Saul Of Tarsus Part 62

CHAPTER x.x.xI

THE DREGS OF THE CUP OF TREMBLING

By noon the following day, all Alexandria roared with the news that Agrippa had returned a king!

The Regio Judaeorum lost its repose. Certain irrational of the inhabitants displayed carpeting and garlands in honor of the Jewish potentate, within their boundaries. But others, instructed by instinct, closed the fronts of the houses and laid their treasure within grasp.

By the advice of Marsyas, Agrippa had caused his s.h.i.+p to bring to, outside the harbor, and await the dropping of darkness before he came ash.o.r.e. The few hours he spent in Alexandria had been pa.s.sed under cover, and none without the alabarch's household was aware of his presence in the city. The newly-crowned Judean king found it difficult to repress his desire for ostentation, and when Marsyas' plan for secrecy miscarried at last, Agrippa was irritated because he had been deprived of a longed-for opportunity to astonish the Alexandrians.

"But who could have told it?" he asked, with ill-concealed satisfaction.

Marsyas' lips curled.

"Cla.s.sicus," he said.

Before the porch of the alabarch's house groups of people came to stand and discuss the fortunes of the Herod. The sounds, never congratulatory, began to change in temper. As the day grew, numbers began to acc.u.mulate and hang like sullen bees buzzing insurrection.

Though they themselves were mongrels cast out of twenty subjugated kingdoms and bullied into unspeakable servitude by the tyrant Rome, Prejudice, unarmed with argument and speaking in dialect, arose and rebelled at Alexandria entertaining a Jewish king.

Toward sunset a group of empty curricles and chariots came and stood before a certain house, the last in the Jewish district, facing the Gentile environs of the water-front. Had any cared to remark, it might have been observed that this house could be reached from the alabarch's by abandoned pa.s.sages and private walks, a series of Jewish courts and stable-yards, without exposing any who went that way to the Gentile eye. After a while, a body of Roman guards emerged from nowhere and arrayed themselves alongside the vehicles. Presently, groups of slaves bearing burdens, followed by a party of high-cla.s.s Egyptians, mounted the chariots and without hesitation the procession took up movement toward the harbor.

But an angle in the streets brought them upon the Gymnasium. It was built in a square of sufficient size to receive the crowds that usually attended the contests of the athletae, and there thousands were a.s.sembled to do Alexandrian honor to a Jew.

The daylight was still on the streets, and Marsyas, in the guise of a charioteer, driving the horses of the foremost car, observed that each of the ma.s.s was busy with his own noise, and apparently unsuspecting the coming of Agrippa. So he signed to the centurion in charge of the praetorian squad to make way with as little ostentation as possible.

At the porch before the Gymnasium, the crowd was most packed, loudest and most entertained. A naked, deformed, apish figure stood on a pedestal from which a statue had fallen and had not been replaced. A wreath of rushes had been twisted about the degenerate forehead, a strip of matting had been bound with a tow-cord about his middle; in his hand was a stalk of papyrus with the head broken and hanging down.

On their knees about the base of the plinth were half a score of youths from the Gymnasium, groaning in tragic chorus, the single Syriac word:

"_Maris_! _Maris_! Lord! Lord!"

Loudly the crowd roared its part, with voices raucous and hoa.r.s.e from much abuse:

"Hail, Agrippa! King of the Jews!"

Agrippa's chariot, following the way the centurion had quietly opened through the crowd, attracted little attention and the half-light of the twilight did not reveal his features, which he had been led further to conceal by an Egyptian cowl. A long white kamis covered his dress.

But his eyes fell upon the idiot; he caught the mockery and its meaning from the crowd.

A quiver of rage ran through his frame. Laying hold of the Egyptian smock, he tore it off and threw it fairly into the faces of those nearest him; the white cowl followed, and he stood forth like a new-risen sun in a tissue of silver, mantled with purple, his fillet replaced by a tarboosh sewn with immense gems.

Defiance and insult and daring could not have been embodied in a more effective act. The continuous tumult burst into a yell of fury. In a twinkling his chariot was hemmed in and blocked and the raving rabble reached out to lay hands on him.

Marsyas, seeing destruction in Agrippa's recklessness, shouted to the centurion, who responded by hurling his praetorians, with broadsword and spear into the mob.

The protection of Caesar, thus evidenced, beat back the astonished herd as a charge of cavalry might have done, but it fringed the lane opened before the royal Jew and raged.

Thereafter every inch of the way was contested.

Not even a show of interference was made by munic.i.p.al authorities.

Instead, here and there, soldiers of the city garrison could be seen, singly or in groups, as spectators and applauding. The riot began to take on the appearance of a holiday, for groups of upper cla.s.ses began to appear on housetops, stairs and porches of houses, where they made themselves comfortable and listened to the demonstration as they were accustomed to watch contests in the stadia. Below in the long way toward the harbor-front, the lawless of any cla.s.s indulged their love of disorder and amused the aristocrats.

The fugitives were almost in sight of the forest of masts which marked the wharves, when Marsyas detected a change in the tone of the tumult.

Derision and revilement began to lose impetus, flagging in the face of a freshened uproar of another temper, beginning far behind and sweeping down the street after the fugitives. It was savage, bloodthirsty and menacing. Out of the inarticulate volume he caught finally shouts about the Jews and Flora; next, about the dance of Flora; after that the whole declaration, sent thundering, like a sea over winter capes, that the dancing Flora was a Nazarene and the daughter of the alabarch!

Marsyas' face, turned toward Agrippa, was ghastly. The Herod felt the first quiver of terror he had experienced in years. He reached toward the lines, meaning to give Marsyas opportunity to return to the Regio Judaeorum. But Marsyas was shouting mightily to the centurion to charge the crowds before them. The praetorian heard and his men presented a double row of spears and rushed. The lesser mob ahead broke, and Marsyas cried back to Cypros' charioteer.

The next minute with desperate mercilessness he had loosed a long plaited whip like a crackling flame upon the necks of his horses.

The terrified beasts leaped; the car lurched and headlong they plunged into the ma.s.s before them. Right and left the rawhide played, over faces, shoulders and lifted arms, searing and scarring wherever it touched. With grim satisfaction, the two within the chariot felt at times that the car mounted and toppled over prostrate rioters, like sticks in the roadway. The jam became panic and flight, and the horses took the free pa.s.sage, mad with desire to get away from the stinging torment that hara.s.sed them.

The driver of Cypros' car closed in quickly with its following of curricles, and kept close behind the flying chariot, but the praetorians, out-distanced, contented themselves by following through short ways, and the riot was left behind.

At the wharf the maddened animals could not be stopped until they had been circled again and again. But hardly had the wheels ceased to move, when Marsyas leaped to the ground, and, flinging the lines to a slave, put up his hands to Agrippa.

"As the first debt to thy manhood and to the alabarch forget not this opportunity to help him! Hear them! They want Jewish blood; Lydia's blood! There is none in Alexandria to stay them! Help, my lord!

Beseech Caesar in thy people's behalf, as I beseech thee now! Answer, answer!"

"I hear, Marsyas," Agrippa responded, "and by all that I hold sacred, I promise thee Flaccus' end! G.o.d help thee! Farewell!"

Pausing only for the word, Marsyas turned and ran with frantic speed back into the city. He saw, at every step, that which made his heart chill in his bosom. The tide of the riot had turned, and that which was not already pouring in upon the Nazarenes, was rus.h.i.+ng into the Regio Judaeorum.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

SANCTUARY

The cl.u.s.ter of vagabonds hanging before the alabarch's mansion stayed no longer after the breezes brought the first sound of tumult which announced a rarer sport elsewhere. In a twinkling the Regio Judaeorum was silent and deserted.

Except for the gusts of far-off turmoil, the cooing of pigeons in towers, the clas.h.i.+ng of palm-leaves, the creak of crazy gates in the wind, the casual calling of Numidian cranes or the crowing of poultry were the only sounds in the quarter--lonesome, nature sounds, signals of a householder's absence.

But it seemed as if the Regio Judaeorum listened and waited.

After Agrippa's departure, the alabarch came into his presiding-room, without purpose and visibly uneasy. Lydia followed him, and, at a look from her father, came close to his chair and mingled her yellow-brown curls with his white locks.

The silence over the quarter had become oppressive and the slightest break would have been no less grateful than distinct, when it seemed that cautious footsteps pattered by without.

The two stirred and listened.

After a moment, they heard others, very swift and soft, as if many were running by a-tiptoe. There were whispers and rustlings, excited words cried under the breath.

The two in the presiding-room looked at each other. Had the vagabonds returned to their place for mischief, outside the alabarch's mansion?

Lysimachus stepped to the windows and listened. But Lydia stood still, dreading without understanding that which he might hear.