The tremulous old man, weakened from his long and superhuman struggle to enter the doomed city, held Laodice to his breast while she stroked his rough cheeks and murmured things that he did not hear and which she did not realize in the rush of her helplessness and dismay.
At the corner of Moriah and the Old Wall, the tumult was infernal. Out of the suffocating sallow smoke from the tuns of burning tar heaved over the fortification upon the engines and their managers, the stones from the catapults soared into view and fell upon the sun-colored marbles that paved the Court of the Gentiles. Clouded by the vapor, targets for the immense missiles, the Jews heaving and writhing in personal encounters appeared black and inhuman. Every combatant shouted; the great stones screamed; the boiling pitch hissed and roared, and the thunder of the conflict shook the Temple to its very foundations.
Without, the Romans planted scaling ladders, mounted them and were pitched backward into the moat regularly. Regularly, the ladders were set up again after struggle, mounted without hesitation and thrown down again, with an inevitability which furnished a grim travesty to the struggle. The two remaining towers were set in position against the base of Moriah and resumed execution. One after another the engines of the Romans were hauled into position, and worked unceasingly until covered with burning oil from the battlements above and consumed. Others were hauled into place; fresh detachments of Romans seized upon the scaling-ladders or mounted to the towers, and the roar of the conflict never abated.
Meanwhile on the slopes of Zion the whole of Jerusalem, gaunt, dying and demoniacal, was packed in the ruins of the palace of Herod.
Old Momus with triumph and tearful exultation was holding out to Laodice a heavy roll of writings, dangling important seals, ancient papers showing yellow beside the fresh parchment, and an old record dark with long handling.
Here were the proofs of her identity!
Laodice shrank from him with a gasp that was almost a cry. Behold, the faithful old servant had suffered she knew not what to bring such evidence as would force her to do that which she believed she could not do and survive!
Momus sought to put the papers in her hands, but she thrust them away and he stood looking at her in amazement and sorrow.
Nathan, the Christian, stood close to her. From the opposite side, Philadelphus rounded the outskirts of the mob, searching. He did not see her. She flung herself between Momus and Nathan and cowered down until Philadelphus had passed from sight. When she lifted her head, Momus was gazing at her with the light of shocked comprehension growing in his eyes. Nathan, the Christian, touched her.
"Who was that man?" he asked gravely.
She rose and laid her hands on the Christian's shoulders.
"My husband," she said.
Something had happened at the Temple. She saw the Jews at the wall recoil from the dust of battle, rally, plunge in and disappear. From out that presently shone now and again, then with increasing frequency and finally in great numbers, the brass mail of Roman legionaries. Titus' forces had scaled the wall.
From her position, she saw running toward them John of Gischala, with his long garments whipping about him, wrapping his tall figure in live cerements. He was disarmed and bleeding. She saw next Amaryllis, with compassionate uplifted hands stop in his way; saw next the Gischalan thrust her aside with a blow and the next instant disappear as if the earth had swallowed him.
Nathan was speaking to her.
"How often, O my daughter, we recognize truth and deny it because it does not give us our way! God put a sense of the right in us. We transgress it oftener than we mistake it!"
The roar of the turning battle and the mob about her drowned his next words, except,
"You can not be happy in iniquity; neither blessed; but you are sure to be afraid. Right has its own terror, but there is at least courage in being right, against your desires."
He was talking continuously, but only at times did the wind from the uproar sweep his fervent words to her.
"Christ had His own conflict with Himself. What had become of us had He listened to the tempter in the wilderness, or failed to accept the cup in the Garden of Gethsemane! How much we have the happiness of Christ in our hands! Alas! that His should be a sorrowful countenance in Heaven!
"The love of a man for a woman was near to the Master's heart! How can you feel that you must love and be loved in spite of Him! Pity yourself all you may you can not then be pitied so much as He pities you!
"Love as long and as wilfully as you will, and then it is only a little space. The time of the supremacy of Christ cometh surely, and that is all eternity! Which will you do–please yourself for an hour, or be pleased by the will of God through all time? Love is in the hands of the Lord; you can not consign it longer than the little span of your life to the hands of the devil."
Momus, in whose mind had passed an immense surmise, was again at her side.
"O daughter of a noble father," his dumb gaze said, "wilt thou put away that virtue which was born in thee and let my labor come to naught?"
But the preaching of Nathan and the reproach of Momus were feeble, compared to the great tumult that went on in her soul. She had seen John of Gischala cast Amaryllis aside. Even the Greek's sympathy was hateful to him. Yet when Laodice had first entered the house of Amaryllis, the woman had been obliged to dismiss John from her presence for his own welfare and the welfare of the city. Why this change?
Amaryllis was no less beautiful, no less brilliant, no less attractive than she had once been; but the Gischalan had wearied of her.
Laodice recalled that she had not been surprised to see the man throw Amaryllis aside. It seemed to be the logical outcome of love such as theirs. How, then, was she to escape that which no other woman escaped who loved without law? In the soul of that stranger who had called himself Hesper, were lofty ideals, which had not been the least charm which had attracted her to him. Was she, then, to dislodge these holy convictions, to take her place in his heart as one falling short of them, or were they still to exist as standards which he loved and which she could not reach? In either event, how long would he love–what was the length of her probation before she, too, would encounter the inevitable weariness?
It occurred to her, then, how nearly the natural law of such love paralleled the religious prohibition that the Christian had shown to her. However harsh and unjust the sentence seemed, it was rational. With her own eyes she had seen its predictions borne out. Already the relief of the sorrowing righteous possessed her. She turned to the Christian.
"Take me to my husband," she said. "Now! While I have strength."
Momus caught the old Christian by the arm and, signing eagerly that he would lead, hurried away in advance of the two down into the ravine and crossed to the house of Amaryllis.
There were no soldiers to stop them about the house. When no response was made to her knock, Laodice opened the door and passed in.
Her old conductors followed her.
Amaryllis sat in her ivory chair; opposite her in the exedra was Philadelphus. At sight of him, the last of the soft color went out of Laodice's face. A curve of despair marked the corners of her mouth and she seemed to grow old before those that looked at her.
Philadelphus and the Greek sprang to their feet, the instant the group entered.
Laodice waited for no preliminary. Amaryllis' design was patent to her; it was part of her sorrow that now Hesper would be free to the devices of this deceitful woman. So she did not look at the Greek. She addressed Philadelphus in a voice from which all hope and vivacity had gone.
"I have brought proofs. Behold them!"
Nathan, the Christian, stood forth.
"I, Nathan of Jerusalem, met and talked with this Laodice, daughter of Costobarus, in company with Aquila, the Ephesian, three men-servants in all the panoply and state of a coming princess three leagues out of Ascalon, her native city. I buried by the roadside her father, who died of pestilence on their journey hither. I bear witness that she is the daughter of Costobarus and thy wedded wife."
A great light sprang into the face of the Greek. Philadelphus, nervous, albeit the news he heard filled him with pleasure, stood and waited.
The Christian stepped back and Momus, bowing, approached and handed the leather roll into the none too steady hands of the Ephesian. He opened it and drew forth parchments.
Aloud he read a minute description of Laodice from the rabbi of the synagogue in Ascalon; under the great seals of the Roman state, he found and read the oath of the prefect, that such a maiden as the rabbi had described had been married before him to Philadelphus Maccabaeus fourteen years before. Then followed the depositions of forty Jews and Gentiles who were nurses, tradesmen and other people like to have daily contact with the young woman in her house, setting entirely at naught any claim that Laodice was other than the wife who had been supplanted by an adventuress. Philadelphus did not read them all. Before he made an end he dropped the documents and flung wide his arms. But Laodice with a countenance frozen with suffering held him off for a moment.
"Go," she said to the old Christian, "unto Hesper and lead him into the belief of the Lord Jesus Christ which is mine."
The old Christian approached the fountain in the center of the andronitis and taking up water in his palm sprinkled a few drops on her hair while she knelt.
"In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I baptize thee, Laodice. Amen!"
While she knelt, he said:
"I shall search for him also. Christ have mercy on thee now and for ever. Farewell."
He was gone.
When Nathan, the Christian, stepped into the streets once more there was an immense accession of tumult about him.
He turned to look toward the corner of the Old Wall in time to behold Jews in armor and Romans in blazing brass rush together in a great cloud of dust as the Old Wall went in and Titus swept down upon Jerusalem.
At the same instant from the ruined high place upon Zion came a roar of stupendous menace. The Christian, with sublime indifference to danger, kept his path toward the concourse from which he had taken Laodice. As he ascended the opposite slope of the ravine, he saw, descending toward the battle, the front of a rushing multitude, as irresistible and as destructive as a great sea in a storm.
He saw that the mob was turning toward Akra, and to avoid it, the Christian climbed up to the Tyropean Bridge, and from that point viewed the whole of Jerusalem sweeping down upon the heathen.
At the head of the inundation passed a melodious voice crying:
"An end, an end is come upon the four corners of the land! Draw near every man with his destroying weapon in his hands for the glory of the Lord! For His house is filled with cloud and the Court is full of the brightness of the Lord's glory! A sword! A sword is sharpened! The way is appointed that the sword may come! For the time for favor to Zion is here; yea, the set time is come!"
After this poured a gaunt horde numbering tens of thousands. They bore paving-stones, stakes, posts, railings, garden implements, weapons from kitchens, from hardware booths and from armories; anything that one man or a body of men could wield; torches and kettles of tar; chains and ropes; knotted whips, and bundles of fagots; iron spikes, instruments of torture, anything and everything which could be turned as a weapon or to inflict pain upon the Roman, who believed at this moment that Jerusalem was his!
The Christian overlooked this ferocious inundation and shook his head. On a mound near him stood the spirit of the mob concentrated and personified. It was crazed Posthumus.
He was screaming: "It is finished; the law is run out! All prophecy is fulfilled!"
And over his head he was swinging a parchment fiercely burning.
It was the Scroll of the Law!
After uncounted minutes, vibrating with roar, the terrible flood rushed by. Feeble arms clasped the Christian about the knees and he looked down on the tangled white locks of the palsied man, who had searched for him until he had found him. The Christian laid his hand on the man's head but did not speak.
At the breach in the Old Wall, the watchers on that almost deserted street saw the brazen wave of four legions gather and sweep forward to gain ground in the city before the mob swept down on them.
Between the two warring bodies, one orderly, prepared but apprehensive, the other mad and perishing, was a considerable space. Fighting still went on at the breach in the walls, but the supreme conflict of a comparatively small body of soldiers and an uncounted horde was not yet precipitated.
Ordinarily, the Roman army could have reduced any popular insurrection with half that number of men. But at present the legionaries confronted desperate citizens who were simply choosing their own way to die. Reason and human fear long since had ceased to inspire them. They were believing now and following a prophet because it was the final respite before despair. There was no alternative. It was death whatever they did, unless, in truth, this splendid sorceress was indeed the Voice of the Risen Prince. Force would be of no avail against them. Madness had flung them against Rome; only some other madness would turn them back.
The Christian, from his commanding position, expected anything.
It was the moment which would show if the false prophet would triumph. If the four legions went down before the multitude, it would mean the ascendancy of a strange woman over Israel, and the obliteration of the faith in Jesus Christ in the Holy Land.
It can not be said that the Christian watched the crisis with a calm spirit. He did not wish to see the heathen overthrow the ancient people of God, nor could he behold the triumph of a false Christ. He put his hands together and prayed.
A figure appeared between the two bodies of combatants, rushing on intensely, to grapple.
It was a tall commanding form, clothed in garments that glittered for whiteness. By the step, by the poise of the head, the Christian recognized Seraiah.
The front of the multitude fell on their faces at that moment as if he had struck them down.
Out of the forefront, the prophetess appeared. The Christian heard her splendid voice out of the uproar, and while he gazed, he saw mad Seraiah turn away from her, with the front of the mob turning after him, as a needle turns to the pole.
In that fatal moment of pause, out of which the warning cry of the prophetess rang wildly, the Roman tribune, in view for a moment under the blowing veils of smoke, flung up his sword, the Roman bugle sang, and the brassy legions of Titus hurled themselves upon the halted mob.
The Christian dropped his head into the bend of his elbow and strove to shut out the sound. The nervous arms of the palsied man at his feet gripped him frantically.
Up from the corner of the Old Wall, came the prolonged "A-a-a-a!" of dying thousands.
Jerusalem had fallen.
The foremost of the mob, turning with Seraiah, escaped the onslaught of the Romans, and as the mad Pretender strode toward the broad street from which the Tyropean Bridge crossed to the demesnes of the Temple, they followed him fatuously, blind to the death behind them and the oncoming slaughter in which they might fall.
Seraiah passed above the spot where the sorrowful Christian stood, crossed the great causeway leading toward the Royal Portico and after him six thousand blind and insane enthusiasts followed, expecting imminent miracle. Above them towered the heights of Moriah, now veiled in smoke. Up the great white bank of stairs they rushed after him, facing an ordeal which must mean a baptism in fire, and on through a curtain of luminous smoke into a gate pillared in flame, up into the Royal Portico, resounding with the tread of the advancing Destroyer, out into the great Court of Gentiles wrapped in cloud through which the Temple showed, a stupendous cube of heat, through the Gate Beautiful where the Keeper no longer stood, thence into the Women's Court, raftered with red coals, up smoking stones tier upon tier till the roof of the Royal Portico was reached.
At the brink of the pinnacle, they saw through tumbling clouds Seraiah towering. He was looking down through masses of smoke upon the City of Delight, perishing. They who had followed watched, uplifted with terror and frenzy, and while they waited for the miracle which should save, the roof crumbled under them and a grave of thrice heated rock received them and covered them up.
Below, Nathan, the Christian, seized upon the shoulders of the Maccabee as he was dashing after the thousands. His face was black with terror for Laodice. He struggled to throw off Nathan, crying futilely against the uproar that Laodice was perishing.
"Comfort thee!" the Christian shouted in his ear. "She is saved. She sent me to thee."
The Maccabee stopped, as if he realized that he need not go on, but had not comprehended what was said to him.
Nathan dragged him out of the way, still choked with people struggling to pass on to the Temple or to flee from it. Half-way down the Vale of Gihon, where speech was a little more possible, the Maccabee, who had been crying questions, made the old man hear.
"Where is she? Where is she?"
"She has returned to her husband. In love with thee, she has done that only which she could do and escape sin. She has gone to shelter with him whom she does not love!"
The Maccabee seized his head in his hands.
"It is like her–like her!" he groaned.
In the Christian's heart he knew how narrowly Laodice had made her lover's mark for her.
"It is her wish," Nathan continued, "that I teach thee Christ whom she hath received."
"How can I receive Him, when He sent her from me?" the unhappy man groaned, unconscious of his contradictions.
"How canst thou reject Him when His teaching led thy love to do that which thine own lips have confessed to be the better thing?"
"Then what of myself, when I love where I should not love?" the Maccabee insisted.
"You may suffer and sin not," the Christian said kindly.
The unhappy man dropped to his knees.
"O Christ, why should I resist Thee!" he groaned. "Thou hast stripped me and made me see that my loss is good!"
The Christian laid his hands on the Maccabee's head.
"Dost thou believe?" he asked.
"Will Christ accept me, coming because I must?"
"It is not laid down how we shall baptize in the thirst of a famine," Nathan said, "yet He who sees fit to deny water never yet hath denied grace."
But the Christian's hand extended over the kneeling man was caught in a grip steadied with intense emotion. The unknown had seized him.
But for his feeling that this interruption was necessary to the welfare of another soul, the Christian would not have paused in his ministry.
The phantom straightened himself with a superb reinvestment of manhood.
"Thou, son of the Maccabee, Philadelphus!" he exclaimed to the kneeling man.
The Ephesian's arms sank.
"Who art thou that knoweth me?" he asked in a dead voice.
"I am all that plague and sin hath left of thy servant Aquila," the phantom declared.
The Maccabee lifted his face for what should follow this revelation. It was only a manifestation of his subjection to another will than his own. He was not interested–he who was hoping to die.
"Hear me, and curse me!" Aquila went on. "But save thy wife yet. I say unto thee, master, that she whom thou hast sheltered in the cavern is thy wife, Laodice!"
The Maccabee struggled up to his feet and gazed with stunned and unbelieving eyes at this wreck of his pagan servant, who went on precipitately.
"Her I plotted against at the instigation of Julian of Ephesus. Her, my mistress, Salome the Cyprian, robbed and hath impersonated thus long to her safety in the house of the Greek. This hour, through ignorance of thine own identity, through my fault, she hath gone reluctantly to his arms. Curse me and let me die!"
The Maccabee seized the hair at his temples. For a moment the awful gaze he bent upon Aquila seemed to show that the gentler spirit had been dislodged from his heart. Then he cried:
"God help us both, Aquila! My fault was greater than thine!"
He turned and fled toward the house of the Greek.
The four legions of Titus swept after him.
Aquila lifted his eyes for the first time and gazed at Nathan.
"I cursed thee for sparing me to such an existence as was mine! Behold, father, thou didst bless me, instead. I am ready to die."
"Wait," the Christian said peacefully.
A moment later, the Maccabee dashed into the andronitis of Amaryllis.
After him sprang a terrified servant crying:
"The Roman! The Roman is upon us!"
A roar of such magnitude that it penetrated the stone walls of Amaryllis' house, swept in after the servant. Quaking menials began to pour into the hall. Among them came the blue-eyed girl, the athlete and Juventius the Swan. These three joined their mistress who stood under a hanging lamp. Into the passage from the court, left open by the frightened servants, swept the prolonged outcry of perishing Jerusalem. Over it all thundered the boom of the siege-engines shaking the earth.
The slaves slipped down upon their knees and began to groan together. The silver coins on the lamp began to swing; the brass cyanthus which Amaryllis had recently drained of her last drink of wine moved gradually to the edge of the pedestal upon which she had placed it.
The dual nature of the uproar was now distinct; organized warfare and popular disaster at the same time. The Roman was sweeping up the ancient ravine. Jerusalem had fallen.
The gradual crescendo now attained deafening proportions; the hanging lamp increased its swing; the silver coins began to strike together with keen and exquisitely fine music. Juventius the Swan, with his dim eyes filled with horror, was looking at them. The peculiar desperate indifference of the wholly hopeless seized him. His long white hands began to move with the motion of the lamp; the music of the meeting coins became regular; he caught the note, and mounting, with a bound, the rostrum that had been his Olympus all his life, began to sing. The melody of his glorious voice struggled only a moment for supremacy with the uproar of imminent death and then his increasing exaltation gave him triumph. The great hall shook with the magnificent power of his only song!
The Maccabee confronted Amaryllis, with fierce question in his eyes. She pointed calmly at the heavy white curtain pulled to one side and caught on a bracket. The brass wicket over the black mouth of the tunnel was wide.
Without a word, the Maccabee plunged into it and was swallowed up.
Amaryllis looked after him.
"And no farewell?" she said.
The thunder of assault began at her door. Juventius sang it down. The athlete and the girl crept toward the mouth of the black passage, wavered a moment and plunged in. After them tumbled a confusion of artists and servants who were swallowed up, and the hall was filled only with music.
The woman by the lectern and the singer on the rostrum had chosen. To live without beauty and to live without love were not possible to the one who had known beauty all his life, to the one who had learned love so late–after she had been beggared of her dowry of purity.
There was hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect which is death's recapitulation of the life it means to take. And out of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made the step of the Roman on her threshold welcome. It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed it was time to reconstruct the whole artistic attitude of the world.
And that was why she waited impatiently at her doorway for death, which was a kinder thing than life.
There was no incident in the Maccabee's long struggle through the inky blackness of the tunnel leading under Moriah.
It was night when the first new air from the outside world reached him. So he rushed into great open darkness, lighted with stars, before he knew that he had emerged from the underground passage.
Entire silence after the turmoil which had shaken Jerusalem for many months fell almost like a blow upon his unaccustomed ears. The air was sweet. He had not breathed sweet air since May. The hills were solitary. Week in and week out, he had never been away from the sound of groaning thousands. Not since he had assumed his disguise to Laodice in the wilderness had he been close to the immemorial repose of nature. All his primitive manhood rushed back to him, now infuriated with a fear that his love was the spoil of another.
All instinct became alert; all his intelligence and resource assembled to his aid. It came to him as inspiration always occurs at such times, that if the pair proceeded rationally, they would move toward a secure place at once. Pella occurred to him in a happy moment.
He took his bearings by the stars and hurried north and east.
He came upon a road presently, almost obliterated by a summer's drift of dust and sand. It had been long since any one had gone up that way to Jerusalem. There was no moon to show him whether there were any recent marks of fugitives fleeing that way.
He did not expect that Julian of Ephesus would have courage to halt within sight of the glow on the western horizon which was the burning from the Temple. He expected the Ephesian to flee far and long, and in that consciousness of the cowardice of his enemy he based his hope.
But he ran tirelessly, seeking right and left, led on by instinct toward the Christian city in the north.
At times, his terror for Laodice made him cry out; again, he made violent pictures of his revenge upon Julian; and at other moments, he believed, while drops stood on his forehead from the effort of faith, that his new Christ would save her yet. There were moments when he was ready to die of despair, when he wondered at himself attempting to trace Julian with all the directions of wild Judea to invite the fugitives. Why might they not have fled toward Arabia as well, or even toward the sea? Perhaps they had not gone far, but had hidden in the rock, and had been left behind. Conflicting argument strove to turn him from his path, but the old instinct, final resource after the mind gives up the puzzle, kept him straight on the road to Pella.
He came upon the rear of a flock of sheep, heading away from him. A Natolian sheep-dog, galloping hither and thither in his labor at keeping them moving, scented the new-comer. There was a quick savage bark that heightened at the end in an excited yelp of welcome. The shepherd, a dim figure at the head of the flock, turned in time to see his dog leaping upon the Maccabee.
"Down, Urge," the shepherd cried.
"Joseph, in the name of God," the Maccabee cried, "where is Laodice?"
He threw off the excited dog and rushed toward the boy, who turned back at the cry with extended hands.
"True to thy promise, friend, friend!" the boy cried. "She is here!"
The Maccabee stiffened.
"Is there one with her?" he demanded fiercely.
"A man and her servant."
The Maccabee threw off the boy's hands.
"Where?" he cried.
"Ahead of the sheep," the boy said a little uncertainly.
The Maccabee dashed through the flock and rounding a turn in the road came upon Laodice walking; behind her Momus; at her side was Julian of Ephesus.
Immense strain had sharpened their sense of fear until it was as acute as an instinct. Before the sound of the Maccabee's furious approach reached Julian, the Ephesian whirled.
Towering over him, the very picture of retribution, was the man he had left, apparently dead by his hand, by the roadside in the hills of Judea months and months before.
For an instant, Julian stood petrified. Over his lips came a faint, frozen whisper that Laodice heard–that was proof enough to her, the moment after.
"Philadelphus–Maccabaeus!"
When his outraged kinsman put out vengeful hands to seize him, the Maccabee grasped the air. Julian of Ephesus had vanished!
Among the rocks at the base of the cliff that sheltered Christian Pella from the rude winds of the Perean mountains, the procurator of the city, Philadelphus Maccabaeus, and his wife, Laodice, sat side by side in the morning sun. There was a path little wider than a man's hand wandering along below them toward a well in the hollow of the rocks. Along this way, in early morning, Joseph, the shepherd, was in the habit of driving his sheep to drink. And hither the procurator and his wife came to visit the boy from time to time. Within their hall, there was too much state. Something in the wild open of Judea with its winds gave them all an ease whenever they wished to talk with Joseph.
But the shepherd was not in sight. The pair sat down and waited for him.
Laodice rested against her husband's arm, laid along the rock behind her. Presently he freed that arm and with the ease of much usage withdrew the bodkins from her hair. The heavy coil dropped over his breast down to his knee. With delicate touches he began to free from the splendid tangle a single strand of glistening white hair. When she saw it shining like spun silver across the back of his hand, she looked up at him. With infinite care he searched her face, while she waited with questioning in her tender eyes.
"This," he said, lifting the hand that supported the silver threads, "is the sole evidence that thou hast seen the abomination of desolation."
"And that came the night I journeyed away from Jerusalem, without you," she declared. "But, my Philadelphus," she said, turning herself a little that she might hide her face away from him, "had I stayed with you against my conscience, I had been by this time wholly white."
He kissed her.
"I did not expect you to stay," he said. "I knew from the beginning that you would not. Ask Joseph. He will bear me out."
Low on the slope of the hill, the shepherd approached, calling his sheep that trailed after him contentedly by the hundreds. The excited bark of Urge, the sheep-dog, came up faintly to them.
While they leaned watching them, old Momus, bent and broken, stood before them. Laodice hurriedly drew away from her husband's clasp. It was a habit she had never entirely shaken off, whenever the mute appeared, in spite of the old man's pathetic dumb protest.
He handed a linen scroll to his master.
It read:
The captives whom thou hast asked for freedom at Cæsar's hand are this day sent to thee, Philadelphus, under escort. They should reach thee a little later than this messenger. However, it is Cæsar's pain to inform thee that the Greek Amaryllis as well as the actress Salome were not to be found. Julian of Ephesus, who named the woman for us, is here at Cæsarea, but being a Roman citizen, is not a captive. However it shall be seen to that his liberty is sufficiently curtailed for the welfare of the public. Also, I send herewith a shittim-wood casket found with John of Gischala when he was captured in a cavern under Jerusalem. It contains treasure and certain writings which identify it as property of thy wife. There were other features in it which, coming to my hand first, made it advisable that the State should not know of its existence. And privately, it will be wise in thee to destroy them.
The Maccabee stopped at this point and looked at Laodice.
"What does he mean?" he asked.
"My father put your last letter in the case," she said, with a little panic in her face.
The Maccabee laughed, and went on,
Those that go forward to thee are Nathan of Jerusalem and Aquila of Ephesus. To thy wife my obeisances. To thyself, greeting.
CARUS, TRIBUNE.
THE END