Saul Of Tarsus Part 44

She had been waiting to have a stolen look upon him as he went!

He caught her in his arms and drew her out into the light. Under its revealing ray, he saw her lovely face smitten down with shame, but he lifted it, to kiss her eyes, her temples and her lips.

"Lydia! Lydia! I fear to leave thee!" he whispered.

She let her eyes light upon him, to catch his meaning, and when she saw terror for her apostasy and amazement for the thing she had done for the Nazarenes, a sudden misery leaped into her face. She tried to put him back.

"Lydia, Lydia!" he begged, feeling the repulse, "dost thou not love me, then?" His tone urged, his eyes pleaded.

For a moment, she was silent; then she said, with infinite pain:

"Marsyas, I broke off the trail of roses through Rhacotis, and held back the mult.i.tude from the Nazarenes. But thou art an Essene, and a Jew; wherefore, in thy sight I can not be justified. Forget not these things for my sake! Go, ere thy teaching hath cause to reproach thee."

"No, no!" he agonized. "Do not say that to me! Say rather that thou wilt turn away from this heresy and be led no more by it into transgression! Better thy sweet life and thy sweet fame than all the truth in the world!"

The word he used caught her. She waited and seemed not to breathe. He swept on.

"Art thou, beyond saving, a Nazarene?"

Her face fell, and her soft red lips were parted with a heavy sigh.

"From this night henceforward, Marsyas! I have purchased the blessing dearly."

She took the hands about her and undid them.

"Go!" she whispered. "Farewell, and the one G.o.d, that loves us all, s.h.i.+eld thee from harm all the days of thy life!"

A moment and she was gone.

After a while he turned and walked with stumbling feet into the new dawn on Alexandria.

CHAPTER XXII

"IN THE CLOAK OF TWO COLORS"

Marsyas turned on the gilded couch, threw off the light covering and sat up. A Syrian slave thrust aside the heavy drapery over the cancelli, which had been drawn in the atrium while the young man slept.

In the brilliant light of the Roman mid-afternoon, Marsyas looked sleepily at the slave that bowed beside him, and the courier that stood near by.

"A message for thee," the slave said.

Marsyas put out his hand and the courier laid in it a package wrapped in silk. Marsyas broke the seal and read the contents.

"O MARSYAS:

"Gossip hath it now that thou art no longer confused when a woman addresses thee: wherefore I write with less trepidation and more confidence.

"I am in Rome these seven days, under my father's roof, for a little s.p.a.ce before we are commanded to join Caesar in Capri. In this time I have not seen thee nor thy lord.

"If not myself, then perchance the news I bring from Alexandria may urge thee to accept the invitation I extend.

"There exists no greater claim than thine upon my hospitality.

"Come thou, and make me welcome in mine own city.

"JUNIA."

Marsyas sprang up, the last of the languor gone from his face.

"Thou shalt conduct me," he said to the messenger.

He disappeared in the direction of his cubiculum.

In a time longer than he had consumed in his old Essenic days to prepare himself for the streets he came again into Agrippa's atrium.

It was hard to recognize in him the picturesque Jewish ascetic that had bent over the scroll in the great college of Jerusalem. He had permitted the blade to come at his hair and beard; the kerchief had been replaced by the fillet; the cloak and gown by the scarlet tunic and mantle, the daylight had been let in on his fine limbs, and there was the fugitive glitter of jewels on his fingers and arms. He had a.s.sumed perfumes and polishes, had laid aside all his oriental habit and had become not only a Roman but an exquisite. The change was not all in his dress; the indefinable something that marks the man of experience was upon him and the ascetic blankness was gone from his brow.

He signed to the messenger to follow, and pa.s.sing out of the house and down the long banks of marble steps which led up to Agrippa's magnificent eyrie on the brink of the Quirinal, entered a lectica that awaited him in the streets.

Years are not time enough to weary one of Rome.

Marsyas had come into the capital with a spirit benumbed by a great shock, so that the first day he walked the imperial streets he was less conscious of their wonders than he was at this hour.

He was borne through narrow lanes that were like clefts between heights of marble, under arches, chronicling the solemn consummation of triumph, along crowding pillars that arose out of the ravines between the seven hills, and, catching the sunlight on their white capitals, cast it down in the gloom of the depressions. Glories clambered up the bosom of the Esquiline; templed sanct.i.ty crowned the Aventine, and might in marble and gold sat on the Palatine. Between were splendor and squalor, confused, for only beauty stood up above the miseries and defilement that made Rome hateful in its unsunned ways.

The feebleness of unwieldy and disunited mult.i.tudes c.u.mbered the Carinae, along which he pa.s.sed. Starvation and the excess of plenty, power and abject subjection, unspeakable depravity and innocence met and pa.s.sed. The slaves preceding the young man's litter made way for it with staff and pilum, or again it made way for slaves bearing fasces and maces. He did not proceed unnoticed. Albucilla, widow of Satrius Secundus, in a litter with Cneius Domitius, turned from the languid senator at her side to cast a bewitching smile at the young Essene; Ennia, wife of Macro, the praetorian prefect, leaned from her litter to cry him an invitation.

"To Tusculum! Come with us!"

"Many thanks: yet I would the invitation came to-morrow!"

"It shall," she said in answer and was borne on. Running slaves pushed by him to overtake her chair, and Marsyas knew without looking that the lectica they bore contained Caligula, Caesar's grand-nephew. Agrippina, a young matron in a chair, with a month-old babe in her arms, cast a sidelong glance out of her black eyes at the young man as he approached. Stupid old Claudius, clad in a purple-edged toga and stumbling as he walked, acknowledged the precedence Marsyas gave him with a smile and a greeting. As the young Jew was borne on he did not realize that he had made room for three coming Caesars in the Carinae.

After them streamed a great number of patricians in chairs, all proceeding to the races at Tusculum, but Marsyas' bearers turned off the Carinae and began to mount the Esquiline. In a few minutes he was set down before a small, newly-erected house as cla.s.sic as a Greek temple, as compact as a fortification.

The messenger bowed him into the hands of the atriensis, who led him into the vestibule and left him for a moment. Presently, a soft-footed, scantily-clad boy bowed gracefully beside him and begged him to follow. He was led into Junia's atrium.

The Roman woman, who had been lounging in a chair at the cancelli, turned languidly, and sprang up in feigned surprise. But honest feeling came into her face as she looked at the changed man that stood before her.

"Welcome!" she cried, hastening to meet him. "Would thou wast a G.o.d!

Perchance there would be despatch about answering prayers!"

"Give the G.o.ds as welcome a supplication, and the answer would come riding upon Jupiter's thunderbolts!" he responded.