The cold touch of a hand at his ear drew Julian from his dreams. The lesson of the catechist was finished. On his knees he recited the prayer of thanksgiving; then escaping from Eutropius he ran to his room, took down a book, and hastened to a solitary nook in the garden to read at ease the Symposium of Plato, the pagan, a book forbidden above all others. On the stairs Julian met the monk, who was departing—
“Wait, my dear boy! What book is your Majesty carrying?”
Julian stared at him and tranquilly tendered the volume. On the parchment binding Eutropius read the title, written in great capitals, “The Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle,” and gave back the book unopened.
“That’s all right! Remember that I have to answer for your soul to God and to the sublime Emperor. Don’t read heretical books, especially none of those frivolous philosophers whom I have to-day condemned.”
It was the habitual trick of the boy to wrap dangerous books in innocent bindings. Julian from his infancy had learnt dissimulation, and even took pleasure in deceiving others, especially Eutropius. He dissembled and lied needlessly and habitually, prompted by deep-seated anger and revenge. To Mardonius alone his behaviour was always open and gracious.
Intrigues, scandals, gossipings, suspicions continually arose at Macellum among the numberless idle servants. The whole pack of varletry, in the hope of Court favour, subjected the two disgraced young princes to espionage by night and day. Long as Julian could remember, death was an hourly expectation. Little by little he had accustomed himself to perpetual fear, being quite aware that neither in the house nor garden could he take a step or make a gesture unperceived by a thousand intent but invisible eyes. Hearing and understanding much of the toils about him, the boy was forced to feign ignorance. At one time it was the conversation between Eutropius and a spy sent by the Emperor Constantius, in which the monk named Julian and Gallus “the imperial scourges”; at another time, in the gallery under the kitchen windows, it was the meditation of a cook, furious at some insolence on the part of Gallus. She was saying to the washer-up of the dishes, “God save my soul, Priscilla, but what I can’t make out is, why they haven’t strangled them before!”
To-day, when Julian, after his lesson in theology, went out of the house and perceived the greenness of the trees, he breathed more freely. The two peaks of Mount Argæus, covered with snow, sparkled against blue sky. The neighbourhood of glaciers made the air refreshingly cool; garden alleys stretched hither and thither into the distance; glistening dark-green foliage of oaks formed thick vaultings; here and there a ray filtered through the branches of plane-trees. Only one side of the garden was not walled in, for in that direction lay a chasm. At the foot of the plateau on which the castle stood, a dead plain stretched as far as Anti-Taurus, and from this plain fierce heat rose in mist, while in the garden fresh streams were running and little waterfalls tinkling through thickets of oleanders.
A century before the date of which we are speaking Macellum had been the favourite domain and pleasure-house of the luxurious and half-mad Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia.
Julian took his way towards an isolated grotto, hard by the precipice, in which a statue of the god Pan, playing the flute, stood over a little sacrificial altar. Outside the grotto, a lion’s mouth jetted water into a stone basin, and a curtain of roses masked the entrance while letting through its branches a view of the undulating hills and the plain, far down and drowned in misty blue. The perfume of roses filled the little cave, and the air there would have been oppressive had it not been cooled by a stream channelled in the rocky floor.
The wind scattered the turf with yellow petals of roses, and flung them floating on the water of the basin. From the dark and warm place of shelter could be heard the humming of bees. There Julian, stretched on the moss, used to read the Banquet of Plato, understanding nothing of many of the passages; but their beauty had for him a double relish because it was a fruit forbidden.
When his reading was done, Julian wrapped the book anew in the binding of the “Epistles of the Apostle Paul,” went up to the altar of Pan, gazed at the joyous god as at an old accomplice, and, thrusting his hand into a heap of dried leaves, drew from the interior of the altar, which was cracked and covered with a piece of board, a small object carefully enveloped in cloth. It was his own handiwork—a delightful little Liburnian trireme, or galley with three banks of oars. He set it swimming in the basin; the galley rocked on the miniature waves. The model was complete,—three masts, rigging, oars, gilded prow, and sails made of a fragment of purple silk, the gift of Labda. Nothing was wanting but to fix the rudder, and the boy began the task.
From time to time, while planing a piece of board, he would look into the distance, at the hills outlined in mist through the hedge of roses. Beside his plaything Julian soon forgot all vexations, all hates, and the eternal fear of death. In this little cave he imagined himself a shipwrecked sailor. He was the wily Ulysses in some solitary cavern facing the ocean, building a ship in which he might win back again to Ithaca. But down yonder, there among the hills, where the houses of Cæsarea shone white as the sea-foam, a little cross, glittering high above the roof of the basilica, irritated him still. That everlasting cross! Could he never be free of it, even here in his own cave? He would resolve not to see it, and stooping, redoubled his attention to the galley.
“Julian!” a voice cried; “Julian, Julian! Where in the world is he? Eutropius is looking for you to go to church with him.”
The boy shivered, and nimbly hid his handiwork inside the altar of Pan. He smoothed his hair, shook his clothes, and when he came out of the grotto had resumed an expression of impenetrable Christian hypocrisy.
Eutropius, holding Julian’s hand in his bony one, conducted him to church.
* * *
IV
The Arian basilica of St. Maurice was built almost entirely of blocks taken from the ruined temple of Apollo. The sacred court, the atrium, was surrounded by colonnades. In the middle of this court murmured a fountain, placed there for the ablutions of the faithful. Under one of the side porticoes lay an ancient oaken tomb darkened with age; and in this tomb were the wonder-working bones of St. Mamas, for which Eutropius had obliged Julian and Gallus themselves to build a stone-work shrine. The task of Gallus, who took to it as to a game, went rapidly forward, while the wall of Julian frequently crumbled and proved oddly unsatisfactory; a phenomenon which Eutropius explained by remarking that St. Mamas refused the offering of children possessed by the demon of pride.
The halt, the maimed, the sick, and the blind, expectant of miracle, thronged near the tomb. Julian understood why they stationed themselves here. One of the monks used to hold a pair of balances; the pilgrims—some of them come from hamlets many leagues away—weighed with scrupulous care pieces of linen, woollen stuff, or silk; and having laid them on the tomb of St. Mamas, would fall to praying all night. At daylight the stuff was weighed over again, and the weight compared with the weight on the previous day. If the texture proved heavier, it was declared that the prayer had been answered, that the divine mercy, like dew, had soaked into the stuff and rendered it capable of producing all manner of marvellous cures.
But frequently the prayer was in vain. The stuff weighed just what it did before; and pilgrims would pass whole days, weeks, even months, waiting at the sepulchre. Among the latter there was an old woman named Theodula. Some called her demented; others counted her a saint. For years she had not quitted the tomb of St. Mamas. The daughter for whose restoration she had come to pray had now been a long while dead. But Theodula continued kneeling ceaselessly before her faded and ravelled fragment of cloth.
From the outer court three doors led into the basilica—one for women, one for men, and the third, in the centre, for monks and the lower clergy. With Eutropius and Gallus, Julian went in through this last door, being anagnost or reader of the lessons for the day. Clothed in a long black robe with white sleeves, his hair anointed, and bound back by a fillet that it might not fal
l into his eyes while reading aloud, Julian passed through the midst of the faithful, his eyes fixed humbly on the ground. His pale face assumed almost involuntarily the inevitable and hypocritical expression of submissiveness. He ascended the high rood-loft. The frescoes of the wall to the right depicted the martyrdom of St. Euthymus, in which one executioner seized the sufferer’s head, while another, wrenching open his mouth with pincers, brought the cup of molten lead to his lips. In another scene the executioner with an instrument of torture was flaying the childish and bleeding limbs of St. Euthymus, hanging from a tree by his hands. Beneath these frescoes ran the inscription, “With the blood of the martyrs, O Lord, Thy church is arrayed as in purple and fine linen.”
On the opposite wall sinners were burning in the fire of the pit, and above them rose Paradise and the saints. One of the saints was plucking the fruits of the tree of Eden; another playing the psaltery; and a third, couched on a cloud, contemplated with a beatific smile the tortures of the damned. Beneath were written the words, “Behold! there shall be tears and gnashing of teeth!” The adorers of St. Mamas entered the church like a procession of all human maladies. The bandy-legged, the blind, the armless, the anæmic, children tottering along like old men, epileptics, idiots with pale faces and inflamed eyelids—all bore the mark of a dull and desperate submission. When the choir ceased, there could be heard the contrite sighings of the “widows of the church,” black-robed nuns of the order of St. Basil, and the jingling of the chains of old Pamphilus, who for many a long year had addressed no word to the living, muttering only, “Lord, Lord, give me tears!—grant me mercy!—give me an end to remembrance!”
The atmosphere was that of a warm sepulchral chamber, thick, loaded with incense and the smell of melting wax, hot oil, and the breath of all these sick persons. Now it was Julian’s lot on that day to read aloud part of the Apocalypse.
The terrifying pictures of the Revelation were unfolded, the white horse of Death soared through space above the peoples of the earth, as they knelt weeping at the nearness of the world’s end.
“The sun becomes dark as pitch, and the moon red as blood. Men say to the mountains, Fall on us and hide us from the throne of God and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of His anger is come, and who can resist it?“
Over and over again came the prophecy: “Men shall seek death and shall not find it; they shall desire death and it shall flee from them.“
Lamentation arose: “Thrice happy are the dead!“ and “Then came the bloody destruction of all peoples, and the angel cast his sickle into the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth and cast it into the great wine-press of the wrath of God, and the wine-press was trodden without the city; and there came out blood from the wine-press even unto the bridles of the horses, as far as a thousand and six hundred furlongs,” and men cursed the God of heaven for their plagues, and they did not repent them of their sins; and the angel sang: “He Who worships the Beast and his image shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, prepared in the cup of His anger, and shall be tormented in fire and sulphur before the holy angels and the Lamb, and the smoke of his torture shall rise in the night of ages. For he who shall adore the Beast and his image shall rest no more.“
Julian ended. A profound hush succeeded in the church. Painful sighs rose from the terrified crowd; and the noise of foreheads struck against the earth and the clank of the fetters of Pamphilus, accompanying his perpetual murmur: “Lord, Lord, give me tears!—grant me mercy!—give me an end of remembrance!”
The child raised his eyes towards the spandril of mosaic between the columns of the arcade, representing the Arian image of Christ; a sombre, terrible figure, its wasted face aureoled in gold, and diademed in the fashion of the Byzantine emperors. It was the face of an old man, with a long thin nose and lips severely shut. With his right hand he was blessing the world; in the left he held a book in which was written, “Peace be with you; I am the Light of the World.” He was seated on a splendid throne, and a Roman emperor (Julian imagined that it must be Constantius) was in the act of kissing his feet.
In the penumbral shadow below this image, lighted by a single lamp, could be discerned a bas-relief on a sarcophagus, dating from the earliest Christian times. It displayed sea-nymphs, leopards, gay tritons blowing their horns, and among them Moses, Jonah and his whale, Orpheus charming the beasts with his lyre, an olive-branch, and a dove; the whole sculpture a symbol of pure and childlike faith. In the midst stood the Good Shepherd bearing on his shoulder the sheep that had gone astray, the soul of the sinner. This barefooted youthful figure, with beardless face, had the joyous and simple bearing of a poor peasant, and his smile something of a heavenly sweetness.
Julian imagined that nobody nowadays knew or saw that Good Shepherd; and this little picture of old times was somehow connected in his mind with a dream of his childhood which he tried in vain to recover.
And, gazing at this youth, who seemed as if mysteriously reproaching him, he murmured the name picked up from Mardonius, “Galilean!” At that moment slanting rays of the sun through the windows trembled, above, in a cloud of incense, which, aflame with reflections from the gilded aureole, seemed to upheave the sombre and terrible image of the Arian Christ. The choir chanted, “Let all human flesh be dumb and bow down, fearful and trembling, thinking no more of the things of the earth; for the Emperor of emperors, the Lord of lords, has given Himself afresh as a pledge and a food to His faithful; even He who is surrounded by the hosts of angels, by all powers and dominions, by cherubim with innumerable eyes, and by the six-winged seraphim, veiling their faces and singing, ‘Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!’“
Like a tempest the psalm swept over the bowed heads of the pilgrims. The figure of the Good Shepherd faded into the distance; but its youthful gaze remained steadily fixed upon Julian, a gaze full of reproach. The heart of the child was moved, not by a sense of worship, but by an intolerable fear; a fear before that mystery which was for him to remain for ever insoluble.
* * *
V
From the Arian basilica Julian returned to Macellum, and got out his little galley which he had prepared for this special occasion; and learning that Eutropius, after the Mass, had gone a journey of several days, the boy slipped through the barred gates of the fortress, and ran to the temple of Aphrodite, close to the church of St. Maurice. The sacred wood of the goddess bordered the Christian cemetery. Endless hostilities, debates, wranglings, and even lawsuits, were kept up between these two temples. The Christians begged for the destruction of the Pagan shrine; Olympiodorus, the sacrificing priest, on the other hand, complained that the custodians of the basilica by night would secretly cut down ancient cypresses in the sacred wood, and dig graves for Christians in the soil belonging to Aphrodite.
Into the wood Julian wound his way; a warm breeze blew softly on his cheek. In the afternoon heat the grey and fibrous bark of the cypresses trickled with thick resinous tears. To Julian the dusk seemed perfumed by the very breath of the goddess.
The white bodies of statues stood up in sharp relief against the rich shadow of trees. An Eros there had been maimed by some custodian of the basilica, who had rudely smashed off its marble bow. The weapon of the little winged Love-god, together with his hands, lay in deep grass at the foot of the pedestal. But although one-armed, the mischievous boy continued to take aim, and a mad smile of malice still fluttered on his lips.
Julian entered the house of the priest, Olympiodorus. Its rooms were small but comfortable, and rather bare than luxurious. There was neither carpet nor silver dish to be seen; the floors and furniture were of wood, and the vessels of clay. But everything bore the stamp of taste. The handle of the kitchen lamp was a marvellous little work of art representing Neptune with his trident; the bold outlines of earthen jars, full of olive oil, won the admiration of Julian; and along the walls ran light frescoes, water nymphs mounted on sea-unicorns; and dancing women, clothed in the long robe of votaries of Pallas Athene, hovered along in gr
aceful scroll-work.
The little house stood all smiling in its bath of sunshine. Nereids, dancers, sea-unicorns, the Neptune on the lamp, and the inmates of the house, all seemed folk cheerful by nature, guiltless of ugliness, of malice or spleen. A couple of dozen olives, some white bread, a bunch of grapes, some wine and water, these were enough to turn the little meal into a feast, and Diophane, the wife of Olympiodorus, had in fact tied a wreath of laurel to the door to mark that very day a feast-day.
Julian went into the little garden of the atrium. Under the blue sky a jet of water pulsed into the air, and in the midst of narcissus, acanthus-blossom, tulips, and myrrh, rose a bronze Hermes, winged and smiling like the rest of the cottage, and poised in the act of taking flight. Above the flowers, butterflies and bees playing in the sunshine chased each other, and in the shade of the porch Olympiodorus and his daughter Amaryllis, a pretty girl of some seventeen springs, were playing the Greek game of kottabos. On a slender column fixed in the earth, and oscillating like the scale of a balance, lay a little beam, which bore, slung from each end, a cup; under each cup stood an amphora full of water, crowned by a statuette in metal. The game consisted in throwing from a certain distance a few drops of wine, in as high a curve as possible, into one of the little cups, which, thus suddenly weighted, would descend and strike the statuette.
“Play, play; it is your turn!” cried Amaryllis.
“One, two, three!” Olympiodorus threw the contents of his goblet, and missed.
He burst out into a boyish laugh. It was strange to see the tall grey-headed man so wholly absorbed in his game.
The Death of the Gods Page 3
