The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe quenchless light

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe quenchless lightThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The quenchless lightAuthor: Agnes C. LautRelease date: December 19, 2022 [eBook #69587]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1924Credits: Al Haines, Howard Ross & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUENCHLESS LIGHT ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The quenchless lightAuthor: Agnes C. LautRelease date: December 19, 2022 [eBook #69587]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1924Credits: Al Haines, Howard Ross & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

Title: The quenchless light

Author: Agnes C. Laut

Release date: December 19, 2022 [eBook #69587]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1924

Credits: Al Haines, Howard Ross & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUENCHLESS LIGHT ***

[page 75]THE PRINCESS STRUCK THE TREMBLING CREATURE A BLOW ON ITS FLANK.

[page 75]

THE PRINCESS STRUCK THE TREMBLING CREATURE A BLOW ON ITS FLANK.

TheQUENCHLESS LIGHTBYAGNES C. LAUT

The

QUENCHLESS LIGHT

AGNES C. LAUT

D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BYD. APPLETON AND COMPANYCopyright, 1923, 1924, by The Pictorial Review CompanyPRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

How much is fact and how much is fiction in the narrative told here of the early struggles against fearful odds in the lives of the Disciples? And why could the life of each Disciple not be given in direct historic record?

For readers to whom these questions present themselves, answer can be given in few words.

The most cursory reading of the Gospels and Epistles makes self-evident that the writers were very much more concerned with the message than the messenger; and this was natural in an age when zealous partisans were much more eager to rally round political and religious leaders than to demonstrate the truth of the message in better living and good works and pure beliefs. It is as if the early evangelists of the Faith were determined to let the cause rest on its eternal truths rather than on the merits or frailties of the human medium through whom the truths were transmitted to humanity. It is as if the records seem to say—don’t judge the message by the frail human vessel from whom you take it. Judge it by its own effects.

Of the human events in the lives of all the Disciples and Apostles—the former, the first followers of the Living Visible Christ; the latter, evangelists, who later became followers—very little, almost nothing, is told. One finds some of the early followers first with John, the Baptist, on the Dead Sea at Jordan Ford; then with Christ in Galilee, then after the Crucifixion, in Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Babylonia, in Rome, in the cities of the Roman Road in Asia Minor, in Greece, in Thrace, in Macedonia. Connected narrative of their movements, there is none except a few chapters in the Acts on Paul’s travels from Damascus to Rome; and even in this, there are long gaps. Paul speaks of hopes to go to Spain. Did he go? We do not know, for if he did, Luke his historian, leaves no record of that trip. Peter writes a letter from Babylonia. Was he in the region of the Euphrates; or was he in Rome, writing in cypher because of the perils to the Faith from the time Rome set up Emperor Worship in all the pagan temples? Again, we do not know; for consecutive narrative from year to year, there is none; so that any attempt to give a connected life of the leaders of early Christianity would fall down from sheer lack of data; but the facts, which we possess authenticated beyond controversy by contemporary sacred and profane writers, and by recent and ancient archæological and linguistic research covering from Egypt to Ethiopia, from Ephesus to Mesopotamia—throw so much light on the early struggles of the New Faith that by taking what the modern scenario writer would call—“the spot-lights” of their activities—we can reconstruct the early lives of the leaders of the purest Faith the world has ever known.

And now how much is fact and how much is fiction in these narratives? Very little of the essential is fiction. The fiction is only the string for the jewels of Truth. A semi-secular figure, who is absolutely historic, has been chosen as the actor. The actor’s experiences are taken from real life and actual fact. The reaction of the experiences on the actor’s personality may be called imaginary; but they are such as similar experiences would have been on you, or me to-day; and each action is chosen to throw a flash light on some era in the Disciples’ and Apostles’ lives, which is known and proved and authenticated in history, archæology and the documents now coming so richly to light, owing to better mastery of ancient script. In this way, we can get a picture of the heroes and heroines of the early days, who kept the Faith for us. We can get a picture of them as living, struggling, heroic, dauntless men and women, and not the shadowy figures of half myth, half fairy stories, with which we have too often enveloped the keepers of the ark of the covenant of the Faith.

I have referred to youth seeking light, where many of the old school accuse them of thoughtlessly seeking only pleasure. I consider this a libel on modern youth.

It is in the hope of showing the verity of the heroic lives in the early days of the Faith, that I have planned these records. It is in the hope of showing the keeping of that Faith as the supremely best vocation for youth that I have tried to dig out the unknown, historic facts bringing us the Faith and clothe them in flesh and blood. If the stories send back with fresh eyes readers to the old records, their aim is fulfilled, and all the errors, I pre-claim as my own. The truths, themselves, are eternally old as they are eternally young.

A. C. L.

Wassaic, Harlem RoadNew York

Wassaic, Harlem Road

New York

CONTENTS

STORIES OF THE APOSTLES’ LIVES IN THEIR DAUNTLESSSTRUGGLE TO ESTABLISH THE NEW FAITH IN A DYING WORLD

STORIES OF THE APOSTLES’ LIVES IN THEIR DAUNTLESS

STRUGGLE TO ESTABLISH THE NEW FAITH IN A DYING WORLD

BE GLAD1“Be glad! Be glad!” I sing!The sun rolls round the ringOf law! His beams outflingLike birds of song on wing.2Be glad the sun is bright—Be glad the sun is light—Be glad the law is right—Tho’ truth we learn through pain—Be glad the darkest nightRolls round to light again.3Our sin is but a sleepOut from the vasty deepOf Death’s eternal KeepFor God, to Whom we creep.4Breast forward! Shout the cryOf Joy, of Life, on high!To sadness give the lie!Ten-thousand spheres give voiceThe rivers racing by—The chorus join—Rejoice!5Mistake not carcass pains—They are your growing gainsOf Soul on Self, ere wanesThe Sun; and through the lanesOf the Far Golden WestYou pass to your long rest,O Warrior Soul; where shadeAnd dark by that sword bladeOf Light are cleft from youAnd never more pursue:The shadows cleft and reftBy HimWho guards the Tree of LifeFrom snatching hands of strifeElohim!And you pass to your restIn the all Golden WestWhere Sun sinks never moreAnd Light far to the foreSings with ten-thousand spheres—Give voice, Rejoice, Rejoice—Again, I say, Rejoice!A. C. L.

BE GLAD

“Be glad! Be glad!” I sing!

The sun rolls round the ring

Of law! His beams outfling

Like birds of song on wing.

Be glad the sun is bright—

Be glad the sun is light—

Be glad the law is right—

Tho’ truth we learn through pain—

Be glad the darkest night

Rolls round to light again.

Our sin is but a sleep

Out from the vasty deep

Of Death’s eternal Keep

For God, to Whom we creep.

Breast forward! Shout the cry

Of Joy, of Life, on high!

To sadness give the lie!

Ten-thousand spheres give voice

The rivers racing by—

The chorus join—Rejoice!

Mistake not carcass pains—

They are your growing gains

Of Soul on Self, ere wanes

The Sun; and through the lanes

Of the Far Golden West

You pass to your long rest,

O Warrior Soul; where shade

And dark by that sword blade

Of Light are cleft from you

And never more pursue:

The shadows cleft and reft

By Him

Who guards the Tree of Life

From snatching hands of strife

Elohim!

And you pass to your rest

In the all Golden West

Where Sun sinks never more

And Light far to the fore

Sings with ten-thousand spheres—

Give voice, Rejoice, Rejoice—

Again, I say, Rejoice!

A. C. L.

TheQUENCHLESS LIGHT

The

QUENCHLESS LIGHT

CHAPTER INEITHER BOND NOR FREE

The old Idumean soldier of the Prætorian Guard sat on the stone bench in front of his prisoner’s hut on the canal road to Rome and listened to the drunken songs coming from the bargemen at the place called the Three Taverns.

It was a fair evening in spring. Frogs piped from the marshes. Oleander and apricot bloom drugged the night with dreams. The sun hung over the far sea in a warrior shield, and the dust from the chariot wheels filtered the air with powdered gold.

The Spring Festival was over. The corn ships from Egypt had come in to Naples on time for the free gifts to peasant and slave. All Rome seemed out in holiday attire, on foot, on barge, on horseback, or in chariot, either going home to the hill towns, or down to the villas by the sea. The plodding peasants and slaves had their little bags of free corn and goatskins of wine flung over their shoulders, and were followed by their wives and their children as they turned off up to the hills, where their bonfires were already aglow with flamy eyes in the blue shadows of the mountains, for all-night revels.

On the canal and its paved road passed an endless procession of the great and the rich. Litters, palanquins, chairs, with black Nubian slaves between the poles, went surging past with the patter of the runners’ bare feet on the pavement and the glimpse of painted face or jeweled, pointed hand, when the breeze blew the silk curtains from the latticed windows. Barges, with black-faced slaves chained to the iron rowlocks and gayly clad men and women lolling on the ivory benches beneath awnings and pennants of white, red and gold, went gliding down the canal with a drip of water from the oars colored in the dusty air like a rainbow. Then there would be the sharp ring of iron-shod hoofs over the cobblestones—a centurion with his hundred horsemen riding in rhythm as one man, their three-edged lances aslant, would gallop seaward, followed by the whirl of gold-rimmed chariot wheels, when some general or senator went flashing past to take his pastime for the night down in his grand villa by the sea.

The old Idumean soldier of the Prætorian Guard glanced in the hut to see that all was well with the prisoner inside, glanced toward the Three Taverns, whence came louder songs and wilder revels, loosened his metal headpiece, laid the helmet on the stone bench beside him, and, with another glance up and down the thronged road, raised a bronze tankard of wine and drained it to the lees. Smacking his lips, he set it down and began eating some bread and cheese, when the revels in the Three Taverns rose to the tumult of a noisy brawl. A figure darted out of the dense road crowds, running like a deer, pursued by a rabble of drunken bargemen armed with pikes.

The fugitive dashed along the stone parapet of the canal, looking wildly to right and left, frantic for a way of escape. Then the figure dived into the thronged road, as if the crowd would afford best hiding, in and out among the plodding peasants, who scattered from the road in panic, with the bargemen in full cry behind shouting, “Stop him!—stop him!—slave!—slave!—runaway slave!”

The old Idumean guard had sprung up with sword in his right hand for a slash at the flying figure, when a great hue and cry rent the confusion.

“Make way—make way—the Emperor!” and a centurion band galloped through the dust, clearing the road with their long lances.

There was a flash of gold-rimmed chariot wheels with flying horses in a blur. There was the figure of a youthful man with a bare head and shaved face, holding the reins far out as charioteers drive; and Nero’s royal equipage had passed in a smoke of dust with a great shout from the barge travelers, who clapped their hands and rose and waved their flags. The fleeing figure, the pursuing bargemen, and the drunken rabble had melted; and a little form crumpled up in the doorway of the prison hut, panting as if its lungs would burst.

The old Prætorian guard stood motionless, sword in hand.

The pursuing rabble had disappeared back to the drunken revels in the Three Taverns.

The old Idumean drove his sword back in its scabbard with a clank.

Then he surveyed the figure lying prone at his feet.

A thin voice called softly from the dark of the prison hut: “Who is there, my Julius? My eyes grow poor. I cannot see in this light. I thought I heard some one running in distress.”

“Nothing—nothing—Master! ’Twas only that madman Emperor of ours passed in his mad race with his proselyte Jewess Queen. You heard only the knaves of the Three Taverns noisy in their cups.”

The crumpled figure had not looked up, but lay panting on its face. A green-and-white turban, such as mountaineers wear, had fallen off. The hair was gold as the golden light of the sunset and hung in unshorn curls about the neck. There were the sky-blue jacket of the Asiatic Greeks, the scarlet trousers and pointed red soft kid sandals of a page; but the garments were torn as if snatched by the pack of human wolves.

The burly Idumean guard smiled till his teeth shone like ivory tusks through his grizzled beard.

“No runaway this, but some grandam’s lackey,” he smiled. “Is it boy or girl?”

He touched the prone, panting figure with his boot. The form did not rise. It crouched upon its knees, and, with face hidden in hands, bowed the head at the soldier’s feet.

An evil-faced old woman with bleared eyes and wiry, disarranged gray hair came swaying drunkenly up from the Three Taverns and paused, peering.

“Off out of this, harpy, snake of the dirt—sniff earth!” the soldier clanked his scabbard against the metal of his leg greaves, “back to your wine-shop den. I’ll question you later of this! We’ll have none of you here—” and the leering woman vanished in the gathering dusk.

The soldier sat down on his stone bench.

“Up—boy or girl, whichever you are—help me unbuckle my breastplate and greaves!”

The figure sprang up with the nimbleness of youth. The eyes were blue with the terror of a frightened girl, the cheeks were burned with the tan of a hillside grape, and the lips were fine and full as the caressed lips of a child. The long, slim hands had slid off the metal breastplate of the Prætorian, and were unbuckling the greaves of an outstretched leg, when the soldier’s great hand closed on the slim wrist and twisted the palm upward.

“No slave you! No callus here! No gyve marks on the wrists! You’ve never worked among the galley slaves—my little runaway! Thighs too thin and shoulders too slim for these foreign swine we bring to Rome in droves. Where do you come from, young one?”

“From the mountains of Lebanon, my Lord Julius,” answered the downcast face.

The Idumean gave a start. “How know you the Romans call me Julius?” he sharply asked. “I’m an Idumean of Herod the Great’s Guard.”

“Because you were commander on the Alexandrian corn ship that carried all the Jewish prisoners wrecked at Malta,” answered a trembling voice in the falsetto between youth and man.

“You were not among the prisoners, young one—nor sailors either! I recall them—to a man. I’ll test your truth. Mind your tongue! Describe the ship, the passengers, the prisoners.”

“I took ship at Fair Havens, Crete. I came down from Phrygia. You remember the Prophet, who was a prisoner from Cæsarea, wanted you to tarry there for the winter?”

“By Jupiter, I do; and now I wish I had, for I’d be back in Idumea, leading our General Vespasian’s cohorts if I hadn’t wrecked that accursed corn ship, and not be cooling my heels here, waiting the trial of these Jewish fanatics—what next? Describe what next—the ship?”

“The ship had a golden goose at the stern. It was full of Egyptian corn to the rowers’ benches. She was deep as she was broad, and long as from here to the Three Taverns—”

“Go on! You guess well and may lie better—all corn ships are the same—”

“She had flaming pennants and huge iron anchors and two monstrous oars as paddles that you used as rudders, and the pilot at the helm was a bald-headed old man—”

“They all are—these Greeks—from wearing caps so tight. Any bargeman at the Taverns could have told you that. Go on—”

“And she had only one little boat astern, that almost swamped in the mountain waves; and when the northeaster struck her you were afraid of being driven to Africa, and cut the great mainmast and threw her overboard, and drifted for fourteen days, four hundred miles; and when the hull sprang a leak and strained to split apart you frapped her round and round with great cables and trussed her up as cooks tie up the legs of a fowl! And when the soldiers would have sprung into the little boat, you cut her adrift; and when you would have slain the prisoners to prevent escape, and slain yourself to avoid punishment for the loss, it was the Prophet, who is the prisoner in your hut there, stopped your hand and foretold you not a soul would lose his life. Then you cast the cargo overboard.

“No stars, no sun we saw for fourteen days, only the clouds and the pelting rain, and fogs so thick a sword could cut them. When the breakers and the surf roared ahead, you heaved and heaved and heaved the lead, and knew we were driving straight ashore to wreck in the breakers, and you cast four great iron anchors out astern to hold her back; but they only combed the fine sand as a housekeeper’s knife cuts dough. The shore of Malta Bay was soft as paste. The pumps you set to work; but she settled on her prow, like a swine’s snout in mud, with her goose-beaked stern, high in the crash of waves, breaking to splinters—”

“Stop!” cried the Idumean. “I’ll test your truth right there! The bargemen of the Taverns might have told you all the rest. When the ship broke and the sailors and the prisoners plunged over in the pelting dark to swim for it, what said the Prophet, who is my prisoner, then?”

“When you could not look the wind in the eye, my Lord Julius, the Prophet bade you be of good cheer and thanked his strange Judean God, whom he called Christus, that he was reaching Rome.”

“By Jupiter, child,” cried the guard, with a crash of his sword on the stone bench, “you have spoken truth! What next? Be careful how you answer—your life hangs on it if you are slave! It is death to harbor a runaway in Roman law—”

“I know not what next, my Lord Julius; for Publius, the Governor of Malta, took all your shipwrecked crew in, and you tarried to come by theCastor and Polluxon to Neapolis (Naples) while I took secret passage on a fishing vessel and reached Rome first.”

The Idumean then knew the youth spoke truth; but not all the truth—what more? Here was a lad of noble birth and clad in a page’s garments, caught and held and hounded by the harpies of the wine shops amid the rascal loafers of the underworld—lost in the gutters of Rome for two full years. Whose son was he and why was he here?

The old guard’s manner changed. Could he find the boy’s parents there might be money in it—honest money—not the kidnapper’s ransom for which the knavish criminals of the Three Taverns had tried to steal him; but the old soldier knew he must proceed cautiously. No gain to frighten a startled bird that had fallen in your hand; a gift of gold from the gods. Good money from a good father somewhere back in Grecian Asia could he but win the lad’s trust and get his story true, and save some royal youth from those sharp-taloned hawks of the wine shops.

He bade the little stranger sit down on the bench.

“The wine in the tankard there I drained; but here’s bread and cheese—eat! How does that compare with the bread and cheese of your Lebanon herds?”

The lad ate ravenously. The guard went inside the hut and brought out fresh wine.

“The cheese is not so white as our goat curds; but the bread is like pearls after Rome’s slave fare.”

The old Idumean pricked up his ears. “Slave fare!” Then the boy had been held by some one in Rome. The guard’s caution redoubled, to which he added courtesy.

The spring frogs piped from the marshes. Last snatches of bird notes came from the oleander and acacia groves in front of the villas on the far side of the canal. A cooling breeze came down from the hills where the festive bonfires now winked a flamy eye. Only a few barges glided down the waters of the canal. The traffic of the paved road had quieted to an occasional soldier-tread echoing iron on the stones, or the barefoot patter of a hurrying furtive slave, or the loud laughter of lewd women, and louder disputes of the bargemen in the lodging houses.

“What brought you here?” quietly asked the guard.

“To see the sights of Rome—”

“And I’ll warrant you’ve seen enough of them. Have you seen the gladiators?”

“Their blood sickened me,” answered the lad. “The narrow streets choked me. I could not breathe their yellow air after our Lebanon sunshine. These marshes send up a yellow stench; and the lodging houses stank; and your freedmen loafers are night demons! I’d give all Rome for one night back in Daphne’s Gardens at Antioch, or down by the sea at Cæsarea. Your iron-shod hoofs keep me from sleep. I’d give all Nero’s Empire to hear the padded tread of our camels over the turfs where the caravans of Damascus and Chaldea meet!”

The Idumean pondered that. He must, then, be the son of some Damascus or Grecian merchant in Asia. Good money and plenty of it in those iron chests!

“Know you the ‘Camel Song’ of the sand rovers of Arabia?” he asked.

In the starlight he saw tears spring to the long-lashed blue eyes.

Sweet to mine ears are the soundsOf thy tinkling bells, O my camel!

Sweet to mine ears are the sounds

Of thy tinkling bells, O my camel!

“And, oh, how the singing sands made melody, my Lord, when the hot winds drove them like sheets of snow!”

“Aye, that they do,” returned the old Idumean, “and I would I were where I could hear them sing instead of cooling my heels in Rome waiting for this crazy Prophet to get his head chopped! Much good that will do!” The old man’s manner warmed to desert memories of his native land.

“I’ll befriend you. You can stay here. The Prophet needs some one to care for him and cook his meals. He’s growing old. His sight is fading fast. I’ve grown tired of nightly sleeping chained to the arm of a prisoner you could not bribe to run away, while the Emperor takes his pleasure and puts off the acquittal of a man Agrippa wrote was innocent, all because his wife plays the convert to Jerusalem Jews to get a revenue for protecting them, and hates this new sect of Jews that call themselves Christians. You could not pay this prisoner to escape, though fewer and fewer friends come to see him every day. They know the Empress is their enemy and may work Nero to some fresh madness any day. If it were not I value my own head, I’d sometimes believe him myself; but no head of mine for these mad zealots! It takes the iron hand of a Herod to beat out the flame of their sedition, and not the gentle pleading of young Agrippa to bring them to their senses! When the Prophet gets his pardon, if he is wise he’ll haste to Spain and never set foot in Rome or Jerusalem again.”

A second draft of wine—for the mountain lad had not touched the fresh tankard—had loosened the old soldier’s tongue. “I mind when I served Herod’s son as a lad like you at Cæsarea and won my freedom in the great gladiatorial combat in the theater, where the sands swam in blood to the knees, with Agrippa the Great sitting clad in his mail of silver, before the owl flew over and brought him ill-omens so that he fell down dead—”

“What?” interrupted the boy—“were you once a slave, too, my Lord Julius?”

“Too,” noted the old Idumean. The softened manner hardened. Was he a slave after all? “What did the harpies of the wine shops want of you? A lad clad in Damascus silks would not touch these sows of Rome’s gutters.”

The boy answered eagerly. “They said the Emperor would pass in his chariot to-night; and the Empress Poppæa was to go down to the sea in her ivory barge. They meant to strip me, throw me in the water, rescue me, and offer me for sale as her barge passed—”

The old guard laughed so harshly that all his ivory teeth gleamed ugly as a boar’s tusks. “And I’ll warrant if ever she saw your milk-white mountain skin stripped, they would have made the sale at three times a slave’s price. There is more in this—there is more in this. Why did you leave your mountains of Lebanon?”

“I did not,” hotly protested the baited boy, becoming frightened at the changed manner of the Idumean. “When Felix cleared the robbers out of Galilee, I was held for ransom in their caves. They said we mountaineers were robbers. We never were. We are shepherds; but I was caught in my father’s caravan. He was the great sheik of the road from Damascus to the East; and Felix gave me to young Agrippa for a toy, a plaything. I was a page to the Princess Bernice when your prisoner Prophet in there made his plea before Agrippa the Young to come to Rome and prove his case; but when the Princess Bernice was sent to Cilicia to marry that old man there, and still the evil tongues about her and her brother—”

The boy paused in confusion, blushing red as a girl. The Idumean grasped his wrist. “Go on—the truth—or I’ll have you torn limb from limb by the tigers in the arena. What of that night monster, Bernice, with the snaky Herod blood in her veins?”

The boy cried out with the pain of the viselike grasp. “The Princess bade me not to fear to come to Rome, where she would come when she had shaved her head and paid a vow in Jerusalem—”

“Where she is now, and all Rome laughing at the pretext,” the old Idumean loosened his grasp. “Where she is now, to slip her old husband and throw her net over Titus, our General Vespasian’s son. I’ll warrant it will be a net of air she’ll weave; the spider maid will throw her wiles on the next poor fly! Did the King Agrippa’s sister send you to Rome? Have a care how you answer that!”

“No, my Lord Julius, the King, her brother Agrippa, handed me to a Grecian merchant in Colossé; but with the gold his sister gave me I ran away and took ship to Rome from Crete.”

A curious, terrible crafty change had come over the guard. No wild boar of the desert was he now, but crafty hunter stalking human prey in Rome’s underworld. “Young one—I have no love for these seditious Judeans; but I’ll befriend you because I have given you a Roman’s pledge. Here’s my right hand as pledge no Roman ever broke. Had I lost my prisoners it would have cost my head; but when you go into the Prophet there, see you do not bleat like one of your long-eared mountain goats! Blastus, Herod’s old chamberlain, is friend of his; so is Manæn, Herod’s foster-brother, and Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward! Keep yourself out of sight in the inner room when strangers call; for some of Cæsar’s household also come here, whether to spy or believe, how do I know? But how did the knaves and body snatchers of the Three Taverns snare you?”

“I was coming out to seek the young scribe Timothy—I saw him once and helped him carry the Prophet in, when he was mobbed and stoned and left for dead in Lystra—I thought he’d help me back to my people!”

The Idumean rose impatiently.

“That spider maid! The vixen with Herod’s snaky blood! Go inside! I’ll lock the door! Prepare the Prophet his supper. I’ll to the Three Taverns to ferret this. Remember if you try to run away—there is no escape from Roman power in all the known world from Gaul to the Ganges; but I see one rich way of escape to fortune for you, and money for me to make me rich, if Bernice ever cast her eyes at you—might save young Titus, son of our General, falling a victim to her wiles! Go in, I say, and keep your tongue from blabbing—or I’ll cut it out with my dagger! Princess Bernice! Titus’ mistress! By Jupiter, ’tis my lucky day at last and I’ll make offerings to Fortune,” he muttered, striding off.

The heart of the frightened boy almost stopped. He seemed to have jumped from danger close to death or torture. What had he told, or not told, that made him, a friendless Grecian boy in Imperial Rome, of great money value to the Idumean guard the minute Bernice’s name was mentioned? Why had the rough soldier called the young princess a “night monster,” “a spider maid,” “a vixen with snaky blood,” “a nymph” aiming a net at Titus, the son of the Roman General in Asia? Why should a girl princess not flee one old husband, married to silence evil tongues, and seek a younger mate in the General’s son? Wise, wise as seer or prophet is the intuition of youth; but stronger than the breastplate of Imperial Rome the innocence of youth; for the boy had not told all the truth. Something he held back for the love of the royal mistress, who had befriended him. He had not told the Idumean captain that when he had been handed over to the merchant of Colossé he had been sold by King Agrippa because his young master was jealous of his sister’s affections for a page; and when he had taken ship at Crete, dressed as a page, he was a runaway slave, with Princess Bernice’s gold in a goatskin wallet round his girdle, obeying her orders “to have no fear to go to Rome; she would meet him there: to wait.”

To his youthful heart it seemed no evil thing that she should come to Rome and marry Titus, Vespasian’s son, where he again could be her page. He could not know that all Rome was now counting on General Vespasian to save the Empire and become Emperor. He would not have had long to wait, as destiny soon rolled the years to Vespasian’s triumphial entry into Rome—if the harpy women of the wine shops on the water front had not taken note of his beauty and set the bargemen on to kidnap him as bait for higher game in Nero’s Palace, where ruled an evil woman, guided only by her own wicked desires.

The boy heard the door clank as the Prætorian guard drew the chain across outside and snapped the great twin locks with a key as long as a man’s forearm. He heard the ring of the swift soldier tread as the Idumean strode over the stones for the Three Taverns.

Then he turned. The room was dark but for a flickering peat fire on the hearth and a little guttering olive oil wick in a stone or breccia lamp on a rough board table. The floor was softened with sand and earth. The window was high and latticed, but let a soft breeze in from the sea. A little, stooped old man with a white beard and snow white hair and skullcap such as doctors of the law wore, sat on a backless stool at the table, writing on a scroll which he unwound from a roller as he wrote, with his eyes so close to the papyrus that he did not see the boy’s form against the dark of the door.

Except for the table and the backless stool there was no furniture in the prison hut but two couches, close together near the door; and the boy noticed that while the prisoner’s right hand wrote and wrote on unheeding, his left arm, resting on the table, had a huge handcuff attached to an iron chain which also lay on the table; and this was the Prophet, whom he had helped the scribe Timothy carry in stoned for dead at Lystra. This was the man, when the wreck broke up at Malta, who stood in the pelting rain and the dark and bade the Lord Julius “be of good cheer” and thanked his strange God “that now at last he could publish the Glad News at Rome.”

The boy had not noticed the strange leader of the strange new sect in the Judgment Hall at Cæsarea, because he had been too young, the toy and plaything of the youthful King Agrippa and his younger sister, Bernice, and he had noticed him still less at Lystra, some years before, because he had been still younger and much too excited over the mob. There is a discrepancy here in the boy’s story as picked out of the old records; and yet the discrepancy proves its truth, for he could not have been more than four or five. Yet he distinctly remembered coming in on one of his father’s caravans for Damascus from the South, and seeing the maddened mob, and running with all the camel drivers toward the gates of the city, where he had picked up the insensible Prophet’s cap and helped the young scribe Timothy to shuffle the almost lifeless form through the doors into the house of Lois and Eunice, Timothy’s people, who were Greek merchants.

On the ship wrecked between Crete and Malta, he recalled the prisoner of two years ago well enough; but he had kept himself out of sight from both prisoners and sailors all he could on that voyage, staying below deck on plea of seasickness by day and coming up only in the wild nights, when the high-rolling cape of his black cloak had hidden his face; and he could dream his dreams of awakening youth, and the message of hope his Princess’s black glance had thrown him when she slipped him the wallet of gold pieces from her litter chair and bade him “haste to Rome and wait there.”

Yet it had been no easy business for him “to haste to Rome,” for the merchant of Colossé to whom Agrippa in a moment of jealous suspicion had sold him had been an exacting master, and had set the new young slave to keeping accounts in the great warerooms. It had only been his knowledge of the Phrygian patois dialect, half Assyrian, half Greek, that had induced the merchant to send him to the seacoast and the Isles of the Sea to collect exchange on accounts. He had collected the accounts. Then he had taken ship at Crete and run away without a qualm. Why should he have qualms? Had he not been kidnapped by the robbers of Galilee and held for ransom, and, when the robbers were routed out by Felix, given as a slave—he, who came from the mountaineers who never had been slaves—to young King Agrippa and the sister, Bernice?

After that, life had become a golden dream of awakening youth. Though Bernice had been a wife to one Herod, and now was sent north to be wife to another old man, after the custom of the Herods to strengthen their thrones by marrying their daughters to powerful rulers, Bernice had been almost as young as he—she was barely twenty. He had been set at first to seeing that the Nubian slaves kept the royal baths at Cæsarea clean. Then in a fit of suspicion over having any but black eunuchs, who were mutes, attend the royal baths, Agrippa had sent him to keep the tracks of the chariot races powdered with soft sand to fill the wheel ruts and save the horses’ knees if a racer slipped on the swift course.

There he had gained the first glimpse of the Princess’s favor toward himself. She had been driving with her royal young brother in one of the trials for the chariot races. The snowy steeds of the young King’s chariot were given precedence of all others, the Festus’s wild Arab horses were champing the bits to pass, and the Roman had great ado to hold them behind Agrippa. A dozen other prancing teams were surging behind. She had worn a silver bangle round her brow to hold back her hair. On her brow hung a jade-stone ornament from Arabia with the swastika cross of luck beaded in gold. In the wild charge of the racers the jade pendant had bounced from its setting in the sand. Leaping in front of the other racers, the boy had rescued the emblem of good luck from trampling; and all the people in the seats of the great hippodrome had cheered his pluck. Fortune had come to him in the little jewel with the odd cross.

When the charioteers came round the course again, King Agrippa himself had stooped to receive the restored jewel; and the people had cheered again; and when Agrippa and Bernice had gone up to Daphne’s Gardens at Antioch, for the wild, lawless pleasures there, then had followed another golden dream of awakening youth. The boy did not know, when he had been with the royal lovers in Daphne’s Gardens, that only a few miles away was the Prophet, with the Christians of Antioch; and here they were, both thrown together in the evil snares of Rome.[1]Amid the roses and the palms and the love temples and the fountains of the gardens were artificial lakes, where plied boats with silken awnings rowed by Naiads in silver-and-golden nets to the music of zither and harp under the Moon Goddess.

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