The Bishop of Ephesus sat dreaming in the garden between his church and his house.
It was the glad season now known as Easter, some fifty years after the death and ascension of our Lord. The sunshine of the Ægean Sea was a luminous glory that clothed all the world of spring in garments of pure light. The city square swam in a transparent gold that dazzled the eye. Across the square, the aërial arches between the columns of the Great Temple to Diana gave glimpses of a sea that was by turns turquoise blue and emerald green, with a fret of snowy waves whose mermaid hair danced rainbows in the sunlight. Between the arcades of the Temple columns, the Bishop could catch hints of the surrounding circle of snowy mountains; and they, too, swam opal jewels in a mirage of morning light. The years had touched Onesimus lightly. He was stouter, stronger, more robust; but few silver hairs intermingled with his gold curls, though an austere strength now stamped face and figure, as of a man, whose shoulders had grown the broader for their load. But the gladness of the day brought back memories of his youth, this morning.
What wonder—he mused—the Greeks’ frieze across the top of the Temple columns represented their huntress Deity as driving the wild horses of the waves with the wind in their tossing manes out to the pasture grounds of the ocean deeps? The Bishop dreaming in the garden between his little Christian church and his house smiled; for though he was Christian, he was also Greek; and never the sun came over the snowy mountains in spring but he felt the wild lure of the huntress, Diana, with her silver horn winding through the woods and caves, leading youth captive in pursuit of the fleet-foot rainbow hours.
Something there was in the glad spring day of the beginning of time, “when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy.”
So sitting in the garden across the city square from the vast marble Temple to Diana, he could not but smile gently to himself. Spite of statue in silver like a spire to sky, and domes that vied in beauty the opals of the snowy peaks, and friezes that were the glory of Grecian art for two hundred years—not so many worshipers came from the seas and hills to the Great Diana’s Temple. Especially, not so many worshipers came to the Temple now that the Roman conqueror persisted in setting up images of the Emperors to be worshiped equal with Diana. That very year, vestal virgins had suffered death for refusing to offer incense to the figure of the Roman Emperor—“Beast worship” it was now called among the Greeks; and after the martyrdom of these vestals, the young Christian Bishop reflected, his own little church had been crowded with new adherents to the new faith.
The three vestal virgins had been accused of breaking their girdle vows; but Onesimus knew the real cause of their death had been—they had laughed at the Goddess Roma set up beside the Great Diana; and when the Great Diana had failed to protect them, faith in her power had fallen off. The people knew the Temple was a cheat to barter gain for sacrifice and hold allegiance to Rome.
Books of Black Magic to the value of more than £2,000 had been burned at Ephesus after Paul’s labors there; and what Paul had preached, Apollos had confirmed, speaking from the very shrine of Diana, herself. Truly what Paul “had planted, Apollos had watered, and God had given the increase.” He thought of Ephesus, the third greatest city in the known world, with its theater holding fifty thousand pleasure seekers, where his little old half-blind, deformed Master, Paul, with the lion heart and sword of the spirit had conquered the Prince of the Powers of the Air—whether Black or White Magic, Onesimus did not know. He only knew the Invisible King had conquered.
Aquila and Priscilla had won Apollos, the Gnostic, to Christ, and had accompanied Paul to Ephesus; and when Paul had left Ephesus to go on to Rome, it was Apollos who had driven the Christ message home; so that now Ephesus, rather than Antioch, was the rallying point for the followers in Asia. The fall of Jerusalem had dispersed all followers there to the deserts of Asia and Egypt. The incursions of the victorious Roman Army had driven the Jews from Antioch. At Ephesus must be the final stand of the followers for the Christ against pagan god and Jewish legalism and the Black Magic of the sorcerers, now a scourge over all the world.
Was Apollos an Apostate, “a wandering star,” as Peter and the others had feared? Certainly, he had failed to come to the rescue of Paul, in Corinth and Rome, when Paul’s need had been sore; but then, he had defied the pagan gods in their own temples, while Paul always spoke from Jewish synagogue, or from market place; and John had reported the Master’s words—that those not against Him, were for Him; and Apollos had one message and Paul another; and both led like Jacob’s ladder to God.
Fewer and fewer animals from the mountain herds went to the Temple as sacrifices; and the trade in little silver images of Diana had fallen away so that the silversmiths had removed their booths from the Temple columns. The space, where the silversmiths’ booths used to stand, now was taken up with aged and infant ragged beggars, imploring alms from the worshipers by day and by night, huddling to sleep behind the shelter of the columns. He could see these poor shipwrecks of port life this morning, shaking off their drowsiness and tatters to begin another dull round of another dull day; and yet—and yet—the legend of Diana’s silver hunting horn winding divine music through the mountain passes to the sea was in the young Greek Bishop’s very soul.
The perfume of the morning flowers had no drugged night bloom. It was clean, dew-washed, elusive as light. Dewdrops still lay on the lips of the purple iris, the white narcissus, the voluptuous flaunting tulips. Spider webs spun with diamonds of light and dew hung in the acacia and oleander hedges. The great Easter lilies lifted royal spears of gold and cups of nectar to greet the rising sun—easterly always pointed the spears and cups to the sun god; and on the stone edge of the garden fountain, a bird with a dash of sapphire blue and ruby red on his throat was caroling love notes to burst his little palpitating heart.
The Bishop closed his eyes in a prayer that was an inarticulate gloria to the gladness of Life, and it was to the Glad Kingdom of Life in Newness that he had dedicated his life long ago, when he had rushed as a boy from pursuit of the kidnappers of Rome right into the prison hut of Paul, the Apostle of Christ, who had opened the doors of that Glad Kingdom. A bird’s wing almost brushed the Bishop’s face. He opened his eyes to one of those common tragedies of garden life, seen every day if we have eyes that see. Some insect of an early butterfly sort had come out of winter chrysalis pale, faint, trembling with the effect of casting off the dead body of its winter shell of skin, and was fanning moist wings dry in the morning sun, when the little feathered songster with a dart past the Bishop’s face, snatched away the dead shell body, while the pale nymph rose in giddy circles in the dazzling light.
The Bishop Onesimus gave a start. The nymph didn’t seem to realize that it had died to one form of life and risen to another. It had thrown aside what the Greeks called its “coat of skin” just as the beggars yonder under the Temple arches were folding up their night rags and coming out in the sun on the city square.
The little drama of the garden had enacted his very prayer; for what was the bird singing but a gloria to glad new life? And what was the nymph doing but casting off the body of death for rebirth to new life? And was not this the very thought that had been puzzling him this morning of the ascension of his Lord on what we to-day call Easter?
He had been reading John, the Beloved’s, last message to the Christian Churches of the Great Roman Road with warnings against the Beast Worship and foreflashes of things to come down the long ages. Of all the first messengers of the Glad News, John only, the disciple of Christ, and Apollos, the disciple of John the Baptist, remained on earth. Paul, beheaded in Rome! Peter, crucified in Rome! Matthew, Mark, Luke lost to history in Egypt! James martyred in Jerusalem! Thomas buried in the Far East! Philip disappeared in Ethiopia!
All were what the world called—Dead!
Almost twenty years had passed since the Fall of the Holy City, when he and Apollos coming from Jordan Ford had passed through Antioch and rescued Thecla in the mountain caves.
Yet here was John’s letter from banishment on Patmos Island, his last message to the Seven Christian Churches of the Great Roman Road, declaring “there shall be no more death,” and here was Paul’s letter to the Corinthians sent forward to be read to his own flock in Ephesus, declaring death was but a change of garment, an awakening from shadowy dreaming sleep to an effulgent intensest reality of life!
The Bishop strode back to his cloister. As he passed from his garden, he noticed the ragged horde of beggars coming out from the night shelter of Diana’s Temple to range themselves in posture of mendicants whining for alms across the city square. There was a child—a little ragged Greek with no clothing but a torn belted shirt, with tousled head, bare of feet, not more than eight years old, with a baby in a sling on his back. The baby’s eyes had been blinded and one arm broken—to arouse pity among passers-by. Onesimus had noticed these children before; and it made his mountain blood boil, for had not his Lord said—“Let little children come unto me?” And had not the prophets predicted: “A little child shall lead them?” And did this look as if the Shepherd of little children were protecting them; as if the spirit of the child were leading men back to God? It was as if a cloud of doubt suddenly obscured the gladness of the Easter morning. For a moment, he watched the byplay on the city square—the little Greek had stolen a flower from some city hedge. A tall angular spare woman clad all in black had come out of the Diana Temple from an all-night vigil. The child beggar was running along with the blind baby on his back wobbling its head from side to side, trying to sell her the stolen flower for a farthing. He made a clutch at the tall woman’s skirts to try and force her attention. She turned on him with imperious gesture and snatched her skirt from his hand so roughly that the little beggar with the baby on his back fell face down on the Temple steps; then something seemed to clutch at the heart strings of the woman’s own memories; for she paused, turned back and from the wallet in her pocket girdle, threw the child a handful of coins that flashed bronze and gold in the sun. It was as if the cloud of sadness that had obscured the gladness of the Easter morning had vanished like mist in sun.
Onesimus entered the cloister off the side of his little Christian church. He was tall, thin and athletic from his active life and inheritance of mountain blood. Religion was to him not the old-age anodyne to jaded physical sensations dying of the fungus that kills a fly in frost. It was the essence compounded of more Life and more Light.
“Growing old in the Kingdom is growing young,” he smiled. “What have we to fear from old wives’ fables of the dark?” and he flung himself in a stone chair below the cloister window and took up the letter of John to the Seven Churches of the Great Roman Road.
Progress had been rapid since he was a slave lad in Rome and Paul wrote on clay and wax tablets. Progress is always swift when we look back, but slow as a snail when we look forward; for John’s letters were on skin parchment.
The light came from the side of his church across from his cloister. He had to bend and strain his vision to decipher the penmanship of the aged disciple and it stabbed him to the quick, that message to his own little church at Ephesus—an oasis of faith in a pagan desert of whirling doubts—a message from his Unseen Lord through the hand of John: “I know your works, your toil, your patience . . . you have never grown weary . . . yet you no longer love Me as you did at first.”
Could that be true?
Did the Church no longer love Her Lord as at first?
Had she grown cold with habit? Or was it fear of death being the end-all that had chilled the fire of their first zeal? They had expected the King to return in a blaze of glory; and here was John’s message pointing to the glory as Kingdom Unseen, where spirits must clothe them in garments of light, where the building stones of the many mansions would be precious jewels of beautiful deeds, where the leaves from the Tree of Life would be for the healing of all nations—all nations, not just Jew and Greek—and where forgiveness would be a cup of forgetfulness to begin Life afresh in the Kingdom of Gladness.
Was it Doubt that had chilled love in Ephesus? For when he had come to that line—“And there shall be no more Death”—hadn’t he paused, staggered in belief, because he knew that all the apostles but Apollos and John were dead? At that very line had he not heard in memory the winding music of the huntress’ horn, when Diana’s horses came champing down the mountains to plunge in the pastures of the sea? If Death were end-all, better ride the wild horses of joy down to the eternal sea!
Was it Doubt that had chilled Love?
Onesimus sprang from his stone chair.
He would settle it once and for all. John, the Beloved, was on Patmos Isle; Apollos of John Baptist’s band on Crete—but a few hours’ sail in a spanking breeze from Ephesus. He would go and ask them if Death itself were slain, robbed of its victory, deadened of its pain.
Was it true “there was to be no more Death?” If true, Onesimus wanted to shout the glad news from the housetops. The very stones should cry out in joy, the leaves clap hands in rhythmic dance, and all the feathered songsters give voice in a gloria chant. Joy would be the voice of God in many laughing waters; and the human body would no longer be dogged by shadow, when Death, the spy, with skeleton face in the dark, was slain!
But as the young Bishop sprang up, a shadow fell athwart the morning light streaming in beams of gold across his church into his cloister. It was the shadow of the woman clad all in black; the woman he had noticed coming out from all-night vigil in the Temple of Diana and tossing the gold and bronze coins to the beggar child, whom her rough jerk had thrown down the marble steps. She stood in the shadow of the gold light gazing at him. She was not young. He knew by her hair and fair skin that like himself, she was Greek; but there was something almost sibylline in her tense silence. Her skin was pale as white wax. Her lips were parted and painted, showing teeth white as pearls; and in her great dark eyes were both the insolence and unfathomable sadness of a woman fleeing in vain from the skeleton clutch of age and catching in vain at the rainbow hours of youth. She was measuring the strength of an almost feline cunning against the strength of his clarity before she spoke; and there was that in her, which could bait cunning with flesh and set a man guessing of her past. She was richly clad and decked in jewels, from the pearls in her hair to the jade in the clasp of her sandals.
She smiled a slow smile with her lips, which had no reflex of joy in her eyes, than which is no sadder smile on earth—’twas like a mask on a death face.
“I wish you good morrow, Sirrah,” she said.
“Not—‘Sirrah,’ ” quietly answered the Bishop Onesimus in a silent rebuke to familiar approach, “nor much need to wish good morning when God gives free such day as this.”
She winced but did not retreat.
“How should I address you?” she asked smiling faintly.
“In sincerity and truth, as I shall answer you, Lady. If you speak truth to a liar, it conceals you best, for he takes all truth for lie. If you speak lie to a liar, it accomplishes nothing; for he regards all words as lies.”
She winced this time and glanced away.
“I wait for you to invite me to be seated,” she said.
“The empty chair has already invited you, Lady.” He waited.
She seated herself, but had lost her air of insolence and no longer baited her dark eyes with a flicker of dare to a man’s guess of her past. Into them had come the terrible pleading of a dumb brute for respite from unseen foe.
“What can I do for you, Lady?” asked the young Bishop.
Into her face came the wan wistful smile of a gambler’s last cast of the dice. Her glance fell. She leaned forward across the table.
“I am not mad. Do not think me mad. You ask what can you do for me? I have both heard and seen your miracles from faith. Years ago, when I was a widow in Iconium, I saw your leader, Paul, work such miracles, but when I sent a magician out to bribe him to tell the secret of his tricks, I could learn nothing. Then he bewitched my only daughter, and she deserted her affianced husband, and joined the Christian sect and has kept house for what she calls her holy women in the hills on the Roman Road for over twenty years. I am an old woman, but she is”—the woman stammered—“she is eternally young. She wears a youth and radiance that grow with growing years, while I—I flee a skeleton called age that clutches me as I run; but she sits quiet while the death’s head of age slips past, leaving her all untouched. You ask me what can you do for me? I prayed all night in Diana’s Temple. I offered incense enough to redeem ten slaves. I am not mad. Do not think me mad. I would pay any price. Here is the gold. I gave a ragged beggar child gold enough to make his parents rich, but to be told which way you lived. I would buy from you your secret of eternal youth. How do you cheat age and death? Why are you happier as you grow older?”
The astounded Bishop fell back with a gasp. It was as if a dark shadow made of self in withered flesh had cast itself athwart the translucent gladness of the spring morning, and would hold the rainbow in its dead and greedy hands.
“Are you the Mother who cast her daughter out to the dogs of the midnight streets in Iconium years ago, because she would not marry the man to whom you sold her? Are you the Mother of Thecla, whom Paul converted?” he demanded.
The woman did not answer. She cowered like a dumb brute from a blow.
“God’s mercy is long enough to reach down and pardon the meanest,” he went on. “God wills not that anything He has created should perish, but even now, you think only of self; and self is the demon that locks you in your dungeon. When I saw you fling the beggar child down the stone steps and then relent and throw the coins after him, I thought it was repentance of your own hard heart; but now I know ’twas but another offering made to the god of self to find another temple where your prayer might be answered when you had failed with Diana. Even now, you think not of the fate that your cruelty brought on your daughter! You think only of saving yourself from skeleton age and death! Self is the vampire that sucks life and youth and radiance to dry shell. Cast self out and let the waters of life in. When you have pondered that, come back for admission to the Kingdom of Gladness; and your own daughter Thecla can open the door and give you the secret.”
He strode from the cloister in the towering rage of a man who has seen a daughter thrown to the wild beasts by the selfishness of a mother. The woman’s body rocked with paroxysm of self-pity in the stone chair of the cloister.
The woman and her selfish request that would have made out of miracles a slave to self passed from the Bishop’s mind like a cloud that darkens our path for a moment, then vanishes, leaving not the shadow of a substance. His quest was a shining light that eclipsed every other impression from his being. Before they could pass beyond his reach, he would go to his aged master, Apollos in Crete, and to John, the Beloved, in Patmos, and ask them in verity if that message in the letter to the Seven Churches of the Roman Road was to be taken in spiritual parable, or in letter truth—that there was to be no more Death. If the Kingdom were here and now, then like the insect nymph on the fountain stone, Death was but the change of a worn out fleshy garment for a vesture of light. Being still in his prime, Onesimus, the Bishop, did not realize that his quest was the self-same search as that of the aged woman, bent and broken under sin at the end of the road where there is no turning. All he realized was that if the Christ’s ascension meant no more Death, then this springtime anniversary marked a gladness of earth and air and sea, that created a New Heaven and a New Earth.
As the Bishop stood at the prow watching the carved eagle’s head noiselessly cut the calm seas between Ephesus and Crete, his soul was wrapped in the deep calm of the beauty of the night. The silver moon above hung silver in the water below. Only a cat’s-paw of wind was in the canvas. The rowers below plied their oars as one man, keeping time to some old rhythmic chant that was like the croon of the wind. The Christian Bishop was Greek and the hypnotic rune carried his racial memories back—back—back to the minstrelsy of hill clan and seaman, to myths of the Isles of Greece—Minotaur—Bull-God—to whom the maidens were offered; Mammon—God of Gold—to whom the youths were offered; and raids over the mountain and sea to steal the victims.
To Onesimus, standing musing, the real world had become a dream world, when a sailor at the prowl spoke to him in Greek:
“Know you this coin, Master? Is it gold or bronze?”
The seaman was clad only in trunks and loose shirt, with bare feet and bare head. He had a capstan bar over his left shoulder, but between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand he held a rudely minted coin with roughly stamped insignia, which glittered yellow in the moonlight.
“It is gold. It is a very old coin. How did you come by it?”
Onesimus had taken the coin and was turning it over and over in his hand.
The seaman’s apple cheeks and gray beard curled in a smile. “My son, he sleeps under the steps of the Temple. Some rich merchant wife from the Roman Road spends the night, night after night, praying to Diana in the Temple. Diana does not give her what she asks; so then she comes out angry in the morning and asks the way to the Temple of your new God, and my son, he show her the way, and she throw him a handful of coin. I think, my master, she make mistake. All the rest was bronze. My son, he said she had a hard stiff face—you know its value, Master?”
Onesimus had handed back the coin. He was hardly hearing the seaman’s words. He was thinking of the scene in the morning, when he had doubted the value of a child to the Kingdom; and now he knew that the beggar child with the maimed baby on its back had led Thecla’s mother to the door of the Kingdom, and he had clashed the door in her face because of past sin.
“Know you its value, Master?” repeated the seaman. “Will it buy my freedom and my daughter’s, too? She is a slave girl in the Temples of Crete and is wasting of a consumption. I would take her back to a good woman in the hills off the Roman Road—a Grecian woman called Thecla. Know you her?”
Onesimus came awake to pressing duties, like a dreamer out of selfish trance.
“Yes, its value is three times the value of a slave; and I will now give you six times its value in Roman coin to countervail my sin of this very morning.” He had opened the leather wallet in his sash and was counting six coins out for the seaman’s one, when a thought arrested him.
“Who mutilated the infant on your beggar-boy’s back? Is this girl child also yours?”
“Nay, my Master,” the Greek seaman’s countenance saddened. “I sink not so low. The little child is daughter of the Roman guard at Patmos; but I am slave seaman for debt; and the witch, the fortune teller, at the Temple steps, who keeps my son and forces him to beg, she it was who maimed the infant. She feeds the children who are leased, and forces them to earn bread. The infant was only a female and will be knocked on the head; so the witch blinded her and broke her arm—”
Gone were the Bishop’s dreams of a world of Light and Life and Love! Gone were his memories of Diana and her hunting horn winding divine music through the caves and grottoes of the Isles of Greece. He was down to earth with his feet on the ground, a warrior again for righteousness in a world of crime. What mattered the coward fear of Death? His duty as a soldier of His Lord was to fight for right in Life, and let Death take care of itself, as the nymph insect that morning had discarded its coat of skin to the winds.
He added another coin to the six he was counting out to the seaman.
“See you redeem the infant as well, and take them all to the hospice of the woman Thecla in the mountains,” he commanded. “I will stand bail for your good citizenship when you get your pass of freedom from the Roman Governor.”
When the cusps of the mountains of Crete were sighted, and the great canvas came clattering down, and the ship warped up to the quay, the burly seaman—no longer slave but free—came to Onesimus with a capstan bar over his shoulder.
“You will need me, Master,” he said. “There are riots in Crete. One Apollos proclaims the downfall of the old Temples. They threaten to kill him to-night if he break in on the service. For me, I see not why they should kill him. He is old—they say he is a hundred years—he will die anyway; and he preaches— ‘There is no Death.’ ” The big seaman exploded in a bluff laugh through his beard that was like the burst of a squall through a mountain pass; and the two went shouldering up through the dock rabble towards the temple.
“They say,” went on the seaman with the new-found tongue of a slave suddenly free, “this Apollos kept silent for five whole years in the Lodges of India. Silent—not a word—only signs; but he learned their magic and can fight the demons of air. ’Twas he gave my girl in the Temple a cup of forgetfulness and bade her seek healing with the Greek woman, Thecla, in the mountain caves off the Roman Road. He preaches Gladness like you, Master, and always Light—Light—Light—a path up to the dwellings of the gods,” the seaman laughed again. He was not sure whether his garrulous babble were passing through the Bishop’s outer ear.
“What does he teach?” asked Onesimus, curious to learn a slave’s views of the Glad News.
“If we have no wants, we’ll seek few possessions,” continued the seaman. “The winds are spirits—light is a garment—prayers are the smell of flowers—incense is their seed—and he speaks only in the Temple at night because he says men will remember his words in their sleep—”
“Why, then, should the Temple priests threaten to kill him?” asked the Bishop.
The seaman paused in his march, shouldering through the crowds. He evidently could not do two things at once—walk and talk.
“How do I know, my Master?” The burly fellow thought. “He is rich. He needs no money. He tells the people to give no money to the priests—”
“Go on,” ordered the Bishop.
The seaman lowered the capstan bar from his shoulder and began poking a pass through the throngs. So great was the press at the main entrance to the Temple that the seaman turned aside and wedged a way through the flanking crowd into the darkened cloisters down each side of the vast edifice to the Sun. The Temple was roofless. On the main central floor knelt thousands in worship. Censer lights hung on chains across the front of the altar and beneath the lights chanted the priests in full-chested chorus, old as time, to the moon and sun deities, while the voice of the vestal virgins and the boy choristers rose shrill and clear from the galleries above the cloisters.
“Go redeem your daughter in the galleries from the priests while I find the Apostle Apollos,” directed Onesimus, “then meet me at the ship!”
But to find the Apostle Apollos was no easy matter in this dim light clouded with incense and mist blowing in from the sea. The sailor went clambering the stone stairs to the upper galleries, while Onesimus picked his way past the prostrate worshipers towards the altar, where Apollos would be likely to appear if he dared to try to speak after the singing. Then, he caught sight of the venerable Apostle.
There was no mistaking that aged and beautiful figure—dressed in pure white, with cork sandals, with hair and beard as white as washed silk, and brow as lineless and radiant as the snowy mountain peaks—standing calmly against one of the Temple pillars to the side of the high smoke-clouded altar; but when Onesimus would have pressed forward to him, he found the way through the last cloister stopped by a half-dozen bloodhounds tied to the Temple columns to prevent the rescue of Apollos by his followers; and one glance told Onesimus that Apollos stood so motionless because he was bound by ankles and wrists to the upright column.
“Bah,” said a bearded Roman guard clad in armor to his eyes, who was standing behind the leashed bloodhounds, “he saved others; let him save himself! He raised others from death by his magic tricks. Now he’s dead man himself under this wolf pack if he budge a hair, where he stands. Give me the leashes. I’ll let the line out to close on him, when the singing stops,” and suiting the act to the word, the Roman took the leash ends of the bloodhounds and gave them line to creep up within touch of the bound man if he but stirred a hair’s breadth.
Onesimus moved up cautiously behind the Roman. He had the short dirk in his belt that all Greeks wore, and from the gold cord round his neck hung the usual traveler’s sword.
He was of two minds—whether to trip the Roman guard and snatch the bloodhounds’ leash, or jump forward in the gathering cloud of mist and incense, cut Apollos’ bonds and himself divert the attack of the bloodhounds—when he noticed something with his keen mountaineer eye that the Roman guard did not see. Apollos’ wrists and ankles had been bound to the pillar by deer thongs. The hounds had sniffed forward and were licking at the deer thongs; and through the dark, Apollos’ gleaming black eyes were boring to Onesimus’ very soul with unspoken message. They forbade word or move for his rescue. They seemed to redirect the younger man’s glance back to the bloodhounds. The blood hounds were licking the deer thongs and the raw hide was stretching as it always stretches when wet, and Apollos had let it slip down over his hands from his wrists to the floor, where the dogs, in growling and snarling to snatch at it, had bitten through the thongs binding his ankles.
The Apostle did not move by a hair’s breadth. His brow was radiant with a glowing light and his hair shone like fuller’s white.
The cymbals clashed. The silver trumpets blew. The lines of chanting priests had seized bells to ring in rhythm and fans to send up the clouds of incense. And there was heard the hunting horn of Diana coming down from the fleecy meadows of mid-heaven to pasture her stallions and mares in the ocean deeps—the vestal virgins’ high clear soprano gave back refrain to the chant of the priests—when a blast of wind from the tidal waves of Diana’s stallions and mares champing out to sea, blew through the Temple pillars, sending the clouds of incense and mist back over the worshipers.
Onesimus saw Apollos leap from the pillar to the altar stairs; and when the Roman guard would have unleashed the hounds to tear him down, an unseen foot tripped the soldier to his face on the tessellated floor of the Temple, and the hounds were upon the fellow in a savage attack that called the attention of the priests. Taking quick advantage of the diversion and the back-blown cloud of sea mist and incense smoke, Onesimus with a bound followed his Master, who had passed swiftly to the stairs behind the altar, that led both to the vestal virgins’ galleries above and to the famous underground labyrinths of Crete.
“Follow me not, beloved! Farewell,” Apollos had turned. “Escape back to the ship with your seaman and his daughter! Take them to Thecla in the caves! Seek me not! Farewell for a little time—”
Again the cymbals clashed. Again the silver trumpets blew. Again the bells rang in rhythm to the chant of the priests and refrain of vestals. Again the fans sent back the cloud of incense above the altar. Again was heard Diana’s hunting horn coming down from the fleecy meadows of mid-heaven to pasture her stallions and mares in the ocean deeps; but of Apollos was nought to be seen.
“Bah,” said a Roman guard standing near the astounded Bishop of Ephesus, “ ’twas but a trick of levitation, which all these Eastern magic fellows play. The fellow has lifted himself up by his sandal straps and disappeared through the clouds of smoke, as he did when he was tried before our Emperor Domitian for tearing a boy’s entrails out. Wasn’t I there? Didn’t I see him? Didn’t he defy our Emperor to his face? They could prove nothing against the scoundrel—he wraps himself in his cloak like this”—the guard imitated a man hiding his face in his cape— “I see him plain as I see you, we all see him, the Emperor was about to have him seized and burned as all these Greeks and Jewish sorcerers ought to be burned—and there, as we look, the knave disappears from our very eyes and reappears down in a cave among his followers by the sea, where he takes ship and flees for Asia again. If I’d been Emperor, I’d have had him seized where found and burned on the spot. ’Tis only a trick of levitation—holding the breath, mumbling a hocus-pocus, and up they go—”
“Simpler than that, Friend Roman,” responded a Greek priest of the Temple, whose head was shaved like a billiard ball and whose face wore the baffled look of one stunned by anger and fear. “There are thirty thousand secret chambers in the old Minos Temples ’neath the Island here, where all the Black Magic books of old have been hidden for a thousand years. The knave must have known the secret passage to these hidden underground caves, where ’tis like he hides now with all his followers and rocks this Isle. ’Tis known the Isle always rocks in the spring and autumn storms—and the old Greeks say ’tis from the Black Magic of the Masters in the Caves. The man wrought Black Magic against our Goddess. He ought to have been burned.”
“I notice,” said another, “that he had no shadow. These demons have no shadow—’tis how we Greeks know demons in human form; and he always wore a ring with a mystic stone got from the Magicians of India to protect him.”
“A plague on these cursed Gnostics and Essenes and Nazarenes,” gritted a Jew, joining the amazed group. “They are turning the whole world upside down. Feed them to the beasts, I say, as they did in the mad Nero’s day.”
Onesimus came out to the star-silvered night, dazed and dumb. Was there “no more Death”? He could not answer. He stood by the rocky coast of the calm painted sea with the Greek freed seaman and his daughter rescued from the Temple service. Snow was falling in a white mantle on the upper peaks of the opaline mountains. Was it “the Angel of the Snows” of which Apollos and Enoch taught? Hoar frost seemed to be lining the upper forested evergreens in the glint of jewels. Was it the Angel of the Hoar Frost? Mist was rising from the sea to meet the mist from the mountains in ghostly curtains. Was it the Spirit of the Mist wrapping its vesture around the departed Apostle? And the winds began to chant a mystic rune where the sea and rock met in the white fret of the night tide. Was it the Angel of the Winds, which, Apollos had taught, come out to gather earth thoughts for the weal or woe of earth?
The Bishop of Ephesus fell to his knees and spent the rest of the night on the shore in prayer.
And so the Bishop on his way home to Ephesus, accompanied by the slave seaman freed and the daughter redeemed from Temple service in Crete on their voyage to Thecla’s hospice on the Roman Road—paused at Patmos, the rocky desert isle, where John, the Beloved, lived in banishment and dreamed.
The vessel beached at dawn and while the sailors took on a fresh cargo of fish, Onesimus asked the way to the hut of John, the exile.
The Roman guard was father of the infant girl, whom the Greek sorceress at Ephesus had leased and maimed to beg; and when the soldier heard from the seaman of the coin which would ransom six slaves redeeming his little daughter, the guard told Onesimus how John’s banishment had been revoked and the aged Disciple had gone to Ephesus by the previous day’s boat.
“Yonder,” said the Roman guard, “is his prison hut; and yonder, where you hear the roaring seas, is his Vision Cave—there is the voice of many waters there—go not too far in—the maids of spray and rainbow hair”—and the man laughed awkwardly at his own superstition.
The little white stone hut stood on the wave-fretted rocks facing the burst of sunrise over the green isles of Greece in the blue morning sea. While the sailors loaded freight, the Bishop wandered up to the prison hut of the last of the Disciples. It was such a prison hut as Paul had occupied at Rome—but in a quieter cleaner haven, where the dawn came over sea and peak in a Jacob’s Ladder to sleeping and waking dreams, up and down which the Angels might pass from Heaven to men’s souls. Blue and primrose were the skies above. Emerald and white were the seas below. Yellow and gold were the spears of the sun, and opal were the peaks of far mountains swimming between heaven and earth.
The cave was a haven for a seer to dream or commune with God for the wind played the harp in the gaunt trees growing from the bare rocks; and the voice of many waters sounded day and night without ceasing, where wave fret beat in the hollow resounding caverns of rock and landlocked inlet; and the trickle of receding tides through the fine sands was as the tinkling of myriad little bells.
Onesimus drew from his traveler’s case a parchment; and here is what he read, as in a trance between life and death:
“And the sea gave up the dead, which were in it . . . and death and the grave delivered up the dead, which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works . . . and I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away . . . and I heard a great voice out of the heavens saying— Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them and be their God . . . and shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. . . . Behold I make all things new. . . . Write; for these words are true and faithful . . . I will give to him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely . . . and there shall be no night . . . for the Lord God giveth light . . . and the Spirit and the bride say—come; And let him that heareth say come! And let him that is athirst come! And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. . . .” When he had finished reading, the Bishop was no longer in trance. He was in ecstasy. It was as if the golden light of day dawn had photographed the last message of the Last Disciple in letters of celestial fire across the firmament of heaven and earth to all time in a rainbow of eternal hope.
What matter whether his resurrection were a physical body, a soul body, a spiritual body? Paul, himself, had said, when wrapped away in vision to a Third Heaven not made of hands, that he knew not whether he was in “terrestrial” or “celestial” body. Onesimus now knew that neither matter nor spirit could perish—but only change, and He who had created both would govern what form they must take in the New Heaven and the New Earth; and Christ would give that cup of forgetfulness of sin from the Book of Remembrance, which the pagan Greeks promised from drink of their sacred spring. Then suddenly, as if in a glimpse of cosmic consciousness, he knew the veil was very thin—thinner in every cycle of ages—as the Old crashed down, the New grew up in its place—till the New became a New Heaven and a New Earth, a New Heaven on Earth; and he heard the voice of many waters, “not only as the rite of baptism for the turning from sin,” but as a river of living waters flowing from the throne of God, to carry mankind to the destiny of the Sons of God. He knew the crucifixion of his Master had marked the end of a cycle, and all His followers were the Torch Bearers of the Glad News to future ages.
The ship anchored at Ephesus too late for the Bishop to get carriage up from the water front to the city square. As far as one can judge from the configuration of sands and ruins, the distance was six or seven miles. Accompanied by the Greek seaman, and the redeemed Temple vestal, he walked the distance from tide water to city square, where his own little church and dwelling stood across from the Great Temple to Diana Artemis. Opposite the pagan Temple, the three left him to rouse the little beggar boy, who commonly slept under the marble steps. The Bishop’s intention was to prepare a cloister for these travelers on the way to Thecla’s hospice to sleep; then snatch a few moments of sleep, himself, before presenting himself at his own home where the aged John would be housed and resting.
The silver colossus of the Goddess stood an unearthly wraith in the pale dawn of the city square. The morning mist came in a long ghostly beam across his own church into the cloisters on the garden side. Some bird awakened in the garden and stabbed the morning silence with a threnody of unutterable beauty. The fountain in the garden fell with the tinkle of tiny bells as though the flowers rang out their morning hymn, besides which was no sound but the padded footfall of his own sandals across the misty church.
He stooped, steadying his hand on a stone bench and loosed the sandals from his own feet, nor quite knew why he had done it, when a spear of sunlight struck through the beam of mist aslant his church; and there on the cot in his own prayer cell lay the figure of the aged Disciple, John, in a deep sleep motionless and peaceful as death.
Then Onesimus started back in an amaze that was neither fear nor horror. It was as if his own doubts lay before him slain; for the figure of the woman, clad all in black, was on her knees, bent over the feet of the Disciple, sobbing. The air was heavy with the spring hyacinth odor for the dead, and the weeping woman was breaking and pouring an alabaster jar of perfumed ointment over the feet of the Beloved and wiping them with her fallen hair. As she caught glimpse of the Bishop standing in the half dark of the cell arch, she rose and whispered—
“He is not dead. He only sleeps. There is no Death.”
It was Thecla’s mother.
“He hath but changed his vesture of flesh for vesture of Light,” said the Bishop softly. “He hath gone to the New Heaven and the New Earth of his Vision. He is not far away. He has fallen asleep to awaken in the Garden of God.”
So “fell asleep” John, the last of the Disciples.
When the Bishop and the woman rose from prayer, the freed Greek seaman, and the redeemed Temple maid and the two beggar children stood in the cloister arch, waiting to be directed to the Thecla hospice of the Roman Road.
The Bishop placed his hands on the heads of the beggar children.
“Suffer little children to come unto Him and forbid them not,” he said, “for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven, for our youth shall lead the whole redeemed world.”