Saul Of Tarsus Part 70

"He does not speak," Marsyas explained. "I do not belong to his party.

I joined them to offer aid."

"Then the G.o.d of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob reward thee," Judas said. He signed to his servants, who brought forward a litter in which Judas had meant his guest should proceed to Straight Street. Saul was lifted into it; Judas climbed in beside him; the servants shouldered the litter, and, with the Levites following, bore it away into the city.

Marsyas looked after it until the narrow ways between the high unsightly mud walls hid it.

Then he put his hands together and smiled.

"The Nazarene bade me ask for Ananias!" he whispered.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

IN THE HOUSE OF ANANIAS

But Ananias was a favorite name among the Jews of Damascus. Weariness and the desire for slumber after inquiries which brought him twenty diverse directions, sent Marsyas to a khan when the night was old, and Lydia still unfound.

The next morning after refres.h.i.+ng and untroubled sleep, he began to search for Ananias, carefully withholding the explanation that the Ananias he sought was a Nazarene, out of an impulse to protect the protector of his beloved.

He found Ananias, the wine-merchant, and Ananias, the tanner, banished to the outskirts of the city, because of his unclean trade; and Ananias, the priest; and Ananias who was a native of Antioch and of mixed blood, but unalterably a Jew; and Ananias, who was a soldier, drafted into garrison service by Aretas, who had taken the city from Antipas; and Ananias, the steward of Sidon who had robbed his master and was now too rich and powerful to be punished; and Ananias, who was a reader in the Synagogue. And for two other days, he sought Ananiases patiently and with pathetic hope.

At sunset on the fourth day, he saw a woman meet another woman in the street, and between the two there pa.s.sed a communication with the fingers. To others, not a.s.sociated with Nazarenes, the sign meant nothing, but Marsyas caught the motion and his heart leaped.

It was the sign of the cross!

He overtook the woman who had pa.s.sed him.

"I pray thee, friend," he said in a low voice, "canst thou tell me where Ananias, the Nazarene, dwelleth?"

The woman raised, a pair of calm gray eyes to his face. She was a Greek and fair, and her forehead was as placid as a lake in a calm.

"Art thou his friend?" she asked, with a touch of the caution acquired by the unhappy.

"I am a friend to many who have departed into the Nazarene way," he said. "I shall not betray him."

"Seest the house built upon the wall," she said simply, "that hath the white gate, at the end of the street?"

Marsyas a.s.sented.

"Knock," she said.

He blessed her with a look and hurried down the darkening pa.s.sage.

With trembling hands, he rapped on the whitewashed gate, set deep in the thick clay wall, and presently the door swung open.

A woman in the house-dress of a servant stood there; behind her was a walk lined with white stones; cooing pigeons were disappearing into a cupola on the house within; an ipomoea, pallid with bloom, shaded the step; irises were pus.h.i.+ng through the rich mold just inside the gate.

There was the rainy rustling of leaves from the olive trees at the property wall on each side. And there was a seat of tamarind with fallen leaves upon it.

"Does Ananias, the Nazarene, dwell here?" Marsyas asked with a tremor in his voice. Whither had his courage departed?

"Enter," the woman said.

Marsyas stepped over the threshold of the white gate, that was latched behind him against opening from the outside, and followed the woman toward the bower of ipomoea.

Within a hall, lighted by a single taper, she gave him a seat, and disappeared through a door at the end of the room. A moment later, the tall spare figure of the pastor of Ptolemais and of Rhacotis emerged from the interior.

Marsyas sprang up, but no sound came to his lips. He clasped his hands and gazed with pitiful eyes upon the Nazarene.

Without pausing for the formality of a greeting, after the first movement of surprise, Ananias reopened the door that he had closed behind him and signed to the young man to pa.s.s in.

Marsyas stood in a large chamber, with a spot of light in its center under a hanging lamp. There, with her head bright under the rays, sat Lydia.

Her face was toward him when he entered. She flung down the skein of wool she was winding and sprang up. But the look on Marsyas' face arrested her cry. One glance of supreme examination and her large eyes kindled with sudden triumph. She came to him as if more than distance between them and danger had been overcome. Marsyas swept her into his arms and folded her to his heart.

"No more, no more!" he was saying, "from this time for ever more mine own!"

Trembling and smiling, while tears perfect as pearls glittered on her lashes, she put her arms about his neck and drew his head down to her.

"O my Marsyas," she cried, "better to die in the light of thy trust than to live in thy love without it! Blessed, thrice blessed the hour which gave me both!"

"O my Lydia, thou anointest me with thy forgiveness, and clothest me in the holy garment of thy love! Blessed am I and consecrated!"

"I believed in thy wisdom, love!"

"I had no wisdom but love!"

"The Lord heard me, my Marsyas, for I was near mine extremity, and I could not have endured much longer!"

"I had reached my extremity, Lydia, and then the Lord gave me His hand."

She turned him toward the light, and gazed up at his eyes with such earnestness, such penetration on her almost infantile face, that he pressed her closer to him and laughed a low laugh. Her eyes flashed on him a light of new interest.

"I never heard thee laugh till now!" she exclaimed.

"I never was happy till now!"

"Why now, and not before?" she asked.

There was silence; he could not tell her why he had changed, but he could tell what had marked it.

He led her to the chair she had left, and when she had sat, dropped at her feet and crossed his arms upon her lap.

"Listen, and when I have done, know that the Lord loved us, and hath joined us with His own hands."

Beginning at the time when he turned to find her gone from the reader's stone before the Synagogue in Alexandria, he told with simple directness of his wanderings, of his disappointments, of his growing fear that he would not save her from Saul. He had her follow him to the Temple, where he met Eleazar and received the dire news that Saul had departed for Damascus; and thence along the old Roman road through the length of the Holy Land, up past his native hills and the waters of the Sea of Galilee, and the marshes of Lake Huleh, into the desert, and on to the beginning of the beneficence of the Pharbar and the Abana, until he brought up within sixty paces of Saul at the wayside pool.

All these things she heard with the sympathetic interest which had won him to her from the talk in the dawn on the housetop in Alexandria.

But when he came to the supernatural visit of the great light, and the prostration of Saul and his own arising a man of subdued and sweetened nature, her eyes shone with a repressed excitement that was not usual in her.