Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

by Elizabeth Miller

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE FINING FIRE

  As Marsyas leaped into the Temple of Rannu, a figure started up besidehim. He sprang away from it in alarm, but a word in Hindu reassuredhim.

  "It is I, Vasti."

  With the bayadere following he raced through the cloyed musk of thetemple toward the square of lesser darkness at the rear, which showedthe exit into the court. He flung himself across the pavement of theinner inclosure and down its aisle of sphinxes, through the gate in therear wall and out into a black passage.

  Behind, the roar of the contending host of Flora followed him. Though,for a second time this day he had run with peril on his track, thethreatened identification of the precious burden he bore was moreterrifying than death had been at sunset.

  It was a long alley, the single outlet for a jam of humble housessurrounding the temple, and it opened into a street deep in theEgyptian quarter. Though Marsyas ran splendidly, he carried no littleburden, and the way was black, unpaved and treacherous. He had begunto fear that he could not reach the end before pursuers, so minded,could hem him in, when almost as if the thought had invited theactuality, he saw a figure appear at the mouth of the alley. With afurious but repressed exclamation, the unknown plunged at the Essene.

  Determined to defend Lydia's identity as long as he might, Marsyasswung her behind him, and with a whisper to Vasti to hide Lydia, madeready to fight fast.

  With the dim illumination of the city behind him, Marsyas was betterable to see his antagonist. As the solid body projected itself at him,like a springing beast, he met it with a raised left arm and a readyright hand. Instantly the two closed and for a brief, fierce moment,fought savagely. But Marsyas discovered that he was far more agile,taller and apparently younger than his assailant, and for a space hehad only to fight away the knife that glinted and darted hungrily athis throat. Then, seizing upon his antagonist's first imperfect guard,he delivered a stunning blow over the heart. The heavy body staggered,quivered and collapsed.

  Expecting to find the passage before him filling with ruffians, Marsyaswas astonished to see the way clear and vacant. Without waiting tocatch breath Marsyas sprang back in the alley, and, whispering thebayadere's name, found Lydia and the serving-woman only a pace from thespot.

  Catching Lydia up again, in spite of her protests, he was about tospring over the prostrate body that all but blocked the passage, whenhis eye fell upon the upturned face. The dim light of the city fell onit.

  It was Flaccus!

  For a single moment of surprise and bewilderment, Marsyas stood still.Then very surely it penetrated through his brain that the proconsul hadrecognized him at the moment of Flora's drop into his arms, and hadcome to capture him--or to identify the Dancing Flora!

  He knew that he had not struck a fatal blow and the proconsul's knifelay near. He picked it up.

  It was bloody.

  Startled and aghast, he flung the weapon away, and, leaping over theunconscious Roman, fled out of the alley. A torch of pitch, burnt downto a charred knot, with a feeble flame playing over it, was set upon astaff hardly ten paces from the mouth of the passage. It was a darkstreet, and deserted. The roar of the populace still centered aboutthe square of the Temple of Rannu. Marsyas turned toward the torch,and, as he ran, he saw under its sickly light the figure of a manstretched on the earth. At another step, he tripped over a secondfallen body. It moved and groaned.

  Marsyas put Lydia down. Carrying her through a street cumbered withprostrate men might mean bodily injury for both of them. With areassuring word, he led her between the head of the obscured man andthe feet of the one under the torch, and stumbled at his second step ona contorted shape.

  Marsyas stopped, to ask himself if the deadly hand that had broughtthese men low might not await him and his dear charge farther on.Vasti leaned over the one under the torch. Then she sprang up.

  "Come! Look!" she whispered in excitement.

  Marsyas hurried to the man, and met at that instant the last consciouslight in the eyes of Agrippa.

  The young Essene dropped to his knees without a word, thrust his handinto the embroidered tunic and felt for the prince's heart. It beatbut slowly. Vasti, meanwhile, snatched the torch from the staff andbeat the charred pitch knot on the ground till the still inflammableheart broke open and ignited afresh.

  By its light Marsyas examined Agrippa. Between the prince's shoulders,his hand touched chilling blood.

  "Ambushed!" he said grimly. "Stabbed in the back!"

  Marsyas looked at the prince's right hand. It was still clenched, andthe flesh on the knuckles was abraded, the second joints swelling fast.

  Vasti, with suspicion in her olive eyes, carried the torch over to thecontorted shape. Then she made a sign to Marsyas. He looked. It wasan Egyptian wearing the livery of Flaccus. The prince's Arabic daggerwas neatly buried to the hilt in the servitor's breast. Vasti examinedthe second prostrate form. By her torch Marsyas saw that it wasEutychus, conscious but benumbed. His left ear, cheek and eye wereswollen and black.

  "It seems," said Marsyas, stanching Agrippa's wound, "that the princedisabled his own support!"

  But Vasti, by deft twitches of ear and hair and threats in Hindu,significant in tone if not in speech to the charioteer, finally gotEutychus upon his feet.

  "Take up the prince," she said to Marsyas. "The slave may follow orlie as he chooses. I shall attend my mistress."

  Marsyas lifted the Herod and, following Vasti, hurried on again intothe darkness. The bayadere made toward the sea-front, not many yardsdistant, sped across the wharf and over the edge apparently into thewater. Marsyas, by this time ready to follow the brown woman into anyextreme, plunged after her. He landed abruptly in the bottom of apunt. Lydia followed, and Eutychus, with an alacrity not expected ofone who groaned so helplessly.

  Vasti severed the rope that tied up the boat, and, with a strong thrustof her hands against the piling, pushed the boat away from the wharf.But she did not take up the oars. She left them to Marsyas, trained onthe blue waters of Galilee.

  In a moment he had pulled out into the black expanse of the bay, and,with the prince's ship in mind, rowed among the sleeping shipping.

  "How came the prince in this plight?" Marsyas demanded of Eutychus.

  The charioteer, with his head in his hands, groaned and murmuredunintelligibly. Lydia dipped an end of the wonderful silk thatenveloped her into the water and pressed the wet corner to thecharioteer's temples.

  Marsyas frowned blackly.

  "Nay, but thou canst answer, Eutychus," he said shortly.

  After further murmurings, the charioteer brought out between groans anavowal that he was completely mystified.

  "How came Agrippa in the street?" Marsyas insisted.

  "He was with Justin Classicus; I attended him. When Flora danced andchose her lover, and the two fled into the Temple of Rannu, theAlexandrian cried to my lord that there was another passage into theTemple, by which they could go in, or the Flora and her lover come out.And he proposed for a prank that he and the prince go thither anddiscover Flora and her lover. We were on the roof of a bath and couldget down at once, so we ran through private passages, my lord and I,outstripping Classicus, whom the crowd swallowed. And when we got intothis dark street, two fell upon us without warning and killed us both!"

  "But it was Agrippa who struck that blow," Marsyas declared.

  The man murmured again.

  "Some one struck me," he said finally; "mayhap the prince, not knowingfriend from foe in the street."

  "Of a surety, this stiff old Roman took chances," Marsyas averred afterthought, "with but one apparitor to aid him against Agrippa,palestrae-trained and this young charioteer! Art sure thou didst notplay the craven, Eutychus?" he demanded.

  "Or should I be blamed," Eutychus groaned, "when it was three againstme, with the prince striking at his single defender?"

  Marsyas fell silent. It was not like Agrippa to be confused under an
ycircumstances.

  He pulled up beside Agrippa's vessel, roused the watchman and had theprince and Eutychus taken aboard; but Vasti and Lydia he left in theborrowed punt, out of sight of the crew that had returned.

  He followed the injured men on deck and hurriedly dressed Agrippa'swound, restored him to consciousness and left him in the charge of thecaptain of the vessel. He ordered one of the skilled seamen to attendEutychus and hurried back to the women in the boat under the blackshadow of the ship.

  He pulled straight for the sea, rounded Eunostos point and skirting thetiny archipelagoes in the broad light of the Pharos, brought up at asmall indented coast between two sandy peninsulas. Here the residenceportion of Alexandria came down to the ocean. The locality was darkand wrapped in sleep.

  As he lifted Lydia from the boat, Marsyas turned to Vasti.

  "Why didst thou not prevent her in this thing?" he asked in Hindu.

  "The white brother forgets that I am a handmaiden," she replied.

  "But what if I had not come?" he persisted, growing more troubled byhis perplexities.

  "I had prepared a path for escape; I was armed, and watching!"

  "Did--did she expect me?" he asked after silence.

  "No."

  Then she had done this thing for him. Oh, for the safe refuge of thealabarch's musky halls that he might harken to the sweet distress inhis soul and tell her of it!

  Without further event, they reached the alabarch's house and thebayadere, producing keys, let her charges into the servant's entrybeneath the porch. Lydia instantly disappeared, but Vasti in obedienceto a word from Marsyas conducted him through the well-beloved chambersto the corridor lined by the sleeping-rooms of the servants.

  Before one, she stopped.

  "Herein is the prince's other servant," she said, and quicklydisappeared.

  Marsyas opened the door and entering aroused Silas. With a bareexplanation that the prince would sail the instant the courier gotaboard, he urged the grumbling old man into activity, and went back tothe alabarch's presiding-room.

  He had a moment of waiting--at last a moment to think!

  He realized that an extreme of some nature had been reached; all hispurposes had been brought up to a climax. There was no lingering inAlexandria possible for Agrippa, wounded or well, for Marsyas knew thatFlaccus had the Herod's undoing in mind. If Lydia were a Nazarene,Marsyas had now, of a surety, though all Heaven and earth intervened,to bring Saul of Tarsus to death before the Pharisee's dread hand fellupon Lydia for apostasy! For that purpose, he must go to Rome--andleave Alexandria--to return? For his love's sake? He, an Essene?

  Silas came, bowed, and was dismissed to wait in the street for themoment. And still Marsyas stood. The house was silent and dark. Theslumber that overtakes those relieved from a three days' strainenwrapped all under the alabarch's roof. Presently he thought ofCypros, in his search for an excuse for lingering. A lamp on thealabarch's table was ready to be lighted, and, finding the materialsfor fire-making in the drawer, he lighted it.

  "Sweet lady," he wrote on a parchment at hand, "the winds favorable tothy lord's departure blow, and he will not awaken thee to the pain of afarewell. Be comforted, be brave, be hopeful; for when he returneth,he bringeth thee a crown. I remember my pledge to thee.

  "Be thou blessed. "MARSYAS."

  It was the first letter he had ever written to a woman; he did notdream that he had written so tenderly.

  He rolled the parchment and addressed it to the princess.

  There was nothing more to be done.

  Was he not to see Lydia again?

  Filled with rebellion and fear, he hurried toward the hall; in thesemi-dark, cast by the lamp within the larger room, he saw a smallfigure slip quickly behind a hanging.

  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 itsrevealing ray, he saw her lovely face smitten down with shame, but helifted 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 sawterror for her apostasy and amazement for the thing she had done forthe Nazarenes, a sudden misery leaped into her face. She tried to puthim 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 heldback the multitude from the Nazarenes. But thou art an Essene, and aJew; wherefore, in thy sight I can not be justified. Forget not thesethings 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 thouwilt turn away from this heresy and be led no more by it intotransgression! Better thy sweet life and thy sweet fame than all thetruth in the world!"

  The word he used caught her. She waited and seemed not to breathe. Heswept 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 blessingdearly."

  She took the hands about her and undid them.

  "Go!" she whispered. "Farewell, and the one God, that loves us all,shield 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 newdawn on Alexandria.