The soldiers must pass thee if I bid them."
With thanks on his lips he stepped in beside her and was presently driven without further interruption through the line of sentries, to the circle of abandoned chariots within. There, alighting, the young man found himself deftly thrust into the crowd by Junia to avoid meeting the proconsul or Justin Classicus. She lost herself with him, and entirely obscured from any he had ever seen before, they proceeded.
"I have delivered thee an evil charge," she said, and there was a note of regret in her voice. "Yesterday and the day before they would have been less objectionable, and seeing them hour by hour thou shouldst have become gradually accustomed to their aberration. But suddenly exposed to this night's work, thy soul will be covered with confusion."
Marsyas smiled awkwardly. The woman could not understand that nothing short of the motive that had actuated him could have moved him to follow Flora; neither did he wish her to rest under the self-blame that she had urged him.
"I do not go of mine own will, nor even thine," he answered. "I was summoned."
"What! has Flora summoned thee?" she cried, gazing at him in unfeigned astonishment. "Fie on her boldness! Only the Floras of Rome do such a thing!"
"A new evil in Rome?" he responded, smiling. "O lady, I can not go thither unless thou promise me protection!"
She laughed and waved him a warning hand.
"Behold how thou acceptest my counsel here in Alexandria! What obedience need I expect in Rome?"
Without waiting for his answer, she turned him out of the open into the grove.
No extensive vista greeted him. No lamps, only their lights were visible. No green-and-gold walled aisle led far in a straight line. The woodland screening of leaf and branch prevailed everywhere. The music, the shouts, the tumult seemed to be in another direction than the one toward which they were tending. Marsyas went uncertainly; he had been bidden to be in the forefront of Flora's van, and ahead of him was falling silence. The splendid creature at his side held her peace, and moved rapidly. Gradually, the people thinned out, and when Junia turned him into another aisle they were alone. She seemed to be conducting him away from the music and noise.
Only for a moment, he hesitated at a loss, and then with an apologetic smile, he said to her:
"We will go this way,"—and, turning at right angles, led back toward the tumult.
"Marsyas," she said, with more impatience than reproach, "and thou art an Essene! How I reproach myself!"
But he smiled uncomfortably, and kept on.
The wail of instruments, wild and discordant, the blowing of horns, the pulsation of drums, seemed suddenly to unite as they approached. Above the clamor and squeal of cymbals and pipes, voices were lifted, loud and strained as if striving to be heard above the uproar. Some of them merely shouted, most of them were singing, not one but many songs; shrieks and laughter shrilled through it all, and once in a while the musical tone of a rich throat triumphant above the noise bespoke the presence of gift with frenzy.
The tumult was not now distant, and Marsyas did not wish Junia's further aid. His search after Flora was not a thing to be published abroad. He glanced at the lights, looked about for a less circuitous route, and, with a word to her, plunged through the brake toward the revel.
Before she had thought to protest, the forefront of a procession penetrated from the side of the aisle and, streaming across, broke through the green on the other side.
The first were flamens, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, robed in the pallium and carrying the lituus—first, if the order of procession had been observed, but before them, and about them bounded a harlequinade of baboons, centaurs, goats, swine—loose, ill-fashioned disguises that only robbed their wearers of human form and did not achieve the animal semblance. Among them were slighter figures of lizards, snails on active pretty limbs, toads, beetles—glittering, sinuous things that surpassed the heavier figures in agility and boldness. After them came a great cornucopia of gold, banded with spiral garlands of roses, studded with jewels and drawn on low ivory wheels by snow-white mule-colts. Out of the shell-tinted mouth of the great horn, and luxuriously bedded on a gauze of gold cast over the flowers and fruits, was the rosy figure of a little boy, with pearly wings bound to his shoulders.
Thus Eros proceeded to Flora.
Only thus far was any semblance of order distinguishable in the procession. The wave of uproar suddenly assumed overwhelming proportions; the aisle was inundated with frenzy.
Marsyas moved forward, Junia moving with him, and the tumult drawing its bulky length across the aisle swept in now by multitudes. He was caught; Junia clung to him determinedly for a moment, but was torn away; he permitted himself to be swallowed up and pitched along by the flood.
He attracted no consecutive attention. Mænads flung themselves upon him because his cheeks were crimson and his figure notable, but other youths with glowing cheeks drew the mænads away, now and again. Satyrs, fauns and bacchantes saluted him, tumbled him, buffeted him: one snatched off his scarlet fillet and crowned him with a wreath of grape-leaves, while a second thrust a thyrsus into his hand. Some clung about his shoulders and bawled into his ear; others reached him flagons of wine and did not notice that others snatched the drink away. These things were single events that stood up out of the daze of astonishment and shock that confounded him.
The noise roared louder at every step: the thousands about him augmented. The grove opened more; the lights became more scattering and presently he found that he had been swept through another circle of chariots and outpost of soldiery into the city again. Hurriedly glancing at the buildings on each side of the street into which the procession poured, he saw a sufficient number of familiar marks to inform him that he had been borne out on the Rhacotis side of the city. Then the blood within him chilled. This half-maddened, half-murderous multitude was upon the trail of Flora, and was driving toward the settlement of the Nazarenes!
An unshakable conviction possessed him, that Lydia stood between!
Meanwhile the army of rabble joined the procession of aristocrats. From every avenue fresh multitudes poured in and added to the thousands. Except for the bounding mimes about them the flamens kept the front of the horde, following with downcast eyes the trail of yellow roses which, Marsyas now knew, led the procession.
In the midst of the gigantic hurly-burly he saw with strained eyes and a laboring heart that the light-footed goddess had made a long, deviating flight: that over and over again she doubled on her tracks, but that the detours led with deadly sureness toward the Nazarenes. Impelled now by desperation, he began to work his way toward the front.
But he had not reckoned on the immense length of the procession, nor how far he had been absorbed into the heart of it. Only when he was rushed over a slight rise in the street did he know that ahead of him for a great distance was a sea of tossing heads and moving shoulders, and on either side a compact wave wholly filled the two hundred feet of street and washed up against the walls of the houses.
The street opened up into an immense square, the last stadium which marked the limit of the Roman influence in the Egyptian settlement. Beyond that, on the water-front, were the streets of the Nazarenes!
Praying and struggling, Marsyas hardly noticed the increase of noise beginning at the front and extending back to him and passing until the wild clamor resolved itself into a stunning shout that shook Alexandria and rippled the face of the bay.
"Flora!Dea maxima!Solis filia! Give us joy; give us joy!"
The trail of roses had been broken off. Flora had been found.
But another roar went up, here and there from the great body there were cries of protest and disappointment: the voice of looters and brawlers that had been deprived of sacrificial blood. There were hisses, shouts of derision and cries to the populace to press on.
But the flamens stopped; the great concourse halted by rank and rank until the slackening and final cessation of movement imprisoned the dissenters that were resolved to go on. The main body continued its greetings to the goddess, above the cry of the dissatisfied.
At the far side of the open was a tiny squat temple, hardly more than a shrine, to Rannu, the Egyptian goddess of the harvests. On the top of the cornice with the blush lights of the City of Love upon her, stood a girl. Thus lifted into the night sky, her features could not be distinguished, and Marsyas believed that she was mummied, face and figure, in wrappings.
He continued to press forward. The small figure on the summit of the Temple stirred, turned half about and slowly raised her arms with a motion that seemed half-command, half-salute to the great expectant crowd below.
Then wing-like mists, taking into themselves the sunset flush of the fires of the City of Love, rose up and fluttered about her. Long, flaming, melon-colored tongues licked in and out of the illusion: distended convolutions of tissue tinged with rose floated and drifted above her, beside her, before her; shivering streamers of silver reached up and failed and dissolved; jagged streaks and reduplications of fiery jets stood out and up and all about her. When the clouds of pearly vapor lifted and eddied about her head, girdled her with circles or framed her with rosy wheels, the center of all this motion was distinguishable only as a snow-white spindle that whirled with dizzy rapidity. And presently it was noted that the shape was losing the mummy form, that more and more the outlines of a beautiful body were blossoming out of the impearled mists: that petaline wings opened out, fold on fold, as a rose-bud would blow, and each successive disclosure gave the entranced vision a clearer image of the dancer at the heart. Ever the motion seemed slow and stately as do all great and graceful things maintaining splendid speed; ever the crimson light from the City of Love lent its illimitable range of shade to the motion of the mists.
Below the great multitude, with its face lifted to the midnight sky, passed from uproar into silence and from silence into thunders of applause. The immense voice was the voice of admiration, for the cooling hand of wonder pressed back the crowd's passion for a let to its reason. They forgot their disappointment, their bloodthirst, their hate of the Nazarenes, and stood to marvel that the goddess burned but was not consumed.
But Marsyas, patiently working his way forward, pressed by a tall black man who was saying over and over to himself in Hindu:
"It is the bayadere dance, for the glory of Brahma! A sacrilege!"
The rest of Flora's program meanwhile was proceeding. Slowly and mightily, magnificent young athletes, for only such could drive their way through so solid a pack of humanity, were working toward the portico of the Temple. These were candidates for Flora's favor. Among them were black-eyed Roman youths with laurel around their heads; golden-haired Greeks, crowned with stephanes; lithe, bronze Egyptians with ribboned locks at the temple which were the badge of princehood. And after them came one, crowned with grape-leaves, with a thyrsus in his hand, but he had shining black curls, the silken beard and the crimson cheeks of a Jew. The eyes of this one glittered, not from excitement of fancy, but from desperate resolution and astounded recognition. The pagans were far in advance of him.
Now the crowd understood where they were bound and shouted to them; now the youths forced themselves past the cornucopia, the mimes, the flamens, and ran into the open space before the Temple. In poses characteristic of their captivation and intent, they looked up at the dancing fires and cried aloud to the goddess.
Meanwhile the morning-tinted mists whirled in a circular plane about the girl; suddenly they began to tremble and rise,—up, up until the ripple and shiver of the shaken silk took on the action and appearance of an illuminated cataract. Through it, the beautiful outlines of the dancer were distinguished, veiled as a Nereid beneath waters, leaping, running. Thousands below instinctively raised their arms to catch the figure which inevitably must leap through the inspirited cataract and over the parapet of the Temple unless the rosy element pent her within its bosom.
The flight gradually changed from a simple step into the entanglement and intricacy of a dance. No gossamer adrift on the wind was more a creature of the air, no tranced ephemera more the genius of motion. The roar of the multitude failed in a vast suspiration of surprise and bewildered delight. Flora had invented, not a new wantonness, but a new grace.
But the young men shouted: each sprang to a column which upheld the portico upon which Flora danced, and began to climb, helping themselves by the incrusted garlands of stone which ran up the pillars from base to capital. It was a contest in climbing, and the best of the contestants was not long in proving himself. He was one of the golden-haired Greeks and the multitude, for ever partizan to the strongest man, roared and thundered its encouragement to him.
He went up with an ease and swiftness almost superhuman; now, he drew himself across the outstanding corner of the architrave, and stood with delicate foothold on its molding while he reached up past the frieze and caught the cornice with his hands.
The dancer caught the flash of light on his golden stephane and wavered.
"Habet!Habet!" roared the multitude. "Evoe, Ionides!"
And Ionides, lazily lifting himself to the top of the portico, lingered a moment on one hand and knee to contemplate his prize.
The cataract sank; the flying feet halted, the glory of fire and motion was lost in lengths of silk which the dancer began hastily to wind about her head and body. Sufficiently covered to hide her face, she paused and looked to see his further move.
The Greek, with shining eyes and smiling lips, began slowly to raise himself.
Then the one with the black curls and silken beard tore himself from the foremost of the crowd and rushed toward the portico.
The dancer saw him come. She moved toward the edge of the cornice. The Greek leaped: the other below flung up his arms, but the roar of the multitude swept away the cry that came from his lips.
The dancer, eluding the triumphant Greek, rushed over the brink of the portico and dropped like a plummet entangled in gossamer into the upreached arms of Marsyas below.
Both fell like stones. But Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms, and fled up the steps through the black porch and the stone valves into the Temple of Rannu.
[Illustration: Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms (missing from book)]
Outside, the multitude, having seen Flora flout her rightful possessor, fell for a moment silent. Then, a part having but one desire to choose for itself, fell to its own choosing; but the rest, already cheated of blood and spoil, howled their disapproval, fought their way through disinterested masses in order to reach the refuge of the capricious Flora, met resistance and precipitated warfare, and in an incredibly short time, bedlam reigned in the square before the Temple of Rannu.
The public celebration of the Feast of Flora was at an end. Meanwhile there was a trail of yellow roses, beginning abruptly in the Nazarene community and leading around every household and out and on toward the west. The roses lay untouched and wilting through the night and were shoveled up and carted away by the street-cleaners the next morning. And on the summit of the Gate of the Necropolis, a painted beauty sat in jewels and flowers and little raiment, and wondered why she was not sought and found and why her followers stayed and roared before the Temple of Rannu.
As Marsyas leaped into the Temple of Rannu, a figure started up beside him. He sprang away from it in alarm, but a word in Hindu reassured him.
"It is I, Vasti."
With the bayadere following he raced through the cloyed musk of the temple toward the square of lesser darkness at the rear, which showed the exit into the court. He flung himself across the pavement of the inner inclosure and down its aisle of sphinxes, through the gate in the rear wall and out into a black passage.
Behind, the roar of the contending host of Flora followed him. Though, for a second time this day he had run with peril on his track, the threatened identification of the precious burden he bore was more terrifying than death had been at sunset.
It was a long alley, the single outlet for a jam of humble houses surrounding the temple, and it opened into a street deep in the Egyptian quarter. Though Marsyas ran splendidly, he carried no little burden, and the way was black, unpaved and treacherous. He had begun to fear that he could not reach the end before pursuers, so minded, could hem him in, when almost as if the thought had invited the actuality, he saw a figure appear at the mouth of the alley. With a furious but repressed exclamation, the unknown plunged at the Essene.
Determined to defend Lydia's identity as long as he might, Marsyas swung her behind him, and with a whisper to Vasti to hide Lydia, made ready to fight fast.
With the dim illumination of the city behind him, Marsyas was better able to see his antagonist. As the solid body projected itself at him, like a springing beast, he met it with a raised left arm and a ready right hand. Instantly the two closed and for a brief, fierce moment, fought savagely. But Marsyas discovered that he was far more agile, taller and apparently younger than his assailant, and for a space he had only to fight away the knife that glinted and darted hungrily at his throat. Then, seizing upon his antagonist's first imperfect guard, he delivered a stunning blow over the heart. The heavy body staggered, quivered and collapsed.
Expecting to find the passage before him filling with ruffians, Marsyas was astonished to see the way clear and vacant. Without waiting to catch breath Marsyas sprang back in the alley, and, whispering the bayadere's name, found Lydia and the serving-woman only a pace from the spot.
Catching Lydia up again, in spite of her protests, he was about to spring over the prostrate body that all but blocked the passage, when his eye fell upon the upturned face. The dim light of the city fell on it.
It was Flaccus!
For a single moment of surprise and bewilderment, Marsyas stood still. Then very surely it penetrated through his brain that the proconsul had recognized him at the moment of Flora's drop into his arms, and had come to capture him—or to identify the Dancing Flora!
He knew that he had not struck a fatal blow and the proconsul's knife lay near. He picked it up.
It was bloody.
Startled and aghast, he flung the weapon away, and, leaping over the unconscious Roman, fled out of the alley. A torch of pitch, burnt down to a charred knot, with a feeble flame playing over it, was set upon a staff hardly ten paces from the mouth of the passage. It was a dark street, and deserted. The roar of the populace still centered about the square of the Temple of Rannu. Marsyas turned toward the torch, and, as he ran, he saw under its sickly light the figure of a man stretched on the earth. At another step, he tripped over a second fallen body. It moved and groaned.
Marsyas put Lydia down. Carrying her through a street cumbered with prostrate men might mean bodily injury for both of them. With a reassuring word, he led her between the head of the obscured man and the feet of the one under the torch, and stumbled at his second step on a contorted shape.
Marsyas stopped, to ask himself if the deadly hand that had brought these men low might not await him and his dear charge farther on. Vasti leaned over the one under the torch. Then she sprang up.
"Come! Look!" she whispered in excitement.
Marsyas hurried to the man, and met at that instant the last conscious light in the eyes of Agrippa.
The young Essene dropped to his knees without a word, thrust his hand into the embroidered tunic and felt for the prince's heart. It beat but slowly. Vasti, meanwhile, snatched the torch from the staff and beat the charred pitch knot on the ground till the still inflammable heart broke open and ignited afresh.
By its light Marsyas examined Agrippa. Between the prince's shoulders, his hand touched chilling blood.
"Ambushed!" he said grimly. "Stabbed in the back!"
Marsyas looked at the prince's right hand. It was still clenched, and the flesh on the knuckles was abraded, the second joints swelling fast.
Vasti, with suspicion in her olive eyes, carried the torch over to the contorted shape. Then she made a sign to Marsyas. He looked. It was an Egyptian wearing the livery of Flaccus. The prince's Arabic dagger was neatly buried to the hilt in the servitor's breast. Vasti examined the second prostrate form. By her torch Marsyas saw that it was Eutychus, conscious but benumbed. His left ear, cheek and eye were swollen and black.
"It seems," said Marsyas, stanching Agrippa's wound, "that the prince disabled his own support!"
But Vasti, by deft twitches of ear and hair and threats in Hindu, significant in tone if not in speech to the charioteer, finally got Eutychus upon his feet.
"Take up the prince," she said to Marsyas. "The slave may follow or lie as he chooses. I shall attend my mistress."
Marsyas lifted the Herod and, following Vasti, hurried on again into the darkness. The bayadere made toward the sea-front, not many yards distant, sped across the wharf and over the edge apparently into the water. Marsyas, by this time ready to follow the brown woman into any extreme, plunged after her. He landed abruptly in the bottom of a punt. Lydia followed, and Eutychus, with an alacrity not expected of one who groaned so helplessly.
Vasti severed the rope that tied up the boat, and, with a strong thrust of her hands against the piling, pushed the boat away from the wharf. But she did not take up the oars. She left them to Marsyas, trained on the blue waters of Galilee.
In a moment he had pulled out into the black expanse of the bay, and, with the prince's ship in mind, rowed among the sleeping shipping.
"How came the prince in this plight?" Marsyas demanded of Eutychus.
The charioteer, with his head in his hands, groaned and murmured unintelligibly. Lydia dipped an end of the wonderful silk that enveloped her into the water and pressed the wet corner to the charioteer's temples.
Marsyas frowned blackly.
"Nay, but thou canst answer, Eutychus," he said shortly.
After further murmurings, the charioteer brought out between groans an avowal that he was completely mystified.
"How came Agrippa in the street?" Marsyas insisted.
"He was with Justin Classicus; I attended him. When Flora danced and chose her lover, and the two fled into the Temple of Rannu, the Alexandrian cried to my lord that there was another passage into the Temple, by which they could go in, or the Flora and her lover come out. And he proposed for a prank that he and the prince go thither and discover Flora and her lover. We were on the roof of a bath and could get down at once, so we ran through private passages, my lord and I, outstripping Classicus, whom the crowd swallowed. And when we got into this dark street, two fell upon us without warning and killed us both!"
"But it was Agrippa who struck that blow," Marsyas declared.
The man murmured again.
"Some one struck me," he said finally; "mayhap the prince, not knowing friend from foe in the street."
"Of a surety, this stiff old Roman took chances," Marsyas averred after thought, "with but one apparitor to aid him against Agrippa, palestræ-trained and this young charioteer! Art sure thou didst not play the craven, Eutychus?" he demanded.
"Or should I be blamed," Eutychus groaned, "when it was three against me, with the prince striking at his single defender?"
Marsyas fell silent. It was not like Agrippa to be confused under any circumstances.
He pulled up beside Agrippa's vessel, roused the watchman and had the prince and Eutychus taken aboard; but Vasti and Lydia he left in the borrowed punt, out of sight of the crew that had returned.
He followed the injured men on deck and hurriedly dressed Agrippa's wound, restored him to consciousness and left him in the charge of the captain of the vessel. He ordered one of the skilled seamen to attend Eutychus and hurried back to the women in the boat under the black shadow of the ship.
He pulled straight for the sea, rounded Eunostos point and skirting the tiny archipelagoes in the broad light of the Pharos, brought up at a small indented coast between two sandy peninsulas. Here the residence portion of Alexandria came down to the ocean. The locality was dark and wrapped in sleep.
As he lifted Lydia from the boat, Marsyas turned to Vasti.
"Why didst thou not prevent her in this thing?" he asked in Hindu.
"The white brother forgets that I am a handmaiden," she replied.
"But what if I had not come?" he persisted, growing more troubled by his perplexities.
"I had prepared a path for escape; I was armed, and watching!"
"Did—did she expect me?" he asked after silence.
"No."
Then she had done this thing for him. Oh, for the safe refuge of the alabarch's musky halls that he might harken to the sweet distress in his soul and tell her of it!
Without further event, they reached the alabarch's house and the bayadere, producing keys, let her charges into the servant's entry beneath the porch. Lydia instantly disappeared, but Vasti in obedience to a word from Marsyas conducted him through the well-beloved chambers to the corridor lined by the sleeping-rooms of the servants.
Before one, she stopped.
"Herein is the prince's other servant," she said, and quickly disappeared.
Marsyas opened the door and entering aroused Silas. With a bare explanation that the prince would sail the instant the courier got aboard, he urged the grumbling old man into activity, and went back to the alabarch's presiding-room.
He had a moment of waiting—at last a moment to think!
He realized that an extreme of some nature had been reached; all his purposes had been brought up to a climax. There was no lingering in Alexandria possible for Agrippa, wounded or well, for Marsyas knew that Flaccus had the Herod's undoing in mind. If Lydia were a Nazarene, Marsyas had now, of a surety, though all Heaven and earth intervened, to bring Saul of Tarsus to death before the Pharisee's dread hand fell upon Lydia for apostasy! For that purpose, he must go to Rome—and leave Alexandria—to return? For his love's sake? He, an Essene?
Silas came, bowed, and was dismissed to wait in the street for the moment. And still Marsyas stood. The house was silent and dark. The slumber that overtakes those relieved from a three days' strain enwrapped all under the alabarch's roof. Presently he thought of Cypros, in his search for an excuse for lingering. A lamp on the alabarch's table was ready to be lighted, and, finding the materials for fire-making in the drawer, he lighted it.
"Sweet lady," he wrote on a parchment at hand, "the winds favorable to thy lord's departure blow, and he will not awaken thee to the pain of a farewell. Be comforted, be brave, be hopeful; for when he returneth, he bringeth thee a crown. I remember my pledge to thee.
"Be thou blessed."MARSYAS."