Saul Of Tarsus Part 40

He turned toward the ruined wall where Marsyas secluded himself.

The pastor knocked on the dried earth wall without the cave, and the matting was thrust aside. The young Jew stood there.

"I bring thee a message from without," the pastor said at once. "Peace and the love of Christ enter thy heart and uphold thee."

He put the arrow into the young man's hand and saluting him with the sign of the cross, went his way.

"What blind incaution," Marsyas said, after he had stared in astonishment at the things delivered him. "A message! How does he know that he does not bear to me treachery against his people, and his undoing!"

But he sat down and undid the white case.

"That is Agrippa's writing!" he declared after he had read it.

He took up the other. The writing was in Sanskrit.

"O white Brother:" it ran; "this by an arrow from the strong bow of thy lord Prince. Him I compelled. Come forth from among the Nazarenes!

Deliver thyself, by nightfall, in the pure name of her whom thou lovest! Come ere that time, if thou canst, but fail not, otherwise, to be in the forefront of Flora's followers! Be prepared to possess her!

"Fail not, by all the G.o.ds!

"Vasti, by the hand of Khosru, priest to Siva."

Marsyas seized the writing with both hands and sprang up; reread it with straining eyes; walked the two steps permitted him in his cave over and over again; or leaned against the earthen wall to think.

In the pure name of her whom he loved! Lydia? He felt his Essenic self dissolve in a flood of glad confusion, for the moment; instead of self-reproach, he felt more joy than he ever hoped to know in a life devoted to vengeance; instead of guilt, an uplift that separated him for an instant from even his terror for the rapture of contemplating Lydia.

Then the grave alarm that the bayadere's letter aroused possessed him.

A rereading filled him with consternation. The unrevealed peril that he was to avert, the intimation that Lydia was endangered, the practically insurmountable obstacles in the way of his escape, shook him strongly in his self-control. He made no plans, for desperate conditions did not admit of formulated action. To pa.s.s outposts of half a cohort of brawny guards offered success only by a miracle, and the miraculous is not methodical.

Presently, he burst out of his burrow and tramped through the bright hours of the afternoon, cursing the sun for its deadly haste to get under the rim of the world, and dizzy with the pressure of terror and anxiety.

Near the softening hours of the latter part of the day, while the awakening revel roared louder in the distance, he stopped before the ancient temple. The great hamper stood without the heavy entrance with three little Nazarene children tying ropes to the interstices between the fibers to pull it after them like a wagon. Marsyas looked at the hamper, glanced with intent eyes at the front wall,--a duplicate, except for the entrance, of the rear one,--and then rushed away in search of Ananias, the pastor.

He found the pastor sitting outside the house that had given him refuge, cutting soles for sandals from a hide that lay by his side.

The Nazarene raised a face so kindly and interested that the young man dropped down beside him and blundered through his story, in his haste to lay the plan for escape before the old man.

"At sunset," he hurried on, "or when the night is sufficiently heavy to hide us, I can be let down in the hamper by the rear wall of the old temple--if thou wilt bid some of thy congregation to help me! I pray thee--let not thy belief deny me this help, for the life of my beloved, or mayhap her sweet womanhood, dependeth upon my escape!"

He clasped his hands, and gazed with beseeching eyes into the pastor's face. He did not permit himself to think what he would do if the old man denied him.

"It is manifest," Ananias said, after a pause for thought, "that only Nazarenes are to be confined herein. And thou, being a Jew, art here under false imprisonment. We shall not be glad to have thee suffer with us."

"Yes, yes!" Marsyas cried. "I am falsely accused, and thou wilt avert an injustice--nay, by the holy death of the prophets!" he broke off, "if I could bear you all to refuge after me, I would do it!"

"It is the spirit of Christ in thee, my son; nourish it! Yet be not distressed for our sake; He who holdeth the world in the hollow of His hand is with us."

Marsyas awaited anxiously the old man's further speech, when he lapsed into silence after his confident claim of divine protection.

"Give us the plan, my son, and we will help thee," he said at last.

Marsyas took the old man's hand and lifted it impulsively to his lips.

While yet the Serapeum was crowned with pale light, but the more squalid streets were blackening, Marsyas, led by Ananias, came to the old temple-house, and briefly unfolded his plan to three stalwart young Gentiles, who had turned their backs upon Jove and a.s.sumed the grace of Jesus in their hearts. The hamper with which the children had played all day was brought. Three troll-lines, each forty feet in length and borrowed from the fisher Nazarenes who lived along the bay, were securely knotted in three slits about the rim of the basket. Then, waiting only for the rapidly rising dusk, Marsyas, the three young Gentiles and the pastor climbed cautiously to the top of the side-wall of the old structure, and pulled up the hamper after them.

At the angle in the rear, Marsyas, who led the way, stopped. Below it was already night, and he could hear the steps of the sentries in the echoing pa.s.sage. He had not planned how he should pa.s.s them after his descent, but the houses opposite were dark and he did not look for interference, if he took refuge among them.

He stepped into the hamper, and the three young men laid hold on the ropes. The pastor spread his hands in blessing over Marsyas' head, and when the sound of the sentries' footsteps was faintest, the hamper, with little sound and at cautious speed, was let down the steep wall.

It touched the sand with a grinding sound. Marsyas leaped out, jerked one of the ropes in signal and the hamper sprang aloft.

With a muttered blessing on the heads of the apostates, Marsyas leaped across the narrow street, to the shadows of the other houses. Creeping from porch to porch with the sheltering shade of overhanging roofs upon him, he pa.s.sed guard after guard, until the row finally ended and the open s.p.a.ce between him and safety on the bay showed up a line of soldiers guarding the water-front.

The distance was not great, and success thus far had made Marsyas strong. With a prayer to the G.o.d of those who help themselves, he burst from the pa.s.sage into the great open of the docking and sped straight for the bay.

Instantly a howl went up, a pilum launched after him, shot over his shoulder, the rush of twenty mailed feet came in pursuit, swords, spears and axes flew and fell behind him, but panting and unfaltering he rushed straight to the edge of the wharf and dropped out of sight into the bay.

The guards came after him, and hanging over the wharf looked down for him to come up. They saw the circles of water widen and widen, grow stiller and stiller, and finally cease to move, but the head for which they looked did not rise.

Meanwhile Marsyas, native of Galilee and lover of her blue sea, arose between sleeping boats far out into the bay. He caught a chain and clung while he drew breath and rested. Not a vessel was manned; every seaman, officer and pa.s.senger had gone ash.o.r.e to follow Flora.

Presently, he looked about and took his bearings. There through a darkening lane of water, a hundred feet long, he made out the ornate apl.u.s.tre of Agrippa's s.h.i.+p.

He let himself down into the water again, and, swimming around to port, away from land, climbed by her anchor-chains and got upon deck.

The s.h.i.+p was wholly silent and deserted. None was there to ask why he came so unconventionally aboard.

He went to the cabin prepared for the prince's reception, and with steward keys still fast to his belt let himself in and prepared to return to Alexandria.

CHAPTER XX

THE FEAST OF FLORA

Marsyas had a.s.sumed pagan dress, bound a scarlet ribbon for a fillet about his head, and flung a scarlet cloak over his tunic, and so, identified with the revelers, he safely entered the city.

Of the first he met on the brilliantly lighted wharves, he inquired, as a stranger, where he should find the night's celebration. The citizens he addressed, intoxicated with revel, smote him with palm-leaves or thyrsi and haled him with them, as their fellow, seeking Flora.

They skirted the Regio Judaeorum toward the northwest and swept him along toward the Serapeum. Ever the streets opened up, more brilliantly lighted, more thickly crowded, more boisterously noisy; ever the nucleus of the crowd that had encompa.s.sed him increased and thickened and spread, until he was in the heart of a hurrying mult.i.tude. Ever they shouted their indefinite antic.i.p.ations, boasts of their favor with Flora, hopes that the run would be diverting, threats that were half-jocular, half in earnest. And some of them, drunk with anarchy, made hysterical, inarticulate, yelping cries, like dogs on a heated trail. And so, with their silent fellow among them, they went, started into an easy trot, and unhindered, like waters turning over a fall.

The strange, half-mad revelry did not make for rea.s.surance in Marsyas.

His unexplained fears swept over him from time to time like a chill, and an unspeakable hatred for the unwieldy host about him, as well as the protest of his caution against the quick pace they had set, moved him to separate himself from them as soon as he might.

Flora was to begin her flight from the Serapeum, but because the grove was most beautiful and the Temple most rich, the aristocrats of the city had repaired thither to separate themselves from _hoi polloi_, and had builded for themselves the City of Love.