"Let her be a hostage dependent on thy good behavior. Lapse, and I shall send her back to Olympus where they keep such nymphs."
Philadelphus smiled at Laodice, but the shock of their recent talk had shaken her too much to enter into this idle chaff on the lips of those upon whom the fortunes of Israel depended at that very hour.
John looked at her for a long time.
"Amaryllis veils thee in the enchantment of mystery. I think she is tired of me and would have me interested in another woman. She does all things well. Who art thou, in truth?"
The Greek lifted her head and gazed with overt anxiety at the girl; Philadelphus turned toward her uneasily. Here was an opportunity for Laodice either as a disappointed adventuress or as a supplanted wife, to take revenge by exposing this pair of conspirators pledged to undermine the Gischalan. But the girl had no such thought.
"I am Laodice," she said unreadily. "What history I have belongs to another. What future shall be mine depends on others. I wait."
"If you mean to throw me off, Amaryllis, I shall not miss you," said John.
The Greek smiled and plucking Philadelphus' sleeve led both men away.
"Do not commit yourself," she said to John, "there is yet another woman under this roof. You shall have a choice."
They disappeared in the direction of her hall.
Laodice, stunned, amazed and shaken, stood still. The stock of her troubles amounted to a sum of such magnitude that she could not grasp it clearly. The entire structure which her life training and all her purposes, the hope of her house and her husband's, the future of Judea and the King to come, had constituted, had been attacked and threatened to crumble and be swept away in a few hours' time.
Out of the wreck she rescued one hope. Momus would return from the west with proofs in a few days' time–only a few days!
On his way to the oaken door that was for ever double-barred, in that small hall which led to the apartments of Amaryllis' corps of artists, Philadelphus met Salome, the actress. He would have passed her without a word, but the woman, armed with the nettle of a small triumph over the man who held her in contempt, could not forbear piercing him as he passed.
"Hieing away to excite your disappointment further?" she said. "Has the forlorn lady convinced you, yet, that she is indeed your wife?"
"Had I that two hundred talents, I would confess her!" he declared.
"Cruel obstacle! But that two hundred talents is locked away safely, out of your reach. Why do you not run away with this pretty creature?"
Philadelphus glowered at her.
"I have been known to make way with those who stood in my way," he declared.
"I sleep with my door locked," she answered, "and I ever face you. I need never be afraid, therefore."
For a moment he was silent, while she sensed that overweening hate and menace which charged the air about him.
"It is not all as it should be," he said finally. "You are not rid of me. I shall stay."
"You should," she responded comfortably. "You are a show of domesticity which lends color to our claim of wedded state. But you may go or stay. As usual, you are not essential."
"I have been known to be superfluous. However it may be, I get much pleasure in the companionship of this lovely creature, the single flaw in the fine fabric of your villainy. Do not fear her convincing me. She might convince others."
There was no response; after a silence he said as he moved on:
"I shall warn her to feed a morsel of her food to the parrots ere she tastes it, however."
He was gone. The woman felt of the keys that swung under the folds of her robes. Then she, too, went on.
The oaken door was still fast closed when Philadelphus reached it, but he knew that the girl, who lived within, came out to walk in the sunshine of Amaryllis' court at certain hours while the household was engaged within doors.
He had not long to wait. She came out in a little while, and glanced up and down the hall; but he had heard the turn of the bolt and had stepped into shadow in time. Reassured that no one was near, she emerged and passing down the hall entered the court.
And there presently he joined her.
He sat down on one of the stone seats and smiled at her.
"Do I appear excited?" he asked.
She glanced at him indifferently.
"No," she said.
"I have this day seen destruction resolved for the city."
She took his easy declaration with a frown. If it were true he should not show that flippancy; if it were not he should not have jested.
"I saw," he continued, "Titus and his beloved Nicanor ride around the walls. Though they were the full length of a bow-shot from me, I knew what they talked about. Now, this young Nicanor is a gad that tickles Titus when his soft heart would urge him into tendernesses toward the enemy. But for Nicanor, Titus would have withdrawn his legions long ago and left Jerusalem to die of its own violences.
"On the day that you came into Jerusalem, Titus, as a display of amicable intentions, rode up to the walls without arms or armor, trusting to the Jews' soldierly honor in refusing to attack an unarmed man. But the Jews have never been instructed in the nice points of military courtesy, so they went out against him by thousands. And but for the fact that he is practised in dodging arrows and his horse is used to running away, Emperor Vespasian would have to leave the ægis to the unlovely Domitian.
"Any Roman but Titus would remember this against the Jews until he had put the last one in bondage, but Titus is not a Roman. I think some-times that he is a Christian, since it is their boast to love their enemies. Whatever his feelings after that ignominious adventure of a few days ago, forth he rides this morning; beside him the Gad, Nicanor; behind him, that sweet traitor, Josephus.
"The Darling of Mankind rode so meditatively, so dejectedly, that I knew by his attitude, he said: 'Alack, it galls me to go against this goodly city!'
"By the swagger of the Gad I knew he said: 'Dost gall thee, in truth? Then truly, alack! Withhold thy hand until the city comes out against thee, so thou canst hush thy conscience saying that they began it!'
"Saith the Darling, 'But there be babes and innocent men and women within those walls, who, deserving most of all, shall suffer the greatest!'
"'By Hecate!' quoth the Gad, 'there is not a yearling within that city possessing the power to pucker its lips but would spit upon thee!'
"'It would be sacred innocence!' declares Titus.
"'Or an old man that would not burn thine ears with malediction!'
"'That would be holy dotage!'
"'Or a fine young man but would pale thee on a pike!'
"'Then let some one whom they hate less venomously, beseech them to their own salvation,' implores the Darling.
"Whereupon the Gad beckons insinuatingly to Josephus.
"'Josephus,' says he, 'let us, being more lovable men than Titus, go up unto these walls and give the Jews a chance to be kind.'
"Josephus turns pale, but Nicanor rides upon Jerusalem. And at that what should a miscreant Jew do but string an arrow and plunge it nicely, like a bodkin in a pincushion, in the fat shoulder of the Gad! Alas! It was the ruin of the Holy City! When Titus, pale with concern, reaches his friend kicking on the ground, does the Gad curse the Jews and inveigh against the hardy walls that contain them? Not he! He struggles about so that he may look into the eyes of Titus and commands him to make war on them instantly under pain of the accusation of partiality to them against his friends! And behold, war is declared. I, with mine own eyes, saw siege laid effectively about our unhappy city!"
She gazed at him with alarmed, angry, accusing eyes.
"And yet you do nothing!" she said to him.
He smiled and let his lazy glance slip over her, but he made no response.
"O Philadelphus," she said to him, "how you affront opportunity!"
"There are more captivating things than such opportunity. I have known from the beginning that there was nothing here."
She looked at him with unquiet eyes. Why, then, had he written so confidently to her father, if he had not believed in the hope for Judea?
"From the beginning?" she repeated with inquiry. "You wrote my father from Cæsarea–"
"Your father?" he repeated, smiling with insinuation.
"My father!"
"Who is your father?" he asked.
She turned away from him and walked to the other end of the garden. He had never meant to aspire to the Judean throne! He had simply written so determinedly to Costobarus, that the merchant of Ascalon would have no hesitancy in giving him two hundred talents! In these past days, she had learned enough that was blameworthy in this Philadelphus to make him more than despicable in her eyes. Again, as hourly since the last interview in the depression in the hills beyond the well, the fine bigness of that lovable companion of his, that had vanished for all time from her life, rose in radiant contrast. She turned back to her husband, with the pallor of longing and homesickness in her face.
"Does this other woman see no fault in this, your idleness?" she demanded.
"She! By the Shades, she sees nothing in me but fault! I would get me up like a sane man and go out of this mad place, but she hath locked up her dowry away from me, which was the simple cause that invited me to join her, and bids me go without her. And I might–but for one other attraction, dearer than the treasure, which also I would take with me."
"Even if she forces you into deeds, I shall forgive her," she declared at last.
He smiled a baffling smile and she looked at him in despair. The very charm of his personal appearance awakened resentment in her; his deft and easy complaisance angered her because it could be effective. She hated the superficial excellence in him which made him a pleasant companion. He had refused to discuss her identity further, except to prevent her in her own attempts to identify herself. He did not refer to the incidents of their journey to Jerusalem, but she felt that he was conscious of all these things, and her resentment was so great that she put it out of sight, lest at the time when she should be proved she would have come to hate him to the further thwarting of their work for Israel.
"It is sweet to have you concerned for me. Now you may understand how much I am troubled for your own welfare. Do not regard me with that unbending gaze. I am, first and before all else, your friend."
"You have changed," she said slowly. "I did not find in you this solicitude in the hills."
"Unhappiness," he sighed, "makes most men law-less. I should be even now as bad, were I not sure of the sympathy you feel for me."
She looked at him with large disdain.
"Does not this woman treat you well?" she asked with the first glimmer of sarcasm in her eyes.
"Her displeasure in me is that I do not make her a queen; yours, however, that I can not save this doomed nation! Her ambitions are for herself; yours are for me. Which waketh the response in my heart, lady?"
"What have I lived for?" she burst out. "For what was I brought up and schooled? For what have I sacrificed all the light and desirable things of my youth, but for–"
"Nay! Do not show me, yet, that you are only bent on being queen!" he exclaimed.
"I care for nothing but the rescue of Judea!" she cried passionately. "There is nothing left to me but that!"
"Then your ambitions are still for me. Alas, that the Messiah has come and gone!"
It was his first reference to the great calamity he had told to her a short time before. Its recurrence after she had resolved to regard it as an impossible and blasphemous tale brought a chill to her heart.
"If I can prove to you that there is no hope for Jerusalem, what then?" he asked suddenly.
She flung off the question with a gesture.
"Answer me. What then?"
"It is unimaginable what shall come to pass when God deserts His own."
"No need for imaginings. Look at Jerusalem and observe the fact. And if we be abandoned, what fealty do we owe to a God that deserts us? If you believe or not you are lost. Let us go out and live."
"If God has deserted us," she said scornfully, "how shall we be happier elsewhere than here?"
"Every god to its own country. The Olympians are a jovial lot. I have seen Joy's very self in heathendom."
She moved away but he rose and followed her.
"Whoever you are," he said in another tone, "your heritage of innocence and earnestness is plain as an open scroll upon your face. Nothing in all the world so appeals to the generosity in the heart of a man as the purity of the woman who is pure. I have said that I am your friend. I do not hold it against you that you doubt that word. Nothing remains but the deed to confirm it. This place is lost–as good as a heap of ashes and splintered rock, this hour! Come away! I'll sacrifice the treasure to protect you!"
"Philadelphus," she said gravely, "we were sent hither to succeed or to suffer the penalty of our failure. My father died that we might have this opportunity. We must use it, or perish with it!"
He shook his head and walked away a step or two.
"You have not the true meaning of life," he said. "Indeed how few of us understand! Obstacles are not an incentive toward attaining impossible things. They are barriers set up by the kindly disposed gods to inform man that he is opposing destiny when he aspires to things he should not have. We were not made to fling ourselves against mighty opposition throughout the little daylight we have; to wound ourselves, to deny ourselves, to alienate that winsome sprite Pleasure, to attain something which was not intended for us by the signs of the obstructions placed in our paths. Who are we that we should achieve mightily! What are we when the gods have done with us, but a handful of dust! Who saves himself from age and unloveliness and ultimate imbecility, by all the superhuman efforts he may exert! A pest on the first morose man that made dismal endeavor a virtue!"
She looked at him with amazement, though until that hour she believed that this man could astonish her no more.
"Misfortune comes often enough without our knocking at her door," he continued. "Mankind is the only creature with conceit enough to seek to emulate the gods. It is wrong to think that to be moral is to be miserable. Nature's scheme for us, faithfully fulfilled, is always pleasurable. We have only to recognize it, and receive its benefits. Nothing on earth is luckier than man, if he but knew it. A murrain on ambition! Let us be glad!"
How could she be glad with such a man! The time, the call of the hour, the need of her nation, the obligation to her dead father–all these things stood in her way. How had she felt, were this that engaging stranger who had called himself Hesper, urging her to be glad with him! She felt, then and there, the recurrence of guilt which the sight of the reproachful face of Momus had brought to her when she found herself forgetting her loyalty in the presence of that winsome man. The thought stopped the bitter speech that rose to her lips. She looked away and made no answer. He was close beside her.
"Come away and let this woman who wishes the kingdom have it. She had liefer be rid of me than not."
She gazed at him with a peculiar blankness stealing over her face.
"Oh, for the quintessence of all compounded oaths to charge my vow!" he said.
"For what?" she asked.
"My love, Phryne!"
At the old pagan name with which he had affronted her that morning in the hills, Laodice drew back sharply.
"Dost thou believe in me?" she asked.
"Believe what?"
"That I am thy wife."
"Tut! Back to the old quarrel! No! But by Heaven, thou art my sweetheart!"
She stopped at the edge of an exclamation and looked at him with widening eyes.
"Come, let us get out of this place. I can get the dowry! Let her stay here and be queen over this place if she will. I had rather possess you than all the kingdoms!"
But Laodice flung him off while a flame of anger crimsoned her face.
"Thou to insult me, thy lawful wife!" she brought out between clenched teeth. "Thou to offer affront to thine own marriage! I to live in shame with mine own husband!"
The insult in his speech overwhelmed her and after a moment's lingering for words to express her rage, she turned and fled back to her room and barred her door upon him.
After sunset the lights leaped up in the hall of Amaryllis the Greek. Presently there came a knock at Laodice's door. The girl, fearing that Philadelphus stood without, sat still and made no answer. A moment later the visitor spoke. It was the little girl who acted as page for the Greek.
"Open, lady; it is I, Myrrha."
Laodice went to the windows.
"Amaryllis sends thee greeting and would speak with thee, in her hall," the girl said.
Reluctantly Laodice, who feared the revelation which the light might have to make of her stunned and revolted face, followed the page.
The Greek was standing, as if in evidence that the interview would not be long. She noted the intense change on the face of her young guest and watched her narrowly for any new light which her disclosure would bring.
"I have sent for thee," the Greek began smoothly, "to tell thee somewhat that I should perhaps withhold, that thou shouldst sleep well, this night. But it is a perplexity perhaps thou wouldst face at once."
Laodice bowed her head.
"It is this: Titus and his friend, Nicanor, approached too close the walls this day, and Nicanor was wounded by an arrow. In retaliation, perfect siege hath been laid about the walls. None may come into the city."
"And–Momus, my servant," Laodice cried, waking for the first time to the calamity in this blockade, "he can not come back to me?"
"No. If he attempts it, he will be captured and put to death."
Laodice clasped her hands, while drop by drop the color left her face.
"In God's name," she whispered, "what will become of me?"
Amaryllis made no answer.
"Can–can I not go out?" Laodice asked presently, depending entirely on the Greek as adviser.
"You can–but to what fortune? Perhaps–" She stopped a moment. "No," she continued, "you have never been in a camp. No; you can not go out."
"What, then, am I to do?" Laodice cried with increasing alarm.
Amaryllis shrugged her shoulders.
"I can advise with John," she said. "Doubtless he will allow you to remain here until you can provide yourself with other shelter."
Laodice heard this cold sentence with a chill of fear that was new to her. Faint pictures of hunger and violence, terrifying in the extreme, confronted her. Yet not any of them frightened her more than the offered favor of the Gischalan. Her indignation at the woman who had supplanted her swept over her with a reflexive flush of heat.
"God of my fathers, judge her in her lies, and pour the fire of Thy wrath upon her!" she exclaimed vehemently.
Amaryllis gazed curiously at the girl. In her soul, she asked herself if there might not be unsounded depths of fierceness in this nature which she ought not to stir up.
"Thou hast hope," she said tactfully. "She hath no such beauty as thine!"
"Nothing but my proofs!" Laodice broke in.
"And Philadelphus is a young man."
"Rejecting her only because I am fairer than she! He is no just man!" Laodice cried hotly.
"Softly, child," the Greek said, smiling; "thou hast said that he is thy husband."
Laodice turned away, her brain whirling with anger, fear and shame.
"Well?" said the Greek coolly, after a silence.
"Where shall I go?" Laodice asked.
"Thou hast been too tenderly nurtured to go into the streets. I shall ask John to shelter thee until thou canst care for thyself."
Laodice looked at her without understanding.
"Thou canst not stay here for long because the wife to Philadelphus is in a way a power in my house and she will not suffer it. But never fear; Jerusalem is not yet so far gone that it would not enjoy a pretty stranger."
The curious sense of indignation that possessed Laodice was purely instinctive. Her mind could not sense the actual insult in the Greek's words.
"I would advise you to be kind to Philadelphus."
"But, but–" Laodice cried, struggling with tears and shame, "he has this day offered insult to his own marriage with me, by asking that I live in shame with him till it could be proved that I am his wife!"
The Greek's smile did not change.
"If we weigh all the unpleasantness of wedded life in too delicate a balance, my friend, I fear there would be little, indeed, that would escape condemnation as humiliating."
Laodice raised her scarlet face to look in wonder at the Greek. The cold smiling lips dismayed her for a moment.
"And thou seest no shame in this?" she faltered.
"Thou sayest he is thy husband; why resent it?"
"Dost thou not see–see that–what am I but a shameless woman, if I live with him, though I be married to him thrice over!"
"After all," said the Greek, after a silence which said more than words, "it is the consciousness of your own integrity which must influence you; not what others think of you. It is not as if your husband thought better of you than you really are."
"And you believe that I–" Laodice began and stopped, bewildered.
Amaryllis, smiling, moved toward the inner corridor of her house. At the threshold of the arch she called back:
"Please yourself, my friend," and was gone.
Laodice was, by this time, stunned and intensely repelled. The hand on which Amaryllis had laid hers in passing tingled under the touch. Unconsciously she shook off the sensation of contact. The whole clear white interior of the hall became instantly unclean. Her standards of right and wrong were shaken; the wholesale assaults on her ideals left her shocked and unconfident. She felt the panic that all innocent women feel when suddenly aroused to the unfitness of their surroundings.
When she turned to hurry to her room, a flood of scarlet rushed into her cheeks and she shrank back, shaken with surprise and delight.
Before her stood a man, pale and thin, with his eyes upon her.
Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original motive. The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness, rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside.
The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city, located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two years before. It was some distance up in the hills to the west. Since the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the sheep-dog, rushed the sheep out of the sedge and hurried them after his master, and in an hour Joseph was once more settled, his sheep were once more nosing over the rocky slants of a hill, his dog once more flat on his belly, watching. But it was a different day, after all.
The hut of the fagot-maker was the four walls and a roof and the earth that floored it, but it was wealth because it was shelter. It had two doors which were merely openings in the sides and between them lay the man on sheep-pelts with a cotton abas, which one of the Galileans had left, over him. At one of these doors, sitting sidewise, so that he could watch in or out, sat Joseph.
All night the man on the sheepskins spoke to the blackened thatch above him of the siege of Jerusalem and the treachery of Julian of Ephesus. He read letters from Costobarus and instructed Aquila over and over again. Then he tossed a coin and spent hours counting the hairs in the long locks that fell from the shining head of the moon down upon his breast, at midnight.
At times the boy, with the exquisite beauty of sleep on his heavy lids, would creep over from his vigil at the door and lay his cool hand on the sick man's forehead. And the sick man would speak in a low controlled voice, saying:
"Naaman being a leper, my friend, why was not the law fulfilled against him?"
But the soothing influence of that touch did not endure. Again, he took census of the fighting-men of Judea, by the Roman statistics which he had from the decurion, and searched through his tunic for his wallet to write down the result. Failing to find it, he raised himself to shout for Julian to return his property.
Again the cool hands would stroke the fevered forehead and the sick man would say:
"Good my Lord, they fetched snow from the mountains to cool this wine."
But how white the hands of that fair girl in the hills! Why, these hands beside hers were as satyrs' hooves to anemones! Her lashes were so long, and he knew that her lips were as cool as the heart of a melon; but that husband of hers knew better than he!
And he, grandson of the just Maccabee, allied by marriage to the noble line of Costobarus through his daughter, Laodice, the bride with the greatest dowry in Judea, had staked his soul on the toss of a coin and had lost it!
At this the shepherd boy straightened himself and gave attention.
But he was wholly lost, the sick man would go on, rolling his head from side to side; he could not join Laodice because he had loved a woman of the wayside and could not cast out that love; he was not a Jew because he had rather linger with this strange beauty in the hills than hasten on the rescue of Jerusalem; he had not apostatized, though he was as wholly lost as if he had done so; he hated the heathen and would not be one of them. He would abide in the wilderness and perish, if this young spirit that abode by his side, with a face like Michael's and a form so like the shepherd David's, would only suffer the darkness to come at him.
"Unless I mistake," the little shepherd said at such times, "there is more than a wound troubling this head."
Thus day in and day out the shepherd watched by the sick man who had no medicine but the recuperative powers of his strong young body. So there came a night when the boy, rousing from a doze into which he had dropped, saw the sick man stretched upon his pallet motionless as he had not been for days. The shepherd felt the forehead and the wrists and sank again into slumber. At dawn he rose from the earth which had been his bed throughout this time and went forth to attend his flocks, and when he was gone, the sick man opened his eyes.
He looked up at the blackened rafters; he looked out at either door and frowned perplexed, first at the hills, then at the valley. He raised his head and dropped it suddenly with great amazement and much weariness. Finally he ventured to lift a wilted and fragile hand and looked at it. It was not white; but it was unsteady as a laurel leaf beside a waterfall. After a moment's rest from the exertion he parted his lips to speak, but a whisper faint as the sound of the air in the shrubs issued from them. He listened but there was no answer. There was the activity of birds and insects, moving leaves and bleating sheep without, but it was all blithely indifferent to him. Finally he extended his arms and pressing them on his pallet tried to rise, but he could have lifted the earth as easily. Falling back and dazed with weakness, he lay still and slept again.
When he awoke rested sufficiently to think, he recalled that he had been twice stabbed by Julian of Ephesus by the marsh on the road to Jerusalem. He had probably been carried to this place and nursed back to life by the householder.
Then he remembered. In his search after cause for his cousin's attack upon him, he readily fixed upon Julian's rage at the Maccabee's preëmption of the beautiful girl in the hills. Instantly, the disgrace of violence committed in a quarrel between himself and his cousin over the possession of a woman, appealed to him. And even as instantly, his defiant heart accepted its shame and persisted in its fault. It is an extreme of love, indeed, if no circumstance however impelling raises a regret in the heart of a man; for he flung off with a weak gesture any chiding of conscience against cherishing his dream, and abandoned himself wholly to his yearning for the girl in the tissue of moonbeams.
There was a quiet step on the earth at the threshold. Joseph, the shepherd, stood there. The two looked at each other; one with inquiry and weakness in his face; the other with good-will and reassurance.
"Boy," said the Maccabee feebly, "I have been sick."
"Friend, I am witness to that. I am your nurse," the boy replied.
After a little silence the Maccabee extended his hand. The boy took it with a sudden flush of emotion, but feeling its weakness, refrained from pressing it too hard, and laid it back with great care on his patient's breast. The Maccabee looked out at the door, away from the full eyes of his young host.
He was touched presently, and a cup of milk was silently put to his lips. He drank and turning himself with effort fell asleep.
When he awoke again, after many hours, it was night. In the door with his head dropped back between his shoulders gazing up at the sky overhead, sat the boy.
"Where," the Maccabee began, "are the rest of you?"
The boy turned around quickly, and answered with all seriousness.
"I am all here."
"Did you," the Maccabee began again, after silence, "care for me alone?"
"There has been no one here but us," the boy said, hesitating at the symptoms of gratitude in the Maccabee's voice.
"Us?"
"You and me."
After another silence, the Maccabee laughed weakly.
"It requires two to constitute 'us' and I am, by all signs, not a whole one!"
"But you will be in a few days," the boy declared admiringly. "You are an excellent sick man."
The Maccabee looked at him meditatively.
"I am merely perverse," he said darkly; "I knew it would be so much pleasure to my murderer to know that I died, duly."
The shepherd repressed his curiosity, as the best thing for his patient's welfare, and suggested another subject rather disjointedly.
"I have been thinking," he said, "about Jerusalem. I was there once upon a time."
"Once!" the Maccabee said. "You are old enough to attend the Passover."
"But our people do not attend the feast. We are Christians."
The Maccabee moved so that he could look at the boy. He might have known it, he exclaimed to himself. It was just such an extreme act of mercy, this assuming the care of a stranger in a wilderness, as he had ever known Christians to do in that city of irrational faiths, Ephesus.
"Well?" he said, hoping the boy would go on and spare him an expression on that announcement.
"I can not forget Jerusalem."
"No one forgets Jerusalem–except one that falls in love by the wayside," the man said.
Again the boy detected a ring of unexplained melancholy in his patient's voice, and talked on as a preventive.
"Urban, the pastor, took me there. It was in the days of mine instruction for baptism. He went to Jerusalem to trial, but there was disorder in the city about the procurator, who was driven out that day, and Urban was not called. But he remained, lest he be accused of fleeing, and then it was he took me over the walks of Jesus."
"Jesus–that is the name," the Maccabee said to himself. "They are born, given in marriage, fall or flourish, live and die in that name. Likewise they pick up a wounded stranger and care for him in that name. They are a strange people, a strange people!"
"They would not let us into the Temple," Joseph went on, "because I am an Arab, born a Christian. So I could not see where Jesus was presented, in infancy. But we went to the synagogues where He taught; we went out upon Olivet to Gethsemane where He suffered in the Garden; we climbed that hill to the south from which He looked upon the City and wept over it, and prophesied this hour. Then we sought the ravine where Judas betrayed Him with a kiss, and afterward Urban led me over the streets by which He was taken first to Annas and to Caiaphas and thence to Pilate and to Herod. After that, by the Way of the Cross to Golgotha; from there to His Tomb. And when we had seen the Guest-chamber and stood upon the Place of the Ascension, I needed no further instruction."
The boy had forgotten his guest. By the rapt light in his eyes, the Maccabee knew that the boy was once more journeying over the stones of the streets of the Holy City, or standing awed on the polished pavements of its lordly interiors, or on the topmost point of her hills with the broad-winged wind from the east flying his long locks.
"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy," the Maccabee said, half to himself.
The boy heard him, but his patient's words merged with the dream that held him entranced. The Maccabee went on.
"So said the Psalmist to himself," he said. "What had he to do for Jerusalem; what did he fear would win him away from that labor for Jerusalem, that he took that vow? It was easy enough to revile Babylon, the oppressor, that stood between him and Jerusalem; but what if he had been the captive of beauty, and chained by the bonds of lovely hair!"
The boy turned now and looked at the Maccabee. The eyes of the two met fair. Then the Maccabee unburdened his soul and told of the girl to this child, who was a Christian and a humble shepherd in the starved hills of Judea.
"I met her," the boy said after a long silence. "And by what I learned of her spirit that night, she will not be happy to know that you have stepped aside for her sake."
"You met her, also; and you loved her, too?"
The boy assented gravely. The Maccabee slowly lifted his eyes from the young shepherd's face, till they rested on the slope of sky filled with stars visible through the open door.
"And she would have me go on to this city, to the one who awaits me there and whom I shall not be glad to see; take up the labor that will be robbed of its chief joy in its success and live the long, long days of life without her?"
The boy made no answer to this; he knew that this white-faced man was wrestling with himself and comment from him was not expected. By the light of the failing fire without, he saw that face sober, take on shadow and grow immeasurably sad. The minutes passed and he knew that the Maccabee would not speak again.
Thereafter followed three days of silence, except the essential communication or the mutterings of the Maccabee against his weakness and unsteadiness. On the fourth day the Maccabee declared that he was able to travel. Joseph protested, but not for long. He had learned in the sojourn of his guest that this man was in the habit of doing as he pleased. So the shepherd sighed and let him go reluctantly.
"But," he insisted to the last moment, "remember that Pella is a City of Refuge. If Jerusalem ceases to be hospitable, come to Pella."
A thought struck him.
"She," he said in a low tone, "promised that she would come."
"Then expect me," the Maccabee said.
The shepherd boy smiled contentedly and blessed the Maccabee and let him go. As long as the man could see, his young host watched him, and at the summit of the hill the Maccabee turned to wave his final farewell. When the path dipped down the other side of the hill, the man felt that more than the sunshine had been cut off by its great shadow.
He did not go forward with a light heart. The whole of his purpose had suddenly resolved itself into duty. There had been a certain nervous expectancy that was almost fear in the thought of meeting the grown woman he had married in her babyhood. He had lived in Ephesus with an unengaged heart in all the crowd of opportunities for love, good and bad. He had magnetism, strength, aloofness and a certain beauty–four qualifications which had made him over and over again immensely attractive to all classes of Ephesian women. But whatever his response to them, he had not loved. Love and marriage were things so apart from his activities as to be uninteresting. When finally he was called in full manhood to assume without preliminary both of these things, he was uncomfortable and apprehensive. But after he had met the girl in the hills, his sensations of reluctance became emphatic, became an actual dread, so that he thrust away all thought of the domestic side of the life that confronted him, and bitterly resigned all hope in the tender things that were the portion of all men. The villainy of Julian of Ephesus engaged him chiefly, and his punishment. After that, then the establishment of his kingdom, politics, conquest and power–but not love!
Late that afternoon, he stepped out of a wady west of Jerusalem and halted.
Ahead of him ran a road depressed between worn, hard, bare banks of earth, past a deserted pool, marged with stone, up shining surfaces of outcropping rock, through avenues of clustered tombs, pillars, pagan monuments which were tracks of the Herods, dead and abandoned, splendid pleasure gardens, suburban palaces lifeless and still, toward the looming Tower of Hippicus, brooding over a fast-closed gate.
The Maccabee nodded. It was as he had expected. The city was besieged.
It was afternoon, a week-day at the busiest portal of Jerusalem; but save for the fixed and pygmy sentry upon the tower, there was no living thing to be seen, no single sound to be heard.
Beyond the mounting hills of the City of David stood up, shouldering like mantles of snow their burden of sun-whitened houses. Above it all, supreme over the blackened masonry of Roman Antonia, stood a glittering vision in marble and gold–the Temple. At a distance it could not be seen that any of those inwalled splendors lacked; Jerusalem appeared intact, but the multitudes at the gate were absent and the voice of the city was stilled.
For one expecting to find Jerusalem animated and beholding it still and lifeless, how quickly its white walls, its white houses and its sparkling Temple became haunted, dead crypts and sepulchers.
But presently there came across the considerable distance that lay between him and Jerusalem, a sound remarkably distinct because of the utter stillness that prevailed. It was the jingle of harness and the ring of hoof-beats upon stones embedded in the gray earth.
A Roman in armor polished like gold, with a floating mantle significantly bordered in purple, rode slowly into the open space, drew up his horse and stopped. The Maccabee looked at him sharply, then quitted his shelter and walked down toward the rider. At sight of him, the horseman clapped his hand to his short sword, but the Maccabee put up his empty hands and smiled at the man of all superior advantage. Then the light of recognition broke over the Roman's face.
"You!" he cried.
"I, Cæsar," the Maccabee responded. For a moment there was silence in which the Jew watched the flickering of amazement and perplexity on Titus' face.
"What do you here, away from Ephesus, and worse, attempting to run my lines?" he demanded finally.
The Maccabee signed toward the walls.
"My wife is there," he said briefly.
The Roman made an exclamation which showed the sudden change to enlightenment.
"Solicitous after these many years?" he demanded.
"She has two hundred talents," the Maccabee replied.
Titus smiled and shook his head.
"I ought to keep her there. Rome must get treasure enough out of that rebellious city to repay her for her pains in subjugating it."
"Pay yourself out of another pocket than mine. It will take two hundred talents to repay me for all that I have suffered to get it. I want the countersign, Titus. You owe me it."
"Will you come out of there, at once?" the Roman demanded. "Not that I suspect you will make the city harder to take, but I should dislike to make war on an old comrade in my Ephesian revels."
The Maccabee looked doubtful.
"I can not promise," he said. "At least do not hold off the siege until you see me again without the walls. It might lose you prestige in Rome."
Titus swung his bridle while he gazed at the Maccabee.
"I wish Nicanor were here," he said finally. "He might be able to see harm in you; but I never could. You will have to promise me something–anything so it is a promise–before I can let you in. Something to appease Nicanor, else I shall never hear the last of this."
The Maccabee laughed, the sudden harsh laugh of one impelled to amusement unexpectedly.
"Assure Nicanor, for me, that I shall come out of Jerusalem one day. Dead or alive, I shall do it! You need not add that I did not specify the date of my exodus. What is the word?"
"Berenice. And Jove help you! Farewell."
Titus rode on.
A little later, after a parley with the Roman sentries and again with the sentries at the Gate of Hippicus, the Maccabee was admitted to the Holy City.
About him as he passed through the gates were the soldiers of Simon. They were not such men as he expected to see defending the City of David. There was an extravagant, half-pastoral manner about them, a pose of which they should not have been conscious at this hour of peril for the nation and the hierarchy. He looked at their incomplete, meaningless uniform, at their arms, half savage, at their faces, half mad, and believed that he, with an army rationally organized and effectually equipped, would have little difficulty in subduing the unbalanced forces of Simon.
Since siege was laid, he did not expect to be met by Amaryllis' servant in the purple turban. He approached a citizen.
"I seek Amaryllis, the Seleucid," he said.
The eye of the Jew traveled over him, with some disapproval.
"The mistress of the Gischalan?" was the returned inquiry. The Maccabee assented calmly. The young man indicated a broad street moving with people which led with tolerable directness toward the base of Moriah.
"Hence to the Tyropean Bridge at the end of this street; thence down beside the bridge into Gihon. Cross to the wall supporting Moriah and builded against it thou wilt find a new house, of the fashion of the Greeks. If thou canst pass her sentries, thou wilt find her within."
The Maccabee thanked his informant and turned through the Passover hosts to follow the directions.
To a visitor recently familiar with the city, Jerusalem would have been strange; he would have been lost in its ruined and disordered streets. But this man came with only the four corners of the compass to direct him and the Temple as a landmark to guide him. Therefore though he entered upon territory which he had not traversed since childhood he went forward confidently.
It was not simple; it was not readily done; but the darkness found him at his destination.
When he was within a rod of the house, he was halted by a Jewish soldier. He whispered to the man the word which Amaryllis had sent to him, and the soldier stepped aside and let him pass.
In another moment he was admitted to the house of Amaryllis.
A wick coated with aromatic wax burned in the brass bowl on a tripod and cast a crystal clear light down upon the exedra and the delicate lectern with its rolls of parchment and brass cylinders from which they had been withdrawn. Opposite, with her arms close down to her sides, her hands clenched, her shoulders drawn up, stood the girl he had played for and won in the hills of Judea!
A sudden wave of delight, a sudden rush of blood through his veins, swept before it and away for that time all memory of his struggle and his resolution to renounce her. All that was left was the irresistible storm of impulse upon his reserve and his self-control.
When she recognized him, she started violently, smote her hands together and gazed at him with such overweening joy written on her face, that he would have swept her into his arms, but for her quick recovery and retreat. In shelter behind the exedra she halted, fended from him by the marble seat. He gazed across its back at her with all the love of his determined soul shining in his eyes.
"You! You!" she cried.
"But you!" he cried back at her across the exedra.
The preposterousness of their greetings appealed to them at that moment and they both laughed. He started around the exedra; she moved away.
"Stay!" he begged. "I want only to touch–your hand."
Shyly, she let him take both of her hands, and he lifted them in spite of her little show of resistance and kissed them.
"We might have saved ourselves farewells and journeyed together," he said blithely.
"But I thought you had gone back to Ephesus," she said.
"What! After you had told me you were going to Jerusalem? No. I have been nursing a knife wound in a sheep hovel in the hills since an hour after I saw you last."
Her lips parted and her face grew grave, deeply compassionate and grieved. If there remained any weakness in his frame before that moment, the spell of her pity enchanted him to strength again. He found himself searching for words to describe his pain, that he might elicit more of that curative sweet.
"I was very near to death," he added seriously.
"What–what happened?" she asked, noting the pallor on his face under the suffusion which his pleasure had made there.
"There was one more in the party than was needed; so my amiable companion reduced the number by stabbing me in the back," he explained.
There was instant silence. Slowly she drew away from him. Entire pallor covered her face and in her eyes grew a horror.
"Did–do you say that Philadelphus stabbed–you–in the back?" she asked, speaking slowly.
"Phila–" he stopped on the brink of a puzzled inquiry, and for a space they regarded each other, each turning over his own perplexity for himself.
"Ask me that again," he commanded her suddenly. "I did not understand."
She hesitated and closed her lips. Her husband had stabbed this man in the back! Because of her? No! Philadelphus had refused to believe her. Why then should he have committed such a deed?
"So you are not ready to believe it of this–Philadelphus?" he asked, venturing his question on an immense surmise that was forcing itself upon him.
She looked at him with beseeching eyes. How was she to regard herself in this matter? A partizan of the man she hated, or a sympathizer with this stranger who had already given her too much joy? Was she never to know any good of this man to whom she was wedded? For a moment losing sight of her concern for Judea and her resolution that her father should not have died in vain, she was rejoiced that another woman had taken her place by his side. The quasi liberty made her interest in this stranger at least not entirely sinful.
"Who are you?" he demanded finally.
How, then, could she tell him that she was the wife of the man who had treacherously attempted his life? How, also, since she was denied by every one in that house, expect him to believe her? The bitterness of her recent interview with Amaryllis rose to the surface again.
"I am nothing; I have no name; I am nobody!" she cried.
He was startled.
"What is this? Are you not welcome in this house?" he demanded.
"Yes–and no! Amaryllis is good–but–"
"But what?"
She shook her head.
"Surely, thou canst speak without fear to me," he said gently.
"There is–only Amaryllis is kind," she essayed finally.
He laid his hand on her wrist.
"Is it–the woman from Ascalon?" he asked, his suspicion lighting instantly upon the wife whom he had expected to meet.
She flung up her head and gazed at him with startled eyes. He believed that he had touched upon the fact.
"So!" he exclaimed.
"She has deceived Philadelphus–" she whispered defensively, but he broke in sharply.
"Whom hath she deceived?"
She closed her lips and looked at him perplexed. Certainly this was the companion of Philadelphus, who had told her freely half of her husband's ambitions, long before he had come to Jerusalem. She could not have betrayed her husband in thus mentioning his name.
"Your companion of the journey hither–whom you even now accused–Philadelphus Maccabaeus."
There was a dead pause in which his fingers still held her wrist and his deep eyes were fixed on her face. He was recalling by immense mental bounds all the evidence that would tend to confirm the suspicion in his brain. He had told her his own story but had invested it in Julian of Ephesus. His wallet, with all its proofs, was gone; the Ephesian had examined him carefully to know if any one in Jerusalem would recognize him; and lastly, without cause, Julian had stabbed him in the back. Could it be possible that Julian of Ephesus, believing that he had made way with the Maccabee, had come to Jerusalem, masquerading under his name?
While he stood thus gazing, hardly seeing the face that looked up at him with such troubled wonder, he saw her turn her eyes quickly, shrink; and then wrenching her hands from his, she fled.
He looked up. Two women were standing before him.
"I seek Amaryllis, the Seleucid," he said, recovering himself.
"I am she," the Greek said, stepping forward.
"Thou entertainest Laodice, daughter of Costobarus of Ascalon?" he added.
The Greek bowed.
"I would see her," he said bluntly.
Amaryllis signed to the woman at her side.
"This is she," she said simply.
The Maccabee looked quickly at the woman. After his close communication with the beautiful girl for whom his heart warmed as it had never done before, he was instantly aware of an immense contrast between her and the woman who had been introduced to him at that moment. They were both Jewesses; both were beautiful, each in her own way; both appeared intelligent and winsome. But he loved the girl, and this woman stood in the way of that love. Therefore her charms were nullified; her latent faults intensified; all in all she repelled him because she was an obstacle.
The injustice in his feelings toward her did not occur to him. He was angry because she had come; he hated her for her stateliness; he found himself looking for defects in her and belittling her undeniable graces. Confused and for the moment without plan, he looked at her frowning, and with cold astonishment the woman gazed back at him.
"Thou art Laodice, daughter of Costobarus?" he asked, to gain time.
She inclined her head.
"When–when dost thou expect Philadelphus?" he asked next.
"Why do you ask?" she parried.
"I–I have a message for him," he essayed finally. "Is he here?"
"Tell me, who art thou?" the woman asked pointedly.
A vision of the girl, flushed and trembling with pleasure at sight of him, flashed with poignant effect upon him at that moment. The warmth and softness of her hands under the pressure of his happy lips was still with him. It would be infidelity to his own feelings to renounce her then. It was becoming a physical impossibility for him to accept this other woman.
He hesitated and reddened. An old subterfuge occurred to him at a desperate minute.
"I–I am Hesper–of Ephesus," he essayed.
"What is thy business with Philadelphus?" the woman persisted.
Again the Maccabee floundered. It had been easy to invent a story to keep the woman he loved from discovering that he was a married man, but the point in question was different. Now, filled with dismay and indignation, apprehension and reluctance, his fertile mind failed him at the moment of its greatest need.
And the eyes of the Greek, filling with suspicion and intense interest, rested upon him.
"I asked," the actress repeated calmly, "thy business with Philadelphus."
At that instant a tremendous shock shook the house to its foundations; the hanging lamps lurched; the exedra jarred and in an instant several of the servants appeared at various openings into passages. Before any of the group could stir, a second thunderous shock sent a tremor over the room, and a fragment of marble detached from a support overhead and dropped to the pavement.
"It is an attack!" Amaryllis cried.
"On this house?" Salome demanded.
There was a clatter of arms and several men in Jewish armor rushed through the chamber from the passage that led in from the Temple.
"I shall see," said the Maccabee, and followed the men at once.
Without he saw the night sky overhead crossed by dark stones flying over the wall to the east. Warfare had begun.
But the attack was simply preliminary and desultory. It ceased while he waited. Presently it began farther toward the north. The catapult had been moved. The Maccabee hesitated in the colonnade.
The beautiful girl in the house of Amaryllis was in no further danger. The interruption had saved him at a critical moment.
He walked down the steps and out into the night.
"Liberty!" he whispered with a sigh of relief. "Now what to do?"
The night following the wounding of Nicanor, John spent on his fortifications expecting an attack. It was one of the few nights when the Gischalan kept vigil, for he refused to contribute fatigue to the prospering of his cause.
Sometime in mid-morning he appeared in the house of Amaryllis and sent a servant to her asking her to breakfast with him. The Greek sent him in return a wax tablet on which she had written that she was shut up in her chamber writing verse, but that she had provided him a companion as entertaining as she.
When he passed into the Greek's dining-room, the woman who called herself wife to Philadelphus awaited him at the table.
When he sat she dropped into a chair beside him and laid before him a bunch of grapes from Crete, preserved throughout the winter in casks filled with ground cork.
"It is the last, Amaryllis says," she observed. "And siege is laid."
John looked ruefully at the fruit.
"Perhaps," he said after thought, "were I a thrifty man and a spiteful one, I would not eat them. Instead, I should have the same cluster served me every morning that I might say to mine enemies, with truth, that I have Cretan grapes for breakfast daily. They will keep," he added presently, "for it is tradition that stores laid up for siege never decay."
"Obviously," said the woman, "they do not last long enough."
John plucked off one of the light green grapes and ate it with relish.
"Since thou doubtest the tradition, I shall not have these spoil."
"But you destroy even a better boast over your enemy. Then you could say to him, 'We can not consume all our food. Behold the grapes rot in the lofts!'"
John smiled.
"Half of the lies go to preserve another's opinion of us. How much we respect our fellows!"
"Be comforted; there are as many lying for our sakes! But how goes it without on the walls?"
"Against Rome or against Simon?"
"Both."
"Ill enough. But when Titus presses too close Simon will lay down his hostility toward me; and when Titus becomes too effective, we are to have a divine interference, so our prophets say."
"I observe," the woman said, "we Jews at this time are relying much on the prophets to fight our battles. Behold, our stores will hold out, we say, because it is said; and we shall fight indifferently, because Daniel hath bespoken a Deliverer for us at this time!"
John, with his wine-glass between thumb and finger, looked at her.
"I should expect a heretic to be so critical for us," he said.
The woman sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, gazing moodily at the sunlight falling through the brass grill over the windows on the court. She ignored his remark, but answered presently in another tone.
"There is nothing to employ a surfeited mind in this city."
"No?" he said lightly, while interest began to awaken in his eyes. "The making of enjoyment is here. I have found it so."
"Perchance you have," but she halted and resumed her moody gaze at the flood of sunlight.
"Are you weary?" he asked. "What is it?"
"Idleness! Eating, sleeping–no; not even that; for idleness steals away my appetite and my repose."
"Strange restiveness for one reared in the quiet inner chambers of a Jewish house," he observed.
Her eyes dropped away to the floor; he saw that she was breathing quickly.
"I dreamed of a free life once," she said in a restrained way. "I have not since been satisfied. I dreamed of cities and kings, that were mine! of crises that I dared, of–of things that I did!"
There was indignation and pride in the words, too much recollection of an actuality to rise from the reminiscences of a dream. John watched her alertly.
"Enough will happen here in time to divert you," he said.
She made a motion with her hand that swept the round of masonry about her.
"Not until this falls."
"Come, then, up into my fortress and see my fellows from Gischala," he offered. "They fled with me from that city when Titus took it and together we came to this place. They are hardened to disaster; they and death are fellow-jesters."
"Soldiers?"
"Everything! Better athletes than soldiers, better mummers than athletes; villains most engaging of all!"
She showed no interest and, after a critical pause, he continued:
"They robbed the booth of some costumer whom the Sadducees had made rich and captured a maid whom they held until she had taught them how to use henna and kohl. So I had a garrison of swearing girls until they wearied of the fatigue of stepping mincingly and untangling their garments. It was that which robbed the sport of its pleasure and changed my harem back to a fortress. But while it lasted they were kings over Jerusalem. And what dear mad dangerous wantons they were! What confusion to short-sighted citizens; what affrights to sociable maidens! Even I laughed at them."
"What antics indeed!" she murmured perfunctorily.
"Now they want new entertainment; something immense and different," he said.
She looked up at him; in her eyes he read, "Even as I do!"
"But they are not unique in that," he continued. "All the world seeks diversion. Observe the pretty stranger come here fresh from some lady's tiring-room, hunting adventure, bearding thee and wearing thy name!"
Her eyes sparkled.
"She shall have adventure enough," she declared.
"I hear," John pursued, "that she does not expect her servant to return, whom she sent to Ascalon for proofs."
"No?" the woman cried, sitting up.
"How can she, when the siege is laid?"
There was a moment of silence. The woman drew in a deep breath that was wholly one of relief.
"Now what will she do?" she asked.
"She expects," John answered, "the mediation of the Messiah. It is the talk among the slaves that He is in the city and she has heard it. She seems not to be overconfident, however."
"It is her end," the woman remarked with meaning.
"Perchance not. She is a good Jew, it seems, whatever else she may be, and every good Jew may have his wishes come to pass if the Messiah come. So it has become the national habit to expect the Messiah in every individual difficulty. Now, according to prophecies, the time is of a surety ripe and the whole city is expectant. She may have her wish."
She stared at him coolly. There was implied disbelief in this speech. She debated with herself if it would serve to resent his doubt. Whatever her conclusion she added no more to the discussion of Laodice's hopes.
"Are you expectant?" she asked.
"I see the need of a Messiah," he responded.
"Doubtless. You and Simon do not unite the city; nothing but an united, confident and supremely capable people can resist Rome in even this most majestic fortification in the world–unless miracle be performed, indeed."
"Nothing but a divine visitor can achieve union here."
"What an event to behold!" she mused. "That would be an excitement! Surely that would be a new thing! No one really ever beheld a god before."
"What learned things dreams are! What things of experience!" he remarked with a sly smile. She refused to observe his insisted disbelief in her claim, but went on as if to herself.
"Whatever Jove can do, man can do!" she declared. "I never heard that the gods do more than change maidens into trees or themselves into swans for an old mortal purpose that even man's a better adept at. Why can there not rise one who is greater than Alexander and of stouter heart than Julius Cæsar? There is no limit to the greatness of mankind. Behold, here is a city rich beyond even the wealth of Croesus; and a country which the emperor is longing to bestow upon some orderly king! Heavens, what an opportunity! I could pray, Jerusalem should pray, that the hour may bring forth the man!"
Her eyes shone with an unnatural yearning. The immense scope of her desires suddenly brought a smile to his lips that he checked in time. He had remembered offering his Idumeans in women's clothing for her diversion.
Hunger for power, the next greatest hunger after hunger for love! He felt that he stood in the presence of a desire so immense that it belittled his own hopes. He was not too much of a Jew to have sympathy with the ambition that dwells in the breasts of women. Cleopatra had been an evil that he had admired profoundly, because she had attained that which his own soul yearned after but which had eluded him. Yet he was large enough not to be envious of a success. He was made of the stuff that seekers of excitement are made of. If he could not furnish the intoxication of activity he was a ready supporter of that one who could.
"What disorder, then, in the world," she went on, as if she had followed a train of imagination through the triumph of the risen great man. "Rome, the ruler of nations humbled! Conquest from Germany to the First Cataract, from Gaul to the dry rocks of Ecbatana! A world in anarchy, for one greater than Alexander to subjugate! The ancient splendor of Asia, the wisdom of Africa and the virginity of Europe to be his, and the homage of the four corners of the earth to be to him!"
John said nothing. Before him, the woman had entirely stripped off her disguise. Now for the purpose!
At that moment one of Amaryllis' servants, who had stood guard without the door, dodged apprehensively into the room and fled across to the opposite arch. There he paused, ready for flight, and looked back with wide eyes. John turned hastily but with an impatient gesture fell again to his neglected meal. The actress looked to see what had annoyed him. There passed in from the outer corridor a young man, tall, magnificently formed, covered with a turban and draped in quaint garments, which to her who was familiar with all the guises of the theater seemed to be Buddhistic. He looked neither to the right nor left, but passed with a step infinitely soft and gliding across to the arch, from which the terrified servant vanished instantly. The stranger stayed only a dramatic instant on the threshold and then disappeared into the corridor which led up into the Temple. When he had gone the startled actress retained a picture of a face, fearless, beatified, mystic to the very edge of the supernatural.
"Who was that?" she asked of the Gischalan, who was gazing at the color of his wine, sitting in a shaft of sunlight.
"Seraiah! But more than that, no one knows. He appeared with the slaying of Zechariah the Just. He haunts the garrisons. Hence his name–Soldier of Jehovah!"