Saul Of Tarsus Part 17

"Twenty thousand drachmae--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The bargain is at first hand between thee and me, good sir," he said to Peter. "The second contract shall be between the prince and myself.

Bring the money here at sunset and the writings shall be ready for thee."

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

"Less thine interest," Marsyas a.s.sented, and Peter went out.

Agrippa got upon his feet and gazed gravely at Marsyas.

"What is this?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great haste to get away from the overwhelmed pair seized the Essene.

Trembling he shook off their hold and hurried out into the air.

He had to quiet a great amazement in him at the thing he had planned for so many days to do. After a long agitated tramp in search of composure, he began to see more clearly the results of his extreme act.

He had fixed himself within reach of Vitellius and the Sanhedrim: unless the ill fortune of the luckless prince improved, he had bound himself to servitude for a lifetime.

But he drew his hand across his troubled forehead and smiled grimly.

He had made his first decisive step against Saul!

CHAPTER VIII

AN ALEXANDRIAN CHARACTERISTIC

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

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

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

He enlarged and embellished Rhacotis, which lay to the west of the new city and left it to the tenantry of the Egyptians, poor remnants of that haughty race which had been aristocrats of the world before Troy.

In its center arose that solemn triumph of Pharaonic architecture, the Serapeum.

But it was they who approached from the south, with the sand of the Libyan desert in their locks, who saw n.o.ble Alexandria. Between them and the city was first the strength of its fortifications, prodigious lengths of wall, beautiful with citadels and towers. Within was the Brucheum, with the splendor of the Library, for the Alexandrian spirit of contentiousness sharpened and forced the intellect of her disputants, till her learning was the most faultless of the time and its house a fit shape for its contents. After the Library the pillared facade of the Court of Justice; next the unparalleled Museum, and, interspersed between, were the glories of four hundred theaters, four thousand palaces, four thousand baths. Against the intense blue of the rainless Egyptian sky were imprinted the sun-white towers, pillars, arches and statues of the most comely city ever builded in Africa.

Memphis, lost and buried in the sand, and Thebes, an echoing nave of roofless columns, were never so instinct with glory as Egypt's splendid recrudescence on the coast of the Middle Sea.

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

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

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

Thus much their privileges; their oppressions were another story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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